doctorow_150x224[1] NPR’s All Things Considered has a brief audio interview with Cory Doctorow, and has also written it up in article form. Doctorow’s new project, A Little Help, is a collection of short stories that Doctorow is publishing entirely on his own—for the first time, he is not using a professional publisher at all.

Proof-reading, editing, and typo-catching was done by members of Doctorow’s social network, which he also relied upon to help build buzz for the book. And while he’s giving the e-book and audiobook versions away for free, he has not limited himself to strictly selling print-on-demand paper books to earn money, either. One of the stories in the new volume was offered as a written-to-order commission for $10,000 (which ended up being bought by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu).

Doctorow is also going to sell 250 hand-sewn hardcover editions of the book, into each of which will be bound various one-of-a-kind paper ephemera, for $275 each, and has put out a donation “tip jar” as well (something he did not do for his previous books, since it would have cut the publishers of those books out of the loop). All in all, Doctorow expects to end up earning $70,000 to $80,000 out of this self-published book project.

But Doctorow has other goals in mind than just the money he can earn. After the project is completed, he plans to publish his data about the process and its results, to give other potential self-published writers more information to work from. And he notes that since he’s already comfortably well off thanks to the other novels and story collections he’s published, he doesn’t really have to worry about money. “I feel like it’s giving something back to people.”

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TeleRead Editor Chris Meadows has been writing for us--except for a brief interruption--since 2006. Son of two librarians, he has worked on a third-party help line for Best Buy and holds degrees in computer science and communications. He clearly personifies TeleRead's motto: "For geeks who love books--and book-lovers who love gadgets." Chris lives in Indianapolis and is active in the gamer community.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Cory Doctorow does everything he can to justify ebooks should not be sold. In fact, he wants to promote his p-books – and makes his ebooks commercially insignificant.
    So it is ridiculous when he says ebooks don’t matter economically. In fact his ebooks don’t matter – because he is scared to sell any ebooks…

  2. @Garyhun: His ebooks are for sale in the Kindle Store, all at $9.99. Doing something you are scared of does not make sense to me, so I guess he is not scared after all.

    Alternatively, you can download the ebook off feedbooks for free, buy the paperback and donate it. He keeps a list of libraries and schools interested in getting his books. Everyone wins: the author, the publisher, the libraries and yourself.

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