The Cory Doctorow Humble Bundle
I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!
It's been 21 years and 29 days since Tor Books published my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. In the years since, Tor has published every one of my novels, sending me around the USA and Canada to talk about them. Now, they've teamed up with Humble Bundle to sell 18 of my ebooks on a name-your-price basis, with part of the proceeds going to benefit EFF:
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books
I've been associated with EFF even longer than I've been published by Tor! My first novel came out while I was working EFF's first-ever booth at CES. I split my time between the booth and my motel room, where I paid $0.25/call to dial up to Earthlink's local number and manage the launch-day publicity. Over the years, I've benefited immensely from Tor's editorial and publicity departments, working with brilliant publishing people like Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Patty Garcia, Dot Lin, Laura Etzkorn, Elena Stokes, Sarah Reidy, Lucille Rettino, and of course, Tor founder Tom Doherty.
But I like to think that it was a two-way street. Tor and I have come a long way together on ebooks: most visibly, they allowed me to publish several novels under Creative Commons licenses (my first book was the first ever CC book, coming out just weeks after the licenses themselves launched). As my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden said at the time, "Ebooks have the worst hours-in-meeting-to-dollars-in-revenue ratio of anything in my publishing career. Why not?"
https://craphound.com/down/download/
Just as important – but less visible – was Tor's willingness to let me insist that all my books be published without DRM, meaning that anything you buy on say, Amazon, can be moved to any reader program if you decide to start getting your ebooks elsewhere. This worked so well that in 2012, Tor became the first major publisher in the world to ban DRM on all its ebooks, flying me, John Scalzi and Charlie Stross to New York City to announce it this at a big, splashy event at Book Expo America:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130512022634/https://tor.com/blogs/2012/06/tor-books-announces-e-book-store-doctorow-scalzi-a-stross-talk-drm-free
Tor's unique status as the sole major DRM-free publisher in the world was well timed! That same year, I curated the very first Humble Ebook Bundle, which was very top-heavy with Tor titles, and raised more than $1,000,000 for the writers, publishers and charities associated with it:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121017215636/http://www.humblebundle.com/
That opened the floodgates to a series of Humble Bundles, tempting other major publishers to dabble with DRM-free, including Simon and Schuster:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-I5QyAfglU
And Harpercollins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHMLfeCrCrE
Now, 12 years after that inaugural Humble Ebook Bundle, I find myself honored by being the subject of a bundle of my own (it helps that I've written a hell of a lot of books in the intervening years). Included in the bundle are (nearly) all of my Tor novels and novellas: The Lost Cause; "The Canadian Miracle" (a Lost Cause story); Red Team Blues; Radicalized; Walkaway; "Party Discipline" (a Walkaway story); Pirate Cinema; Rapture of the Nerds (with Charlie Stross); For The Win; Makers; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, Homeland, Attack Surface, and "Lawful Interception" (a Little Brother story).
(The sole exclusion is The Bezzle, which came out two weeks ago and is already a USA Today national bestseller!)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
Also included in the bundle is Poesy the Monster Slayer, my 2020 picture book for the littlies:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627/poesythemonsterslayer
All these books are delivered as DRM-free epub files. The Bundle runs for the next three weeks, and the minimum buy-in is $18 – that's just $1/book (full retail value is $187). Of course, you can name a higher price, and, as with all Humble Bundles, you can adjust the final split to share out the money between me, EFF, and the Humble folks.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/03/humbly-bundled/#eff-too
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Wood Engraving Wednesday
CLARE LEIGHTON
We return once again to one of our favorite 20th-century wood engravers, the English/American artist, writer, and illustrator Clare Leighton (1898-1989), this time with engraved illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree, printed by R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh and published in New York (and simultaneously in London) by the Macmillan Company in 1940. The text is from Hardy’s second novel originally published in 1872, and this edition was published to commemorate Hardy’s birth in 1840, for which Clare Leighton produced more than 60 engravings. Of Leighton’s work, the dust jacket notes declare:
Miss Leighton has won a place among England's outstanding artists: “a rural Rembrandt” is the title given her by Ernest Rhys, who, in the Observer, stresses “her uncanny mastery of light and shade.” Henry Seidel Canby, writing in The Saturday Evening Review of Literature, has remarked on “the great pictorial beauty of her extraordinarily strong and dramatic engravings.” She has been called “one of the finest of contemporary wood engravers.”
Both as artist and as one who knows intimately the country of Thomas Hardy’s novels, Miss Leighton has made this illustrated edition one which should appeal equally to art lovers and lovers of Hardy’s work.
The blurb isn’t wrong.
View more posts with work by Clare Leighton.
View more posts with work by women wood engravers.
View more Women’s History Month posts.
View more posts with wood engravings!
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A Marvellous Light
Freya Marske
Publisher: Tordotcom (Tor)
Genre: historical fantasy, romance
Year: 2021
What an intriguing little book. A Marvellous Light is historical fantasy that scratched an itch I didn't even know I had. It's the opening book in a trilogy, and I won't lie, the only reason I was so excited for this book was I happened across @ming85's artwork of the second book in the series, A Restless Truth, and I really wanted to read about a lesbian transatlantic voyage murder mystery, so I hunkered down and got the first book out of the way.
For as much as I read this book as a way to get to the lesbians, it was an enjoyable journey. The magic system Freya creates is fascinating, this concept called "cradling" revolving around intricate hand movements and the presence of a string, and while this novel familiarized you with the baser aspects of the magic system, including innate stores of power, BUT the author has already hinted that these established rules are clouded by misogyny, classism, and racism and are actively being challenged and these institutions are being challenged, but for the most part this book is dealing with the magical baseline.
The main characters and love interests are opposites. Edwin is bookish, cold, and waspish. He was born into the magical world but barely has any power of his own. Robin is mundane, no magic at all, a jock and newly elevated to the gentry with the death of his father. When an accident of paperwork gets him a job as the liaison from Parliament to the magical community, and he's plunged (or unbushelled) into the world of magic is where he meets Edwin, dives into the mystery of what happened to his predecessor, and stumbles across an ancient magical conspiracy along the way. It's fun, it's lighthearted, the mystery was engaging, and the book was surprisingly horny. I did enjoy how the author refused to play into tropes when it came to the sex scenes, and also there were a lot of them.
My only criticisms of this book are that I can't believe it only takes place over a week, like Robin and Edwin fall in gay love, break up, get back together in 7 days and you're trying to tell me lesbians are the u-haulers? Also Adelaide deserved more screen time, she was by far the most competent character, and I hope to see more of her and Kitty in future installments.
storygraph | bookshop.org | local houston
★★★★ READ THIS AND NOW I'M READY FOR THE LESBIANS STARS
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