Notices by Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr), page 3

The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:

> That.
> Was.
> A! Fucking! Ride!
> Whoa!

Within a week, he'd bought *Red Team Blues*...and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It's gonna be a wild ride.

Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.

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The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was *Little Brother*, and, as with *Little Brother*, *Red Team Blues* is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story. These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"I had to find out how it ended," she answered.

14/

First, there's naming rights for characters in the sequels - I'm selling three of these; they're a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a *lot* of fun - they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is *The Bezzle*, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff's Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros.

16/

The third book is *Picks and Shovels* (Jan 2025), and it's Marty's first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called "Three Wise Men" that's run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.

17/

Next, there's three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use #MEGO ("my eyes glaze over") as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories.

18/

Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I'll then shop to fiction websites (every story I've written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn't, I'll put it up under a CC license).

19/

Finally, there's a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition - and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have #WillStaehle's fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there's space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of *The Bezzle*, the sequel to *Red Team Blues*.

20/

There is *no better way* to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch - incomparable, really. Invaluable.

What's more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon's DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers.

22/

The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy's endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I've put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I've written for Pluralistic for the past three years.

21/

We have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us - creators, publishers and listeners - more fairly.

23/

I've got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they're not charities. If they can't sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they're not going to make audio editions *at all*. Instead, *I* make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like #AmberBenson and #NeilGaiman, and I sell them everywhere *except* Audible.

5/

Doing this isn't cheap: I'm paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores.

6/

Most audiobook listeners don't even know that these stores exist: if a title isn't available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.

That's where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I've crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were *astoundingly* successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks.

7/

These campaigns didn't just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon's monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren't sticky-traps for Audible's walled garden/prison:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html

8/

And today, I'm launching the Kickstarter for *Red Team Blues*, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one's gonna be *incredible*.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

For starters, there's the narrator: #WilWheaton, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don't tell my other narrators! They're great too!):

https://wilwheaton.net/

9/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench

2/

Audible is #Amazon's monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and *every single one* of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon's DRM on it. That means that you can't break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 #DigitalMillenniumCopyrightAct, I can't give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format.

3/

Doing so is a *felony* carrying a *five year prison sentence* and a *$500,000 fine* for an act that in no way infringes anyone's copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is *much* less illegal than removing Amazon's mandatory DRM from my own books!

4/

*Red Team Blues* is my next novel, a #PostCyberpunk anti-finance finance #thriller; it's a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it's swept the trade press with starred reviews all 'round. Despite all that, #Audible will not sell the #audiobook. In fact, Audible won't sell *any* of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

1/

GPT-4 and professional benchmarks: the wrong answer to the wrong question

https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/gpt-4-and-professional-benchmarks