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My (finished, in editing and rework stage) Kindle book: http://www.lacunaverse.com/reading/lacuna-demons-of-the-void

While I happen to think it's a good book, the issue with self-publishing is that so much of the material out there is crap. Maybe my book is crap, too; I made the first three chapters and prologue not only available online for free, but also CC-BY-SA-NC, so anyone who reads it can expand them, write their own fanfiction, etc.

But one of the advantages of reading the works of self-published writers is that that you often have a more direct connection to them, since getting noticed is the hardest part of writing a successful novel. If someone gives me feedback on my book, good bad or indifferent, then I'm much more likely to listen.

And... look. Despite what I said about so much of self-published books being crap, well... there is a lot of good stuff out there, too. For example, Harry Potter got rejected by basically every publisher in England before Bloomsbury took it up and then you know what happened from there. So just because something's not listed by a big publisher, it's still possible to be good.

Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.

I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.

DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.

Bet you'd feel even more proud when people start paying you for your efforts. As long as enough people do that to make creating worth the trouble, we as a society can thumb our collective noses at the problem. Question is, when the problem goes beyond that point, can any creator stand upon moral ground and say it's wrong, and can the hands be turned back to the point just before the, "we don't care" and creators can start creating again?

Disclaimer: I'm currently finalizing a book for the Amazon store. Shameless linkwhore here.

This guy hit the nail right on the head. The reason the publishers are pushing for DRM is fear of piracy, but...

Bleck. First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.

Real pirates, like these guys, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). I don't want to DRM my book(s). I want people to read them.

DRM pisses me off and ultimately hurts the consumer and then, eventually, the publisher too. Hell if someone made a torrent on The Pirate Bay of my work I'd probably just feel proud that I'd made a book people really want to read.

I wrote a book where the heroes are Chinese and Iranians (and one EU member from Belgium), shameless link-whoring here.

Would this book be banned in Iran? Or lauded? I wonder what they think of it...

I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. I'm just in the final review and cleanup pass now.

The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.

I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.

Anyway. This law is basically insane.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I'm writing a book for Kindle (naturalistic sci-fi, 61,000 words in) and I look upon the inevitable Kindle conversion with a terrible dread. I'm typing it up in Google Docs, but because I use italics for emphasis, this means I have to either manually construct the book (and manually re-put in all my italics and formatting), or use a converter which will produce sucky output which will require a lot of manual cleanup...

If the Kindle supports HTML5 however, Google Docs will do a bang-up job (by and large) of converting it straight to HTML5. Good news for me I guess!

Funny that, my brother and I are also working on an Eye of the Beholder-ish game called Tales of Vamadon, now for iPhones, but also in pre-alpha. In fact, we're soon to go for the alpha part of Chapter I... of course, we were going to wait until the game was complete before doing our own Slashvertisement, but hey. ;)

Interesting stuff. Best of luck, guys! If your game is good, we'll recommend it; until that time, there's Undercroft, and the novel I'm working on here: http://www.lacunaverse.com/reading/lacuna-demons-of-the-void

I'm in the process of writing a book, called Lacuna: Demons of the Void, seen here. The first three chapters are available for free, and are CC-BY-SA-NC; this means that you can legally and safely write whatever fanfiction you want, or pass the sample chapters around, or change and remix them or do whatever you want basically as long as you don't sell it, don't change the licence and credit me appropriately.

I did this because if the book (and subsequent sequels if any) gets popular, I didn't want to get old and fat and retarded and turn into the next George Lucas, grabbing hold of my precious precious IP and never letting go.

Anyway.

Regarding piracy, I wrote on my webpage:

First up I don't like the term "piracy". Bleh. But language is fluid and you all know what I mean, so let's go with it.

Real pirates, like those guys in Somalia, are evil. They're not Jack Sparrow, they're not Captain Hook, they're murderers and rapists and kidnappers and deserved to eat a Tomahawk missile in their sleep. They're scum. They're villains. They're evil. They're not some kid who just wants to read the next (awesome, awesome, aweeeesome) Harry Potter book for free or whatever.

I've never understood musicians, writers and artists who get all messed up about digital piracy. It just strikes me as entirely retarded, especially if they're not in full compliance with every piece of software, hardware, music and movies they've ever seen or owned. I'm sure their $2,000 copy of Adobe Photoshop is fully legitimate now and was when they were 14, and I'm sure they've never downloaded an MP3 in their life.

I see this crap everywhere. I see rap artists thumbing their nose at society, waxing lyrical about sticking it to the man, pimping hoes, glorifying robbery, murder and pushing drugs, while at the same time appearing bereaved that their latest forgettable album appeared on The Pirate Bay the day after it appeared in iTunes. I see armies of cocaine huffing, hooker bashing, Harvard educated RIAA trust-fund babies who've never wanted for anything in their life but a full head of hair, going on about how Limewire costs them the GDP of the entire world ($75,000,000,000,000 dollars) in lost revenue and also, simultaneously, claiming to have had one of their most profitable years ever. How do you even rationalize that kind of blatant, intrinsic wrongness?

Fuck those guys.

I don't give a shit if you got my book from The Pirate Bay. It costs $2 to buy and is available in DRM free PDFs, or even DRM free plaintext if you really want it and you're Richard Stallman (I met you once, by the way, and you were cool. You hated my iPhone though. Sorry bro). If you make $15 Aussie dollars an hour, minimum wage, then $2 represents about eight minutes of your time. If you spent more than eight minutes bringing up the highly overloaded Pirate Bay page, finding a correct torrent, loading the torrent into uTorrent, downloading the file, moving it around on your NAS, putting it into iTunes, getting the book's coverart then syncing it to your iPhone, then yeah you pretty much just robbed yourself.

Just saying. You're probably saving money by buying it vs pirating it, since time=money. LOL. This is why CD's shouldn't be so fucking expensive.

But hey, a lot people have genuine and interesting philosophical beliefs against paying for services rather than physical objects ("it's just bits, man! You can't own bits...!"). Other people are unemployed (or underemployed) and couldn't afford the book anyway. How both these types have high-speed internet is a mystery for the ages, but for those people, well, go forth and torrent... I don't care. I just ask that if you believe all that crazy crap and do like the book, then subsequently you think I deserve some kind of reward for creating it, I beg you not to compromise your principles. Instead, just donate $2 (or whatever) to Child's Play, run by the infinitely-more-talented-than-me dynamic duo of

Honestly, I think the biggest difference between the two universes was that Star Trek, DS9 excluded and not in a bad way, was generally about hope. That's really the central, core tenant of the show.

In the future, all these worries and burdens and injustices we have now will be behind us. For example, it said (in the 60's) that if you're a woman, there's a place for you on the bridge, just like everyone else. If you're black, eventually nobody will care. If you're blind, you can still be chief engineer of a Starship.

I think this is why Trek appeals so much to the GLBT crowd. The idea -- the hope -- that in the future, life will be governed by tolerance and reason. That there's a place for everyone and replicated food means nobody goes hungry.

Star Wars represents, I think, a more grim picture of the future (again, not in a bad way). There's injustice and authoritarianism everywhere. People will kill you for old debts, for being a member of an almost extinct religion, or for opposing the state. There are wars spanning across solar systems. There is money, corruption, politics, and weapons of mass destruction.

For people who prefer this world, I can imagine why it's appealing. It's adventurous, engaging and realistic; as we can see in the modern day Republican party people don't abandon their preconceptions and hatreds just because technology marches on. In Trek there's no money, but honestly people want to make a buck; the basic idea of currency has been with us for so long we rightly can't imagine a world without it.

So what do I prefer?

I love them both, because I agree with William. They are different, and they give a totally separate picture of the future.

I'm currently writing a sci-fi book myself (shameless self promotion herethe prologue and whole first act is CC-BY-NC-SA so feel free to read it, remix it, share it around if you want) and these are the issues I think about. For example, one of the long-running issues I've had with Trek is... If everything's so egalitarian and racism is a thing of the past, then where are all the Chinese people (1\4 of the world's population)? Instead of the 'token asian', shouldn't each ship have a token white guy?

Accordingly, the majority of the crew of the ships in Lacuna are Chinese. Unlike Trek, people didn't give up their nationalities in this future; and nationalities tend to clump together when all mixed up, like oil and water. Old terrestrial grudges show up occasionally too, something that Trek was only able to explore in allegory.

Sci-fi is such a fun and vibrant setting to write in, in particular because of this tradeoff of hope vs realism. The reimagined BSG, for example, took that far to the extreme of realism and was brilliant; Trek took it the other way. Star Wars is somewhere in the middle.

See, if I was George Lucas right now, I'd do what I did with my novel; either implicitly or explicitly make the entire Star Wars universe creative commons, non-commercial, share alike.

In my upcoming e-book Lacuna: Demons of the Void I made the first three chapters and the prologue available (here!) under that licence. What that means is that if I get rich and batshit loco and claim that only I, in my infinite genius, can truly understand this special snowflake of a world I've created and begin a vicious crackdown on my fans... well, my fans can tell me to fuck off.

Hell, they could even write a story where my own characters tell me to fuck off.

That'd be funny. I'd read that.