A Little Help from Cory’s Friends

Cory Doctorow’s story collection A Little Help from My Friends was published this week.  Cory is a columnist, blogger, science fiction writer, crusader for adoption of new copyright laws and business models (known as copyleft), and one of the best public speakers I’ve ever heard. He was the first writer to digitally release a freely shareable novel (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) under Creative Commons license at the same time it was released commercially in print.

A Little Help is Cory’s DIY experiment to produce, distribute, and sell a bound book without the use of a commercial publisher at any step in the process. He is also giving it away in downloadable digital form. For years Cory (along with others, including yours truly) has been arguing that current digital technology enables artists to produce and distribute their own work in a way that, while admittedly is without the resources and revenue-generation currently possible through established corporate publishers, lets the writer control every aspect of the work and keep every penny it generates.

Cory reported on his experiences producing A Little Help in Publisher’s Weekly. His experience has been invaluable and instructive to modern writers for a number of reasons.  First, it demonstrates that it’s perfectly possible to do the whole enchilada yourself (or rather, employing the resources of yourself and a lot of other people; thus the collection’s title), which is encouraging to writers. Second, it demonstrates that art direction, cover design, printing, packaging, distribution, and accounting, are really hard and take a lot of work, which is good for publishers.

Currently, if you are a writer, to go the DIY route means you have to really really want it. Cory proves it’s possible to make money on a self-produced work and give it away at the same time. He also proves that publishers are still relevant and valuable.

I believe that this process will only become easier for writers, and that corporate publishing will remain strong but will evolve into what is essentially a service industry, offering to take the burden of self-production from writers in exchange for a hefty portion of the profits — pretty much what publishers do now, except that historically the writers themselves have not been their competition, and that is about to change. But competition is good, and will force publishers to strengthen and stress what they offer a writer as an alternative to that writer’s increasing, and increasingly powerful, DIY options.

I admire Cory Doctor greatly.  He lives on a battlefield that, in truth, I really only visit a lot. He isn’t just out there talking about the need to develop new business models and adapt to them, he is developing them. He is a one-man existence theorem, demonstrating the viability of an idea by being an example of what it describes. I hope that you will help support him in his pioneering efforts.