Amazon Sells Shorts (Insert Your Own Stock Joke Here)
I’m putting the last touches on my latest PW feature story, but I took a break to read all the emails that piled up over the weekend, including a note fromJ Milligan (who debuted earlier this year with the novel Jack Fish) about “The Viking,” a new short story that’s being published by… Amazon.com?
Yep, Amazon Shorts is a platform for retailing “alternate chapters and scenes to well-known stories, personal memoirs about everything from food poisoning to contact lenses to potty training, one-act plays, and, of course, classic short stories.” All of which are priced to move at a uniform 49 cents.
John Scalzi was impressed with the program from a reader’s standpoint, especially since Amazon has decided not to coat the merchandise with digital rights management blockers. Once you buy a story and download the PDF file, check out the web page, or have the plain text sent to you, it’s yours to copy or reformat as you see fit. He also raises some significant questions about the economic costs and benefits for writers who might like to take part in the program, ultimately seeing it as “a potentially healthy alternative market for writers, and particularly for authors who bring their own fandom to the party.”
22 August 2005 | uncategorized |
As Predicted, Here’s Robert Anton Wilson
Not in the New York Times, as I had hoped, but this interview in Santa Cruz’s alternative weekly, Metroactive, is a good look at the twilight years of “the most ripped-off artist of our time,” who blazed the trail for everything from The Da Vinci Code to What the Bleep Do We Know? His email correspondents include LSD inventor Albert Hoffman: “”He’s a fan of my books, and I’m a fan of his drugs.”
I picked that link up from a site which also gave me a pointer towards Wilson’s answers to 23 more questions; the same article reports that the old trickster’s got at least one more book left in him, as Email to the Universe is…well, it’s probably a bit optimistic to say that it’ll be showing up in your local bookstore, unless there’s some really hip people running it or it also sells magickal paraphenalia on the side.
I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: if you really want a novel to blow your mind and make you question two millennia worth of received history, pick up Wilson’s Masks of the Illuminati. It’s been nearly twenty years since I first discovered a copy in my public library, and I’m still waking up with the shivers some nights.
21 August 2005 | interviews, uncategorized |
Our Endless and Proper Work is my new book with Belt Publishing about starting (and sticking to) a productive writing practice. 
