Austrian Nobel-winning author Elfriede Jelinek is combining novel-writing with her affinity for cyberspace:

Jelinek, 60, has been posting chapters of the new book, “Neid” (German for “Envy”), as she writes them. The first two chapters of the work she describes as a “mixture of blog and prose” are already available on her site, www.elfriedejelinek.com, and there are more to come.

“It’s a wonderfully democratic method, publishing a text on the Internet,” Jelinek told the AP.

Although the German-language work will never appear in traditional book form and is primarily meant to be read on the screen, “anyone who wants to can download it or print it out,” she said.

Read the rest of the Chicago Tribune article here. Link to Jelinek’s site (via BoingBoing)

Author Will Shetterly has released two of his books to the public in text format under a Creative Commons license - meaning they’re free to read and share.

Cory Doctorow writes:

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife — now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That’s just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before “Gospel.” This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

You can read both of the books for free on Shetterly’s Blogspot site.
Links: Dogland, Gospel of the Knife (via BoingBoing)

Author Peter Watts writes through BoingBoing:

I’ve set my latest novel free under the usual Creative Commons license: you can get Blindsight (Tor, October) by going to my backlist and clicking the relevant thumbnail. I’ve also produced seven alternative dust-jackets for the same title, using (with the artist’s permission) artwork submitted to Tor but not used for their official Blindsight cover. You can get those here. (And take a look here for an impressionistic, documentary-style taste of the novel itself.)

I do this only partly to add data to the ongoing get-rich-by-giving-your-stuff-away experiment. The other reason is that a lot of people seem to be having trouble actually finding the book in brick-and-mortar stores; distribution has been spotty despite advance raves, subsequent praise, and (I’m led to understand) significant buzz. Smaller stores report being backordered for weeks; one of the continent’s two biggest book retailers isn’t carrying it at all (although individual store owners have evidently been special-ordering it). And all the buzz in the world is worth jack-shit if the product isn’t readily available.

So check it out and go wild. And when your eyes start to fall out from phosphor burn, consider buying an old-fashioned paper version. There should be enough to go around before long: I’m told Blindsight’s going into second printing.

Link to read the book online for free (via BoingBoing)

Podiobooks, a donation-supported publisher of free serialized audiobooks, just increased the percentage authors get of the donations that the site receives to 75%.  (In other words, authors get 75%, the site gets 25% for maintenance costs - as opposed to the 50%/50% arrangement at the site before.

This is a terrific time to check out the Podiobooks website.  There are 80 titles available, some from the public domain, others from authors such as Mur Lafferty, Patrick McLean and Tracy Hickman - mainly science fiction and fantasy, but with a healthy assortment of other genres as well.  Be sure to make a donation if you can afford one - it’s for a good cause.
Link to the news blog post (via BoingBoing), link to the Podiobooks website.

Award-winning sf author and well-known blogger Cory Doctorow writes about how giving away free ebooks of his books through the internet helped increase his sales.

It’s good business for me, too. This “market research” of giving away e-books sells printed books. What’s more, having my books more widely read opens many other opportunities for me to earn a living from activities around my writing, such as the Fulbright Chair I got at USC this year, this high-paying article in Forbes, speaking engagements and other opportunities to teach, write and license my work for translation and adaptation. My fans’ tireless evangelism for my work doesn’t just sell books–it sells me.

The golden age of hundreds of writers who lived off of nothing but their royalties is bunkum. Throughout history, writers have relied on day jobs, teaching, grants, inheritances, translation, licensing and other varied sources to make ends meet. The Internet not only sells more books for me, it also gives me more opportunities to earn my keep through writing-related activities.

Link to the Forbes article (via BoingBoing)

Warren Adler, who has all his books available in traditional print, is a pioneering author in electronic publishing as well. All twenty-seven of Mr. Adler’s books can now be purchased and downloaded online.

DPPpress (www.dpppress.com) and DigitalPulp Publishing (www.digitalpulppublishing.com), an eBook publishing and distribution company, launched their online bookstore (www.dppstore.com) just ten months ago.

Opening their store with just seven titles, the DPPstore’s virtual shelves are now lined with five hundred titles by new authors and the best eBooks from independent publishers, creating an eclectic array of literary offerings.

The DPPstore (www.dppstore.com) continues to grow and this week is pleased to announce it has added 27 more eBooks, all by critically acclaimed author Warren Adler.

As a novelist, Mr. Adler’s themes deal primarily with intimate human relationships — the mysterious nature of love and attraction, the fragile relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children, the corrupting power of money, the aging process and how families cling together when challenged by the outside world. His books have been cited by readers and reviewers for their insight and wisdom in presenting and deciphering the complexities of contemporary life.
His novels have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Ten of his novels have been sold or optioned to the movies, and two have become major motion pictures, the classic The War of the Roses and Random Hearts.

Warren Adler is arguably the only author in the world, published by major publishing houses, who has re-acquired the English language and foreign rights to his entire backlist of more than 25 novels. Stonehouse Press (Adler’s own publishing company) has made the English language versions available in all eBook formats and Print-on-Demand formats in trade and hardcover.

full press release here

It used to require an army of middlemen to publish a book.  Now technology is rewriting the book on publishing. A number of companies help writers publish books, either on paper or online.

Once upon a time, that approach was considered “publishing with training wheels,” as iUniverse CEO Susan Driscoll told this reporter.  But the new customers for print on demand are often savvy marketers who understand what it takes to write and sell a book and are doing it using technology whose price is falling fast.

Link

This past May, a Wichita jury found AuthorHouse guilty of publishing a book, Paperback Poison, in November 2003 by Brandewyne’s ex-husband that libeled her. The jury awarded Brandewyne $230,000 in actual damages.

• View the full story on PW Daily