Cory Doctorow imagines a world where death and copyright have a cure. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books) is set in the post-death, post-work, net-in-your-head future. It is in bookstores this week and yesterday it was one of Amazon’s top 300 sellers. His future-is-now marketing strategy: the entire book can also be downloded for free at his website, where readers are encouraged to share it. In the first 24 hours, the book was downloaded 20,000 times.
Down and Out is published under the newly devised Creative Commons license and its marketing is essentially an experiment in open-rights publishing for fun and profit. If things keep going as they are, Doctorow will put the lie to the assertion that the Napsters of the world undermine sales of digital product. And his Whuffie score
Meet the authors of the California Authors Directory. Visit the directory to discover writers like Andrew Sean Greer, a San Francisco novelist whose latest book, 
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