Tom Evslin is working on a novel:
It’s an historic murder mystery set in the first Internet bubble and rubble. I had a ringside seat in 1998-2003. It’s fun to tell the story.
Tom did, indeed, have that seat. Put him on the short list of the people who made the inernet the internet. When he headed up AT&T’s internet services, he introduced flat-rate pricing and brought on the masses. He went on to see the power of VOIP before the industry did. And as you’d expect, he’s not publishing the old-fashioned way:
My Novel is going to appear first on the web. I’ve been in software so long that I’m gonna start with a beta release version 0.91 published on a blog engine. It’ll be free; you can subscribe to it; you can visit it online; you can file bug reports and feature requests; you can roast it in comments; and there’ll be other ways to interact online as well. The fictional company in the book will have a real website. That SHOULD all start in a month or two (hey, this IS like software).
The edited e-book version 1.0 will follow and then the hardcover edition early next year (incorporating all bug fixes, of course). By then I think word of blog will have determined how many we need to print in our first run. Newbie authors don’t usually get traditional reviews, even less so if they self publish. Blogs have become a bypass around traditional media gatekeepers in many ways. It’s my bet that’ll happen with books as well. Web marketing is primary for this enterprise!
We’ve put together a small but talented short-term virtual company for the all the many pieces that go into self publishing. I’ll blog about them soon.
