Latest Cory Doctorow book is self-published, with a little help from his friends

NPR’s All Things Considered has a brief audio interview with Cory Doctorow, and has also written it up in article form. Doctorow’s new project, A Little Help, is a collection of short stories that Doctorow is publishing entirely on his own—for the first time, he is not using a professional publisher at all.

Proof-reading, editing, and typo-catching was done by members of Doctorow’s social network, which he also relied upon to help build buzz for the book. And while he’s giving the e-book and audiobook versions away for free, he has not limited himself to strictly selling print-on-demand paper books to earn money, either. One of the stories in the new volume was offered as a written-to-order commission for $10,000 (which ended up being bought by Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu).

Doctorow is also going to sell 250 hand-sewn hardcover editions of the book, into each of which will be bound various one-of-a-kind paper ephemera, for $275 each, and has put out a donation “tip jar” as well (something he did not do for his previous books, since it would have cut the publishers of those books out of the loop). All in all, Doctorow expects to end up earning $70,000 to $80,000 out of this self-published book project.

But Doctorow has other goals in mind than just the money he can earn. After the project is completed, he plans to publish his data about the process and its results, to give other potential self-published writers more information to work from. And he notes that since he’s already comfortably well off thanks to the other novels and story collections he’s published, he doesn’t really have to worry about money. “I feel like it’s giving something back to people.”