Steve Jobs made a fortune by pilfering the neat-o graphical operating system he saw at the Xerox PARC laboratories in the ’70s. He called it the Macintosh OS. Bill Gates, not to be outdone, went and pilfered the same thing from Jobs and called it Windows. In case you missed the past twenty years, Bill Gates is now the richest man in the world.
And so it is with the same spirit of pilfering someone else’s good idea that I present the latest gimmicky idea to promote my novel Infoquake.
It’s simple. If your book group wants to read Infoquake, I want to talk to you. If you’ve got a group of four or more and you’re planning on discussing Infoquake, just e-mail me at dedelman@gmail.com and I’ll join the discussion by phone.
If the members of your book group have purchased five or more copies of Infoquake, then I’ll throw in a signed sixth copy for free to the member of your choice.
Now for some nitty-gritty details.
I don’t really care how “official” your book group is. Call it a book group, a book club, a reading group, what have you. If you and three of your friends feel like calling yourself a club for the purposes of talking to me about Infoquake, then that’s just fine. If you want to call a group of people scattered around the country a book group, then we can chat via free conference calling (I personally use freeconference.com). In case you haven’t figured it out, my ulterior motive here is to inspire you to buy four or more copies of the book.
It doesn’t matter how formal the discussion is. If you’re industrious enough to come up with prepared questions to ask me, great, I’ll answer ’em. If you just want to chat, that’s fine too. And as long as you’re not some group of religious zealots screaming at me for throwing all the remaining followers of major religions into the Pharisee Territories and walling them off, I’m happy to hear any criticisms of Infoquake you have. (In other words: you don’t all have to like the book to talk to me. You just have to buy it.)
Obviously I’m not going to insist on seeing everybody’s receipt for the book and calling up your credit card company to verify the transaction. And I know plenty of people pass around books at groups like this or borrow them from the library. So all I ask is that you try to be honest with me. I’m just a poor working schmuck, after all, and while I don’t exactly bill hundreds of dollars an hour like my wife, my time is worth something.
I’ll try to accommodate your schedule, but can’t make any promises. If your group likes to discuss SF over tea at 3 in the morning my time, fuhgeddaboudit.
You’ll probably want to have a speakerphone handy, obviously. And feel free to record our little chat or transcribe it or what have you, as long as you promise to edit out anything that makes me sound like a complete idiot before posting it for the whole world to hear.
One last detail: I’d be happy to chat with anyone outside the U.S. about the book, but I’ll have to ask you to pay the long distance (or we can chat online or via Skype). Unfortunately I’m going to have to restrict the “free book” part to the U.S. and Canada alone.
I really have no idea what kind of response I’m going to get to this. So let’s see, shall we?
(Oh, and apologies to the ladies in the pic I found on Flickr who have fallen victim to my mad Photoshopping skillz, and who were actually holding someone else’s book. But I don’t apologize too much. Their book looked really, really boring.)