The book looks fabulous. From the cover (designed by David Stevenson) to the layout to the recurring use of that font on the cover throughout the interior, it’s a class package all the way. Then again, judging from the quality of the books Pyr has been putting out, I shouldn’t have expected anything less. (Have you seen Ian McDonald’s River of Gods yet? No? Log off right now, go find a copy, and just hold it in your hands. It’s awe-inspiring.)

I’ve been thumbing through the Advanced Readers Copy of Infoquake for the past few weeks, and so the book’s dimensions are actually a little larger than what I’m used to. The book has a nice heft to it, which makes me feel like I’m giving readers a nice bargain for their $15 retail ($9.75 on Amazon).

It’s very interesting to see the actual, final print layout, because the passages don’t look the same way I remember them from the manuscript. I’m not talking about the typeface so much — I actually composed the book in pretty much the same font it ended up in, which was very serendipitous — but the layout and page breaks. The first part of the book feels much thinner than I’d imagined it would, and I was astounded to discover that the reappearance of a certain character occurs at a much earlier place book-width-wise than I had expected.

And, of course, as any published writer will tell you, now that the book is off the printer I’m seeing things I should have changed. One of the penultimate sentences in the entire book, for instance, mentions “a confidence fertilized by desire and sprouted from fear.” Now that I see it in print, I realize that I’ve gotten the metaphor backwards and that the sentence should read “a confidence sprouted from desire and fertilized by fear.” Critics, please forgive me.

The only real bummer I can see is that the blurb from Tobias S. Buckell didn’t make it onto the inside of the book as planned. I’m not entirely sure what happened, but here’s the blurb: “A fascinating glimpse into an all-too-possible future of business, software, wetware, and over-powerful technocrats.”

It’s a not-so-well-kept secret that when you blurb someone else’s book, you get a boost in name recognition, even if it’s just a very slight one. So I’m sorry that Toby’s not going to benefit from that. He’s been incredibly nice and helpful to me, considering that he really doesn’t know me from Adam. So go check out his book Crystal Rain. No, really, go do it right now!

Thanks to everyone who’s made this possible.

(Who’s “everyone,” you ask? Go buy a copy and read the Acknowledgments page to find out.)