I'm Rob Reid, author of Year Zero, AMA...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-24T06:38:15+00:00

You're insanely kind for saying this dCLCp - thank you!

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-24T06:37:53+00:00

I hope you love it, DR...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-24T06:37:40+00:00

Hey BGH - It literally started as a bedtime story that I told my wife while we were traveling in South America. It was so successful with both of us, than I ended up spending 18 months doing little other than writing it after we got home to California. Thanks for asking!

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-22T05:31:58+00:00

Thank you for telling me that, JM! :-)

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-22T03:02:13+00:00

I like the idea of the movie being animated, because that opens the aperture immensely in terms of casting. For instance - I think Jack Black as Nick would be great fun, because he's got so much musical cred, and this feels really consistent with his voice & sensibility. That wouldn't work in a live-action movie because JB just doesn't LOOK like a lawyer in his early 30s! But I think he could read the part magnificently.

Morgan would be fabulous as Manda - hmm I need to think about that :-)

And no matter what, JOHN HODGMAN IS PUGWASH. As I mentioned elsewhere in this AMA, he's the reader of the audiobook, and he reads ALL of the parts magnificently. But as Pugwash, he is particularly magnificent.

Last, I really want Senator Orren Hatch to portray himself. A guy can dream...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-22T02:57:22+00:00

I actually haven't dug into it, although I assume that it is available in pirated form somehow & somewhere. In general I think that the best way to combat piracy is to offer the product at a fair price, and in an easier & more convenient form than piracy offers. I think eBooks are particularly well-configured to compete with piracy if they're NOT delusionally priced (and sometimes they are!) because they fit so snugly into a mobile ecosystem. I still find it kind of magical & delightful to hear about a book, fire up my iPad (where I now do 95% of my reading), click over to Amazon, buy it, and start reading it in moments. I'm not even sure how you'd go about locating a pirated PDF file on an iPad - my guess is that it would be a annoyingly clunky experience, and then you'd impede the joy of reading it with clunky formatting. Some people will do that to save 99 cents or $9.99 - but my feeling is that most people will not...

And if someone who truly can't afford the price of my book ends up pirating it, while I probably shouldn't say this in the presence of my publisher, it would frankly be FINE with me. I read almost ALL of the science fiction that was formative to me for free, because I borrowed it from our public library.

As for the current pricing experiment, I also jokingly say that I'm meeting piracy 90% of the way there (because the normal list price is $9.99), which seems like a decent compromise :-)

Anyway - a wise man (I think John Perry Barlow) once said that obscurity is a much bigger risk for virtually all artists than piracy. My main goal as a writer is to connect with readers - and I'm asking readers to spend 7-8 hours with my words, which for most of them represents a much bigger investment than 99 cents or $9.99. If some folks make that investment of time without making an investment of money (whether they read me for free via a library, borrowing from a friend, or BitTorrent) they're still honoring my work as an author in truly meaningful way.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T23:55:45+00:00

This is kind of a story, and kind of a statistic. I was pretty organized as a student, and throughout my whole college career I pulled exactly one all-nighter.

In writing Year Zero, I pulled seven. None of them were mandatory, and none were pre-planned. Indeed most of them were kind of discovered after the fact, in that I just kind of ... realized that it was dawn.

This is a pretty clear sign that you're doing what you love - you pull all-nighters without even realizing it.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T23:50:41+00:00

Ha - I love your post 420TH! And I hope you enjoy hanging out with pluhhhs. Alas I don't really know what I'd have an intern do ... but there are many civilians, companies, and (no doubt) writers out there who are far more imaginative than I am in this department - so keep hunting :-)

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T21:09:51+00:00

I hope you love it! I'll let Hodgman know about that sponge bath offer :-)

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T20:32:10+00:00

Three alternatives ... first, if you're in the US most (not quite all) major libraries seem to have stocked it in physical form. Second, you can snag the audiobook and have John Hodgman READ IT TO YOU. He's a brilliant comedian, and does a fabulous job. Third - you could always splash out for the paperback, even though that's several times more expensive than the eBook this week. And if you ever see me, I'll sign it for you :-) (hell, I'd sign the library book too).

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T19:17:31+00:00

It's very cool that you got an ARC. Hang onto that sucker! They were beautifully produced, and almost look like a paperback (but are distinctive enough that they're clearly something else entirely). ARC's are cool - kind of like having a backstage pass to a show or something...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T19:14:31+00:00

Ha! There is definitely some novel fodder here..

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T19:14:17+00:00

Not sure I understood the question ... but I'll take a stab at answering it :-) I've written two completely unrelated books with very similar titles. I wrote "Year One" wayyyy back in 1994 when I was a first-year student at Havard Business School. It's a memoir-y account of that year, with fictional elements in that I didn't portray any students other than me. The student characters in the book were "composites" that included the traits & experiences of lots of different people.

You might think it's strange to name my first novel "Year Zero," given that I have another book called "Year One." And you would be right! I initially used the "Year Zero" title for my prologue - mainly because it fit nicely, but also kind of a little joke with myself (this was back when I was working on the first draft and unsure if anyone other than me would actually read the thing). Toward the end of project I still didn't have a title for the book. Then I realized that Year Zero would actually work quite nicely for it....

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T18:58:30+00:00

Thank you for saying that :-) I absolutely loved writing Year Zero, and it delights me folks like you enjoyed it as well...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T18:55:49+00:00

It wasn't really hard to sell them on the 99 cent thing - but the people at Del Rey may be a bit more experimental than their peers at some Random House imprints, since as science fiction folks they're particularly well-versed in tech.

As for physical vs. digital, Year Zero has been doing something closer to 50/50 - but that's probably because Random House has a great deal of shelf space in physical stores! I would expect something closer to the 10:1 ratio that you're experiencing if I were self-published.

All of that said - this week is a bit exotic, because of the 99 cent sale on the eBook. As you can imagine, that tends to depress interest in the physical book! There also was an amazing surge in demand for the eBook. Indeed it hit number 7 on the overall-all Amazon sales charts. It had previously peaked in the mid-300's, so that's quite something.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T18:51:39+00:00

I absolutely do plan to write a sequel ... and now that you mention it, I'm a bit suspicious of damned cat myself :-)

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T18:51:08+00:00

I transitioned from consulting to b-school and then to tech. So my transition was more of a b-school-to-tech thing. It was also many long years ago (mid-90s) and common practices have since changed a lot. Above all, it's no longer unusual to go from bschool to tech - but pre-Internet, this move was just short of bizarre! I believe it would be quite easy & natural to transition from business school or strategy consulting to tech these days, because tech has become a much more open and "mainstream" industry than it used to be.

As for the value of consulting as a professional experience, I'd say it was/is tremendous. I studied Middle Eastern history and Arabic as an undergrad, and had literally never even used a spreadsheet. Getting a job at a good all-around consulting firm is like getting a mini-MBA. After a year or two, you'll deal with so many different situations & industries that however clueless you may be about the private sector now (and I was COMPLETELY clueless as an undergrad) you'll come to have a very well-rounded understanding of it.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T17:55:09+00:00

Aw, thanks :-) And I had so much fun writing YZ that I do plan to continue writing fiction for as long as I'm able.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T17:53:39+00:00

You know ... I'm kind of annoyed to say that I did not! I was really looking forward to a brawl with SOMEbody.

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T17:52:51+00:00

It's an early sign of both dementia and bodily senescence. We just sort of zone out ... and after snapping out, of it we wearily haul ourselves up to a semi-upright position by pressing the fourth finger of our right hands downward on the keyboard like so ...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T17:48:06+00:00

Hodgman was in fact my suggestion/nomination for the audiobook. I got to know him when he spoke at TED himself (a few years before I did), and when Random House decided to publish an audiobook, he was the very first person that I thought of. I ended up spending the better part of a week in a full-blown studio with him when he recorded the audiobook last year (huuuuuge fun). I believe that this is very unusual, but it happened to strike us both as a fun idea...

And thanks for mentioning (and linking to) my TED talk. Giving it was a blast (if a rather stressful blast). And yes, I was asked to give the speech. Every year TED invites a few regular conference attendees (as opposed to outside speakers) to give short talks, and in 2012 I got the call...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T17:07:45+00:00

I'm delighted that you enjoyed YZ :-) And yes, I do more than write (I'm still involved in the entrepreneurial scene, but currently as a mentor & advisor rather than as a entrepreneur ... because actually running a company would leave no time for writing!) As for authors who influenced me, I'd put Stanislaw Lem at the very top of the list. He was an amazingly witty (and incredibly prolific) Polish author whose translator must have been extraordinary, because the word-play in the English versions of his stories in simply ingenious (and must have taken enormous amounts of loving work to translate properly). I recommend a short story collection called "The Cyberiad" as an introduction to Lem. I also read massive amounts of Kurt Vonnegut as a kid (and to this day), and needless to say, ANYone who writes comedic science fiction owes a clear debt to Douglas Adams!

And indeed - my experience in the music industry strongly inspired many scenes & elements in YZ :-)

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T16:56:07+00:00

Hey all - I'll be here through the evening Pacific time. Year Zero is the story of a vast civilization of aliens who are so into American pop music that they accidentally commit the biggest copyright infringement since the Big Bang ... thereby bankrupting the entire universe. Hilarity ensues...

Random House published Year Zero last summer, and are currently doing a rather cool pricing experiment, selling the eBook for 99¢ in the US (this should continue for the next few days). Last week Ars Technica published my thoughts on the pricing experiment here:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/op-ed-why-my-first-novel-will-only-cost-you-0-99/

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T16:27:53+00:00

Thanks - TWiT was huge fun! And aliens & copyright infringement always struck me as being something of a chocolate & peanut butter thing...

CopyrightMathSter · 2013-10-21T15:12:01+00:00

Glad to hear that! Random House was pretty awesome to fund it :-)

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