Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Posted on June 18, 2005 Posted by John Scalzi 3 Comments
Spotted in the wild, and subsequently purchased: Cory Doctorow’s latest, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which I found at the local bookstore here in Troy, Ohio, the very same bookstore that have never once ever had Old Man’s War on the shelves, grumble, grumble. The book’s official release is July 1, but Amazon also claims to have copies in stock, so there you go. Cory will be releasing a Creative Commons version of the book online on July 1 as well, but I’ve read enough of Cory not to have to need a sample prior to purchase, and I’m a strong believer in making sure people get paid. Call me a self-interested atavist. In any event, the book is getting excellent reviews so far (including a starred review in Publishers Weekly, which says it “demonstrates how memorably the outrageous and the everyday can coexist”) so that doesn’t hurt, either. Kick it, Cory.
Speaking of Publishers Weekly, it published a review of Agent to the Stars this week:
In this slick, lightweight SF yarn from Scalzi (Old Man’s War), Thomas Stein, a hot young Hollywood agent, has just negotiated a multimillion-dollar deal for his friend, starlet Michelle Beck, when his boss, Carl Lupo, foists a space alien called Joshua on him. Joshua and his people, the Yherajk, are intelligent, gelatinous, shape-shifting blobs that communicate telepathically and by sharing odors. They’ve been monitoring Earth’s TV broadcasts and realize that before they can make first contact, they’ll have to deal with their image problem. Tom takes on the job of making the friendly, odiferous creatures palatable to humanity, while keeping Michelle and the rest of his other acting clients happy. Several entertaining trips to the aliens’ spaceship enliven the predictable plot.
Not as nice as the Booklist review, but, eh, not too bad. You can’t win them all.
Perhaps not as good as the other review, but it did get a PW review (not necessarily the easiest of tasks) and, for the first time in PW, connected one of your books with one of your other books. That can’t hurt.
I don’t think it will hurt or hinder, to tell you the truth, since Agent is a limited edition. All we need to do is sell about 1,500 of them, and I think we’re already a fair amount of the distance there already. Also, of course, people can actually read the thing online, so they can decide for themselves whether to drop the cash for the physical edition. I expect most of the sales will come from people who have already read the novel online.
Cory posted about the book on Boing Boing the other day. I had it preordered but nothing had happened yet on Amazon. I happened to follow the link and noticed that it said that the book shipped in 24 hours normally.
I thought that was weird since Cory said that the book was out on the first but I cancelled my old preorder and ordered it again on the site (with another book for free shipping…). Lo and behold, it shipped about eight hours later.
I assume that Amazon must have jumped the gun or something.