*Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:
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This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling *The Bezzle* (2024) and *Red Team Blues* (2023). I wrote *Red Team Blues* with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, *without writing the rest of the series*? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"
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My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I.
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He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.
Which brings me to *Picks and Shovels*. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s - the weird and heroic era of the PC.
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Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.
Silicon Valley in the early eighties was *wild*: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and *man* were the PCs ever *weird*.
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This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.
Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi.
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But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed).
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A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).
Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult.
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There's a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.
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Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers - they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.
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This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.
The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.
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Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I *especially* love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.
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Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.
But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players.
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Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies *even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!*
You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years!
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That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!
Amazon knows every time you buy an audiobook at Audible,you increase the cost you'll have to pay if you switch to a competitor. They use that fact to give readers a worse deal (last year they tried out *ads* in audiobooks!).
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But the people who really suffer under this arrangement are the writers, whom Amazon abuses with abandon, knowing they can't afford to leave the service because their readers are locked into it. That's why Amazon felt they could get away with stealing $100 million from indie audiobook creators (and yup, they got away with it):
https://www.audiblegate.com/about
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Welcome to Audiblegate, the public site Fair Deal for Rights Holders and Narrators group. We are currently at war with Audible who have for years clawed back sales from authors secretly through opaque reporting, while they gave away our books via their over-generous "Easy Exchange" policy.
Which is why none of my books can be sold with DRM. And that means that Audible won't carry any of them.
For more than a decade, I've been making my own audiobooks, in partnership with the wonderful studio Skyboat Media and their brilliant director, Gabrielle de Cuir:
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I pay fantastic narrators a fair wage for their work, then I pay John Taylor Williams, the engineer who masters my podcasts, to edit the books and compose bed music for the intro and outro. Then I sell the books at every store in the world - except Audible and Apple, who both have mandatory DRM. Because *fuck* DRM.
Paying everyone a fair wage is *expensive*. It's worth it: the books are *great*.
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But even though my books are sold at many stores online, being frozen out of Audible means that the sales barely register.
That's why I do these Kickstarter campaigns, to pre-sell thousands of audiobooks in advance of the release. I've done six of these now, and each one was a *huge* success, inspiring others to strike out on their own, sometimes with spectacular results:
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Today, I've launched the Kickstarter for *Picks and Shovels*. I'm selling the audiobook and ebook in DRM-form, without any "terms of service" or "license agreement." That means they're like a print book: you buy them, you own them. You can read them on any equipment you choose to. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them to friends. Rather than making you submit to 20,000 words of insulting legalese, all I ask of you is that you don't violate copyright law. I trust you!
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Speaking of print books: I'm also pre-selling the hardcover of *Picks and Shovels* and the paperbacks of *The Bezzle* and *Red Team Blues*, the other two Marty Hench books. I'll even sign and personalize them for you!
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I'm also offering five chances to commission your own Marty Hench story - pick your favorite high-tech finance scam from the past 40 years of tech history, and I'll have Marty bust it in a custom short story. Once the story is published, I'll make sure you get credit. Check out these two cool Little Brother stories my previous Kickstarter backers commissioned:
* Spill
https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/
* Vigilant
https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/
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Cory Doctorow
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