Gerald M. Weinberg: Writer - Consultant
Dedicated to Helping Smart People be Happy
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Why Nerd Novels?
As you may know, I have had a long and successful career as a writer of non-fiction books. (You may check these out here.) I write for an audience other people call "nerds," often in a pejorative sense. To me, there's nothing pejorative about my nerd friends and colleagues, but they are misunderstood by most "ordinary" people. By making all my principal characters nerds of all sorts, I hope to satisfy one of my goals: helping others understand us better.
But my major goal is to help my major audience, us nerds, understand ourselves better, thus continuing my life's work previously carried out in such non-fiction works as The Psychology of Computer Programming, Understanding The Professional Programmer, and Quality Software Management. Fiction provides yet another route to this goal, a route that many may discover is fun as well as educational.
Why eBooks?
The short answer is "economy and convenience." Using the methods in place for selling hard copies of books, there are many steps, each one of which creates another set of hands in the money pot. Under the best of circumstances, if you pay, say $20 for a book, the author will be lucky to get $2 of that amount.
It's not that the other hands don't earn their shares, but most of those shares are simply unnecessary with modern (eBook) sale and distribution. If I, the author, do my job, you get a reasonable clean manuscript (edited by me and a number of my professional readers) for a fraction of the price. I still have to divide your payment among several hands (such as, PayPal, my internet service provider, and my web builders), but I do receive what I consider a fair payment for the many hours I take to create the books.
Why These eBooks?
I've earned a fine living writing non-fiction, but I've always wanted to write fiction, too. For a variety of reasons, I put off my fiction career until rather late in life. As a result, I don't have a lot of time to ease into that career, and I'm simply too impatient to wade through the years that it takes to produce a bound book.
Why is time important? I'm in a learning phase (I'm always in a learning phase about something) about fiction writing, and learning requires feedback. The quicker the feedback, the more effective it is for learning. By making some of my novels available as eBooks, I hasten the feedback process by which readers give me the kind of information I need to improve my skills at my new trade.
So, why these books? I will probably still pursue paper publication for some of my novels (like The Aremac Project), but I'm putting here a selection of novels whose feedback I think will help me most. In particular, I intend to put series novels here, because the turnaround of paper publishing is particularly hard on series books, whose volumes may take years and years to appear.
May I copy this book for my friends?
The eBooks available here are downloaded in pdf format, which is easy to copy and move from one platform to another. Please do not copy these books except for your own use—such as, making a copy for your electronic reader or a printing a copy if you like reading from paper.
Copying for sale, of course, is illegal, but hopefully, you'll enjoy the books and want your friends to read them. I would like that, very much, so please encourage your friends to obtain their own copy. If they cannot afford the small price, tell them to write to me, and I will email them a free copy. That will help me keep track of how many readers I have.
The earnings from the sale of these books will go to two of my favorite charities: Morris Animal Foundation (for research to improve the lives of animals) and the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation (for research to improve the lives of humans).
