How my DRM-free principles left me owning the rights to a German audiobook
Support me this summer in the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop! This summer, I'm writing The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI, a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux that explains how to be an effective AI critic.
Long story short: thanks to a series of misunderstandings, I had to shell out more than ten thousand euros to prevent a German audiobook of my work from being released with DRM and now I need your help (assuming you speak German) to get the book into readers' ears!
For more than a quarter-century, I've had an iron-clad policy of not releasing my work with "digital rights management," this being a kind of encryption that keeps my readers from reading the books they've bought in the apps of their choice.
There's two reasons for this: the first is, it's just grossly unfair. If you buy one of my print books, you can shelve it on any bookcase and read it sitting in any chair, under any company's lightbulb. It's stupid and offensive for a company like Amazon/Audible to declare that you can only read the ebooks and audiobooks you buy using the apps they approve.
But the second reason is more insidious and subtle. By retaining control over the apps that you must use to read or listen to your books, companies like Amazon are able to lock you into their platform. That means they can change the deal even after you've made your purchase (for example, Amazon has been caught deleting ebooks from people's Kindle apps and readers and Audible has experimented with inserting ads into your audiobooks after you buy them).
This lock-in isn't limited to readers, either. Once Amazon has all my readers locked in, the company acquires control over me, the writer. After all, if my readers can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, then I can't switch from Amazon to another bookseller, because that would mean asking my readers to start over buying all their books again.
Amazon has a long history of squeezing its sellers – including writers and publishers – once it has them locked in. Today, 45-51% of every Amazon Marketplace purchase from an independent seller is skimmed off by Amazon in junk fees. The company makes $58 billion/year charging vendors for search placement (rather than putting the best match for shoppers' searches at the top of the result). And they stole at least $100m from Audible audiobook authors:
In 1998, the US passed a law (Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act) that makes tampering with DRM a felony with a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (for a first offense). In the years since, the US Trade Representative bullied every US trading partner into adopting this law. The EU did so in 2001, with Article 6 of the Copyright Directive.
This means that it's literally a crime for me, the author of a book, who holds the copyright to the work, to authorize you, a reader who bought the ebook or audiobook on Amazon, to convert the digital file so that it works with apps that compete with Amazon's.
So that's why I don't allow my work to be sold with DRM.
Everyone I do business with knows this – my publishers, my agents, etc – and over the past quarter century and more than 30 books, all of these people have bent over backwards to accommodate this policy of mine, even when it meant changing the workflow they used for thousands of books just to make an exception for me. I'm incredibly grateful for this.
But eventually, someone was bound to slip up, and that's how I ended up owning the German audiobook for my novel Red Team Blues.
After Red Team Blues was published in English in 2022 and became a national bestseller, many foreign publishers snapped up the translation rights. Among them was Heyne, my German publisher, who commissioned a fantastic translation by Jürgen Langowski that has sold briskly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Heyne also commissioned an audiobook, beautifully read by a beloved German audiobook narrator, Uve Teschner.
But somewhere in there, everyone forgot that this audiobook could only be sold without DRM. And since Audible, Apple Books and Audiobooks.com refuse to carry DRM-free books, that meant that they would not be able to sell the books in the places where 90+% of readers look for them.
No one is to blame here. It's just an oversight. But it left us all in the awkward position of my publisher having spent more than EUR10,000 on an audiobook that they would never be able to recoup on. Both my publisher and my agent offered to eat these costs, but I felt bad about this, given the great lengths both had gone to over the years to help me live my principles through my books.
Besides: I have this platform of mine, the newsletters and lists of people who've bought audiobooks from me before and the people who've backed the Kickstarters for my previous English works, and I decided I would buy the audiobook rights from my German publisher and try to make the money back by selling directly to my German fans.
Today, I've launched a Kickstarter campaign to sell the DRM-free German audiobook. I'm also selling the DRM-free ebook, and the German paperback, which will be fulfilled by my pals at Berlin's excellent sf/f bookstore Otherland (due to the Trump tariff nonsense, these can only be shipped in the EU, UK, and Switzerland):
There's something for English-speaking readers, too: discounted editions of the English-language ebook and audiobook (read by Wil Wheaton), available in bundles with the German titles, or on their own. Europeans can also order the print edition of the book (again, fulfilled by Otherland in Berlin).
Now, I don't actually speak German. I grew up speaking Yiddish, much of which I've forgotten, which means that I can kind of grunt out ungrammatical German-adjacent phrases (the Otherland folks generously translated my Kickstarter page into German). That means that I have extremely limited ability to promote this Kickstarter to German-speaking audiences. I'm really relying on my readers here: if you are a German-speaker and/or have German-speaking friends, please let them know about this!
When you do, your pals are going to ask you what the book is about. Red Team Blues tells the story of the last case of Martin Hench, a 67 year old high-tech forensic accountant who's spent 40 years in Silicon Valley, busting the weirdest financial scams that three generations of tech bros cooked up. For this final job, Marty's been called out of retirement to resolve that scammiest of all tech-bro schemes, a cryptocurrency heist.
Marty's dear old pal Danny Lazer has built a new – and wildly successful – kind of blockchain, built on the security chips in mobile devices, called Trustlesscoin. Lazer is a cypherpunk legend, but that's not why Trustlesscoin went from zero to more than a billion in capitalization in a few short months: all that money poured in because some of the world's most ruthless criminals came to appreciate how Danny's cryptocurrency could facilitate money-laundering.
That would be bad enough, but Danny is exactly the kind of very smart guy who is more than capable of outsmarting himself. That's how he came to build a cryptographic back-door into Trustlesscoin, a secret key that allows the bearer to rewrite the supposedly immutable transactions in the network, which is to say, to steal all the money.
That's where Marty Hench comes in: Danny summons Marty to his home in Palo Alto because someone has stolen the physical token that this billion-dollar key lives on, and if someone doesn't get it back soon, it's only a matter of time until a billion dollars goes missing, and then the kind of people who resolve their monetary disputes with bone-saws and red-hot pokers will come looking for Danny.
That's where the story starts – but it turns out that recovering Danny's missing keys are the easy part. The hard part comes next, when Marty finds himself in the crosshairs of the violent international crime syndicates that boosted the keys in the first place.
People really like this book. It's the kind of book you stay up all night reading (or, as Molly White from Web3 is Going Just Great put it, "don't start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning"). If you find yourself craving morning Marty Hench in the morning, I've published two more bestsellers recounting his earlier adventures: The Bezzle and Picks and Shovels.
Check it out for yourself. Here's the first chapter of the German audiobook, read by Uve Teschner:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8e2or8ze_4
And here's the first chapter of the English audiobook, read by Wil Wheaton:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mb8yJeASgho
The campaign only runs for a brisk three weeks (I've got to get it all put away before I head out on tour with Enshittification in October), so act fast:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
so, hi. i wrote a book. and it's up on kickstarter right NOW. aaaaaaaaa
Hit The Ground Running is the first novel in an intended series of near-future crime capers!
Built on the bones of a former northern England shipbuilding town, Unity City is an extraterritorial city-state fully owned and operated by worldwide megacorp Imperium International LLC. Renji Starkweather has everything he needs to succeed within Unity: confidence, a fast mouth, and most importantly, a famous aunt. But despite his coveted position within the city’s enforcers, restless Renji has never quite fit in with the company values, and when an impulsive stunt involving an airship and far too many bladed weapons sends him plummeting into Unity's buried depths, he begins to see the real human cost of those record profits.
Thrown into the path of a notorious gang of criminals named The Loose Ends, Renji is keen to help them even the score; and once an unfair gas bill threatens to leave the city's poorest freezing in their own homes, he finds himself with a chance to do just that. Teaming up with a gruff single dad on a mission, a laid-back hacker DJ, and her furious bruiser of a sister, Renji has a plan involving an audacious heist of tonight’s company Christmas fundraiser– but in order to pull it off, he’ll have to dodge his vicious former boss and avoid his terrifying aunt, all while gaining the trust of his new allies.
What could possibly go wrong…?
Here's the first two chapters as a sample, in which you get to meet Renji and see him immediately do something stupid.
The Roleplayer's Guide to Heists - Heists are some of the most fun you can have during an RPG session - the in-depth planning, the nail biti
Made this with the Far Horizons Co-Op a million years ago and its still one of the greatest pieces of work I've done in the TTRPG scene. From project management to print, this was a five gold star winner.
The concept; 35 system agnostic heist writeups set across every genre and setting you can imagine. Each of them fully illustrated, with detailed, labeled maps. Each write up gives you a world of plot hooks, introduces you to important NPCs, points out interesting locations.
This was inspired by my adoration of those history books we all read as a kid, with the huge dioramas. Those things were TTRPG manuals before we knew they existed, right? Poring over them, drinking in every detail, imagining what it would be like to be this person or that. That and Hitman. There's *SO MUCH* Hitman in this book. I loved working on this book. Cracked it open for old times sake earlier today, maybe you'd like to join me.
Idea for a fic I can't write right now due to already having 8! batman fics in my WIPs
Lex Luthor tries to sic the Leverage team on Bruce Wayne with false evidence.
Nate knows that Lex is manipulating them and is the real bad guy here, but he pretends to go along with it in an elaborate plot to take Lex down.
Part of this plot involves breaking into Wayne Enterprises to steal the information they’re using to bait Luthor. “No one will even notice, the CEO’s an airhead playboy with a charity streak.”
Famous last words
Bruce Wayne shows up, Eliot tries to remove him, which… Eliot vs Batman
Basically, Bruce gives up the playboy persona to have a serious talk with the Leverage team: “Luthor’s manipulating you.”
“We know,” Nate’s a little huffy, but explains the plan to Bruce.
Bruce offers some resources and evidence to make it more complete. Catwoman comes along (and Parker’s a fangirl), and several batfam members get matched up with leverage folks.
Cue Batman and family and the Leverage crew coming after Lex Luthor to cripple him beyond recovery. (If a superpowered alien being held prisoner gets rescued in the process, the Leverage crew isn’t going to question it.)
Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li (Contemporary)
The Elysium Heist by Y.M. Resnik (Sci-Fi)
A Game of Hearts and Heists by Ruby Roe (Fantasy Romance)
Among Thieves by M.J. Kuhn (Fantasy)
Hammajang Luck by Makana Yamamoto (Sci-Fi)
Bonus: These are all Adult, but for YA, check out Death Prefers Blondes by Caleb Roehrig, Aces Wild by Amanda DeWitt, A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar, and Six of…
