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Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (read by Wil Wheaton!)
Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it’s a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it’s swept the trade press with starred reviews all ‘round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won’t sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell
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:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench
Audible is Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and every single one of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon’s DRM on it. That means that you can’t break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I can’t give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format. Doing so is a felony carrying a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for an act that in no way infringes anyone’s copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is much less illegal than removing Amazon’s mandatory DRM from my own books!
I’ve got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they’re not charities. If they can’t sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they’re not going to make audio editions at all. Instead, I make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman, and I sell them everywhere except Audible.
Doing this isn’t cheap: I’m paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores. Most audiobook listeners don’t even know that these stores exist: if a title isn’t available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.
That’s where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I’ve crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were astoundingly successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks. These campaigns didn’t just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon’s monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren’t sticky-traps for Audible’s walled garden/prison:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html
And today, I’m launching the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one’s gonna be incredible.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell
For starters, there’s the narrator: @wilwheaton, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don’t tell my other narrators! They’re great too!):
https://wilwheaton.net/
Beyond Wil’s narration, there’s the subject matter. The hero of Red Team Blues is a hard-charging forensic accountant who’s untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west. Now, at the age of 67, Marty Hench is ready to retire, but a dear old friend — a legendary cryptographer — drags him back for one last job — locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that’s worth more than a billion dollars.
That’s the starting gun for a “grabby next-Tuesday thriller” that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation. Marty’s final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers’ libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.
It’s a pretty contemporary story, in other words.
I wrote this one before SVB, before Sam Bankman0Fried and FTX — just like I wrote Little Brother before Snowden’s revelations. It’s not that I’m prescient — fortune-telling is a fatalist’s delusion — it’s that these phenomena are just the most spectacular, most recent examples in a long string of ghastly and increasingly dire scandals.
Red Team Blues blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as bossware turned our “work from home” into “live at work.”
The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, and, as with Little Brother, Red Team Blues is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story.
These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I had to find out how it ended,” she answered.
The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:
That.
Was.
A! Fucking! Ride!
Whoa!
Within a week, he’d bought Red Team Blues…and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It’s gonna be a wild ride.
Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.
First, there’s naming rights for characters in the sequels — I’m selling three of these; they’re a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a lot of fun — they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is The Bezzle, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff’s Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros.
The third book is Picks and Shovels (Jan 2025), and it’s Marty’s first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called “Three Wise Men” that’s run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.
Next, there’s three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories. Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I’ll then shop to fiction websites (every story I’ve written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn’t, I’ll put it up under a CC license).
Finally, there’s a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition — and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have Will Staehle’s fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there’s space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues. The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy’s endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.
I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I’ve put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I’ve written for Pluralistic for the past three years. There is no better way to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell
Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch — incomparable, really. Invaluable.
What’s more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon’s DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers: we have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us — creators, publishers and listeners — more fairly.
I’ll be heading out on tour to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany once the book is out. I’m really looking forward to as many backers in person as I can! Thank you for your support over these many long years — and for your support on this Kickstarter.
Today (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.
[Image ID: A graphic showing a phone playing the Red Team Blues audiobok, along with a quote from Booklist, 'Jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto. Another winner from an sf wizard.']
#pluralistic#wil wheaton#drm#chokepoint capitalism#Monopoly#audible#amazon#audiobooks#sf#science fiction#post cyberpunk#cyberpunk#technothrillers#thrillers#heists#cryptocurrency#red team blues#marty hench#kickstarter
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Text: The heist will need one last member. I head to a planet cast in constant shadows to recruit, whose inhabitants have developed camouflage, blending and blurring naturally into the dark.
#creative writing#writing prompts#space and aliens#heists#space oceans 11 pleasse#please someone oceans 11 in space
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New heist idea! Along with vampires trying to get their old stuff back from a museum, there should also be werewolves trying to get their paws on the moon rocks that NASA has collected, because those are basically reverse Kryptonite.
#somebody write the story#stories even!#allllll the urban fantasy heist stories#c'mon it'll be great#the vampires and werewolves can even know each other#with hilarious banter and used-to-date drama#or it can be all srs biznis#your call#writing prompts#werewolves#vampires#the moon#lycanthropy#heists
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Do heist stories still work in the modern world, especially the developed world? More and more wealth these days seems to be intangible and electronic, and more and more of the physical stuff that's still valuable is marked and traceable so that even if you take, it's hard to spend or unload it anywhere. What are macguffins that a thief in today's world could still physically steal today and realistically hope to profit from (without the profiting getting him caught)?
Heists still happen in the modern world. Hell, the entire NFT “economy” crashed last year as a result of a multiple heists. The Axie Infinity hack last year saw over $600 million worth of crypto tokens stolen. There have been many, many, famous heists, and there is no sign of them slowing down anytime soon.
So, in the vague sense of, “is it realistic?” It happens today, in the real world.
What gets stolen? Anything of sufficient value is a potential target. Art is one of the classic examples, and it remains a tempting target. Any liquid asset is tempting, and no matter how good the tracking is, chances are, someone will find a way to defeat it. In theory, crypto tokens are impossible to scrub, as the entire history of that token will be publicly logged on the block chain... so, thieves were using places like Tornado Cash to launder their cryptocurrency. (Incidentally, the US Treasury has sanctioned Tornado Cash, as of August last year.)
How realistic is it to get away with a heist? There are a lot of unsolved heists. Both, of physical items, and also with a lot of crypto thefts in the last few years. Some of the latter are believed to have been the product of state actors (read: Hacker groups believed to be working for authoritarian states with few extradition treaties.)
Art theft is alive and well. Now, I'm not an expert on laundering stolen paintings, however, from the ones that have been found, a lot find their way into private collections. Art collectors, and brokers who aren't particularly bothered with the legality of a given piece will move stolen art. It's not going to command the prices it would on the open market. (If someone estimates a stolen painting as worth four million dollars, expect that the thieves will get considerably less than that when they fence it, and while the fence will make enough to justify their risk, they're probably not going to be raking in millions either. Once it's made its way to a new owner, it will likely go up on a wall in a private gallery, or get carefully stored in a vault, and never seen again by the outside world for decades (or longer.)
Of course art theft can also be sculptures, books, or really anything else.
When it comes to other things, any liquid asset is a potential target for a heist. Cash, precious metals, and gem stones, are probably the most obvious examples, though, certainly not the only options.
The heist is, generally, a fairly consistent (if modular) structure.
It starts with identifying a vulnerable asset. The reason for the vulnerability may be important for the story, but not for the genre itself. This may be as simple as, “the asset exists,” and the PoV character learns of it, or it could be a situation where an exploitable flaw in the electronic tracking for the item is identified.
Once that's happened, then the ringleader starts assembling a team of specialists (and, amusingly, it is almost always specialists), to fill necessary roles in the heist. Usually this is a mix of technical specialists, social specialists, and at least some muscle.
So, assembling the team is something very specific to the formula, and not reflected in reality. A lot of real world heists simply need bodies, and prefer to have as few people as possible involved. The reasons are twofold. First, the less people involved, the less ways the resulting cash has to be split. Second, the fewer people involved, the fewer people that can lose their nerve and screw up, or rat their partners out to the police.
Once the team has assembled and they have a plan (this is usually hammered out along with the recruitment phase of the story, though that doesn't make a lot of sense when you step back and think about it), then they identify the preceding steps that need to be completed before executing the heist. This involves prepwork, sometimes smaller thefts to obtain the resources they need, and other necessary activities. (Again, this is more of a formula consideration, than a strictly realistic one. Especially the perpetration of earlier crimes. Those crimes can easily result in errors that would lead law enforcement to identify the heist before it occurred, and also help with identifying the thieves. To be fair, this is sometimes handled intelligently while staying within the formula to build tension. As the police close in on the team before they've even gotten started.)
After this, the team goes to execute the heist. Expect several things to fail simultaneously, with members of the team scrambling to salvage the heist. So, I don't want to harp on this too much, but this is another one of those places where the formula structure is extremely unrealistic. When looking at real heists, these kinds of fumbles will usually either botch the heist on the spot or provide the police with the threads they need to find the perpetrators. From a narrative perspective, it makes sense, it help build tension moving into the climax. So, while it's not realistic, that's not the point.
Once the team has the item, then they need to extract with it. Sometimes you'll see this skimmed over, but, getting the thing you're stealing away from the people trying to arrest the thieves is a somewhat important consideration. Generally speaking, yeah, a loud extraction with gunfights and car chases is going to end with the police response scaling to the point where escape is impossible. Also, generally speaking, most writers have a difficult time keeping stealth sequences tense, especially when their instinct is to transition into action.
Once they're out, lot heist stories end. The thieves, “won,” and the climax has played out. From a writing perspective, this makes sense. They won, and everything from here is going to be downhill. The team will break up. The actual process of fencing the stolen goods are going to be fairly dry, and, alternately, the process of laundering any cash they may have stolen isn't going to be that interesting either. There might be some lingering character threads to resolve, but the story is over, at least until you start another.
The main purpose for dragging a story beyond the heist is if you're setting up a tragedy. Probably with the police hunting them down for whatever errors they made along the way. I know I've cited it before, but Michael Mann's Heat (1995) is an excellent example of how the heist structure can be turned into a tragedy. (It's also a rare case that reworks a lot of the formula into something more realistic.)
On the whole, I'd say the heist genre is as relevant today as it's ever been. The specific stumbling blocks your characters will encounter are different. That always changes, and your ability to tune your story to your setting is always important. From a strictly mechanical perspective, there's no difference from your character accidentally leaving his driver's license behind at the scene of the heist, and failing to identify a tracker concealed in the stolen object. Both of them create a direct line from the crime back to that character. In a very real sense, a lot of the particulars for how this plays out is simply flavor. If you want your heist to be a techno-thriller, then you can absolutely do that, though you will probably have to spend quite a bit of time studying modern security methods and technology, but you can do that.
-Starke
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#how to fight write#Starke answers#writing advice#writing reference#writing tips#writing heists#heists
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I havent been feeling too well but I wanna share my wip. Definitely will finish it
#the owl house fanart#huntlow#lumity#the owl house#the owl post#luz noceda#amity blight#gus porter#vee noceda#hunter noceda#willow park#hexsquad#toh thanks to them#disney world#heists#shennanigans#schemes#luz the human#human realm#wintery junk#hunter x willow#luz x amity#dana terrace#current wip
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Summary: A few missing moments from 3x05 and 3x06 as Kiara attempts to deal with the fallout of everything that happened.
A/N: This spiralled out of control (as all the most frustrating yet rewarding fics seem to do) from me noticing how quiet Kie was in the truck post motorcycle crash... and here we are 9k later! I've never really written a missing moment that fit properly into canon like this, so I hope I've done it justice!
A super huge thank you to Diana (@jojameswinter) who betaed this three separate times, which she insisted wasn't insane. I still think it was, but this fic wouldn't be the same without her help so I guess she may have been right in the end. Thanks for everything you do!!
Word Count: 9,141
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As the moment stretched on, she felt something else bubble up inside of her the longer they silently stood there. She fought to breathe properly, to calm her racing heart, to push back the tears threatening to fall. Her relief quieted into something deeper, more solid and heavy, as he shifted his weight back and forth, having the good sense to look a bit embarrassed the longer she glared at him.
They’d already gone through this once, in the lifeboat, his face pale and unresponsive as she screamed at him to wake up, panic clogging her throat. She couldn’t keep doing it.
“Don’t… don’t you ever do that again,” she said lowly, in a voice she barely recognized, amazed that it only wobbled slightly.
She wanted to say more, to make sure he knew how afraid she was, the stabbing pain in her chest that wouldn’t go away even though he was right there in front of her. How much she needed him, relied on him, always looked to him, but she couldn’t seem to find the words.
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Read more on ao3!
#my writing#my fic#jiara fic#jiara fanfic#outer banks fic#obx fanfic#outer banks fanfiction#jiara#outer banks#obx#outer banks season 3#jj x kiara#jj x kie#obx fic#jiarasource#missing moment#heists#3x05
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From @haridraws, Into the Tower is a single-person TTRPG all about a heist, mixing up fantasy, historical fiction, horror, and absurdist humor. Check out our review at the link!
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It’s out! Self promotion isn’t something that I’m particularly comfortable with, but I’m so proud to share this link. The last week or so has mostly been the boring and technical minutiae so waking up this morning to a successful live game has been *chef’s kiss*.
#ttrpg#indie ttrpg#game jam#pocket quest 2024#rooftopsrpg#zines#heists#drive thru rpg#it’s here#dopamine#deep breath#chefs kiss
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Heist movie idea: Because almost all national programming and the London Stock Exchance shut down when a monarch dies, a professional crew plans the score of a lifetime for the distraction caused by the death of Queen Elizabeth II ...but because they expected her to kick it like fifteen years ago, they’re all middle-aged and fussy about it.
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heat (1995)
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It happened again. I was fortunate enough to write for a very cool indie TTRPG production. Stolen Hearts is an anthology of heist adventures centered around romances and how to run heists in the 5e system.
Stolen Hearts comes with two 75-pg PDFs (full color, and white background for printing), 7 color map JPGs (gridded and non-gridded), 12 tokens PNGs, 4 handout PNGs, and an MP3!
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Library Journal on "The Bezzle," my next novel
When readers left cyber detective and forensic accountant Martin Hench at the end of Red Team Blues, he was settling down in a well-deserved retirement. This book finds Marty taking a trip down memory lane to the heyday of the Silicon Valley dot-com boom in the early 2000s, when he exposed a fast-food scam, and relating a fascinating tale of financial skullduggery, long cons, and the delivery of ice-cold revenge. Marty’s reminiscences range from obscure financial machinations to heaping helpings of social commentary but always move the underlying thriller story forward in a backwards heist tale that delivers a righteously satisfying ending to the surprise of both the reader and the villain. This novel, like his previous outing, rides on Marty’s voice. He has a jaundiced view of everything, but he tells it with such style and verve that readers are caught up and ride along on the surface until the shark beneath the water jumps out and bites the villain where it hurts. Doctorow well knows the world he skewers here, having written extensively about tech-sector monopolies, the ethics of the internet, and the state of copyright and creativity in the digital age (including in two recent nonfiction books, The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation and Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back).
-Marlene Harris, Library Journal
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Karin Kuruma (Armored)
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I could see Hob's being an art thief that steals from museums and returns the artifacts to their countries of origin.
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The group is getting into the car
Kaz: I’m driving.
Jesper, out of view: Shotgun!
Inej, turning to face Jesper: Aww! But you had it on the way here-
Kaz & Inej: WOAH-
Jesper, holding a shotgun: No! I found a shotgun! And I want the front seat! Pumps gun
#six of crows#crooked kingdom#kaz brekker#inej ghafa#jesper fahey#grishaverse#incorrect grisha quotes#grishaverse incorrect quotes#the dregs#crow club#heists#this definitely happened#soc headcanons#six of crows incorrect quotes#six of crows headcanons#soc incorrect quotes#incorrect quotes
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The Greatest Cyberpunk Heists of All Time
In the edgy world of cyberpunk, where the neon-lit streets are as sharp as the wit of its anti-heroes, heists are the ultimate rebellion. These audacious acts of theft aren't just about getting rich; they're about flipping off the corporate bigwigs, outsmarting the system, and dancing on the edge of chaos in a world where power, technology, and grit collide.
Introduction
Picture this: a futuristic cityscape bathed in neon, where hackers, rebels, and renegades navigate through digital labyrinths and dystopian nightmares. Heists, my friend, are the lifeblood of cyberpunk. They embody the spirit of those brave enough to say "screw the rules," infiltrate high-security systems, and snatch the ungrabbable, all while wielding some slick, cutting-edge tech.
"Neuromancer" Heist
In William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Case, a washed-up hacker, gets hired for the ultimate heist—a plunge into cyberspace itself. This caper involves infiltrating the Tessier-Ashpool conglomerate's super-secure AI, Wintermute. It's hacking on steroids, with Case plugged into cyberspace via a neural implant. The chase between the hackers and corporate goons showcases the thrill of cyberpunk's obsession with corporate power and high-tech wizardry.
"Inception" Heist
Christopher Nolan's "Inception" takes heists and cranks them up to eleven by diving into the subconscious. Dom Cobb's team uses mind-bending gadgets to infiltrate dreams, stealing the juiciest secrets. Dream within a dream? More like heist-ception! The layers of dreams become a playground for mind-blowing technology, where reality is as fluid as a hacker's code.
"Blade Runner" Data Heist
Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" throws a data heist into the mix of neo-noir, cyberpunk goodness. Roy Batty and his rogue replicants aim to steal data to extend their short lifespans. It's a desperate gambit, touching on themes of AI, identity, and morality. The heist's deeper message is that it's not just about swiping stuff; it's about challenging the very essence of existence in a cyberpunk world.
"Snow Crash" Mafia Heist
Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" mixes hacker culture with mafia drama. Hiro Protagonist and YT embark on a rollercoaster of heists, espionage, and a nasty drug called Snow Crash. With the Metaverse, a virtual playground, and Snow Crash, a linguistic virus, this tale blurs the line between reality and the digital realm, driving home cyberpunk's obsession with the interconnectedness of both.
"Heat" Bank Heist
Michael Mann's "Heat," though not your typical cyberpunk flick, explores heists with gritty realism. Neil McCauley's crew executes heists with military precision, showcasing high-tech gadgets, surveillance gear, and some serious firepower. It's a nod to cyberpunk's love-hate relationship with technology—the same tools used for control can set you free.
Conclusion
In the world of cyberpunk, heists are more than just heart-pounding thrillers; they're the ultimate middle finger to the system. These capers remind us that even in the darkest dystopias, there's a glimmer of hope. It's the belief that with a touch of genius, a dose of tech, and a dash of audacity, we can defy the status quo and rewrite the rules in a world ruled by shadows and neon. Cyberpunk heists are a celebration of the renegades who dare to flip the bird at the establishment and rewrite the code of an unjust reality.
- Raz
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