The Michael Moorcock Strategic Book Placement Programme

[Marca]

As per my postings in the [broken link]Greek Editions thread, I was unable to find any foreign editions of Mike's books in Crete during my recent stay. However, I decided to leave behind my Mayflower copy of The Time Dweller that I took with me, which was a duplicate (and a reading copy) for someone else to enjoy. There were a number of books already in the apartment - several French novels, a Val McDermid book and an Iris Murdoch one in English, a Swedish translation of a Mills and Boon romance, an old copy of New Scientist etc..

Then an idea occurred to me - members here could deposit spare copies of Mike's books in places they stay, a bit like the Gideons with the Bible Who knows when a weary traveller might want to escape present day insanity (as the blurbs used to say) with some Moorcockania. What do you think. Maybe it could be extended outside hotel rooms into doctor's surgeries, works canteens, even telephone boxes (I'm joking here). Just a thought. :idea:

[GuyLawley]

Coincidentally, I left a fairly decent (duplicate) reading copy of The Condition Of Muzak in my French holiday home last week!

It was one of 4 books that I jettisoned as I thought my luggage might go over the weight limit (too many new hardback French BD books coming home with me!)

23 kg is a farcically low weight limit where a collector is concerned. I wasn't too far wrong; my case was 22.1 kg. Luckily they didn't weigh my hand luggage which was probably over the regulation 6kg.

It was already a very well-read home, full of Volatire, Moliere etc. Also a memoir of local life by the father of the guy who rented the house out.

[Doc]

It isn't quite the same, but I keep extra copies of Blood, Mother London, and King of the City in my office. I have students who have borrowed each of them repeatedly.

Incidentally, I also keep loaner copies of Gaiman's American Gods, Danielewski's House of Leaves, Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy, and Jonathan Carroll's Outside the Dog Museum there.

I'm not entirely sure why, but American Gods has been out the most; but I'm starting to really push King of the City. It points out the negative aspects of cultural/consumer homogenization much more elegantly than this ham-handed professor does. :lol:

[Michael Moorcock]

You'd be amazed how many copies of The Amazing Marriage by George Meredith I've distributed over the past 20 years or so. Probably my favourite less-well-known novel of the late 19th century. Quite a lot of Jack Trevor Story has been distributed similarly. As for my stuff, I've had stories of people who've found my books in some very strange places, including up the Amazon on a boat and in a sampan off Singapore. Suggesting I have a large proportion of the lonely and the mad amongst my readers...

[David Mosley]

I'm sure people have already heard of the site www.bookcrossing.com? None of Mike's books seem to have turned up in their database however so perhaps we could start some instead? Perhaps a sticker on the inside saying, "If you've read/enjoyed this book please let us know at www.multiverse.org", or something? :idea:

[Typhoid_Mary]

I've been thinking of liberating a few of the duplicates in my collection; perhaps offering them for free to other users of this forum that are having difficulty finding them. There may be a few caveats, provisos and quid pro quos, but nothing too heavy. Maybe we could make it a regular thing. Any thoughts?

[Michael Moorcock]

In that spirit, here's a thought:
Since not very good (but otherwise interesting for 'background') books like The Sundered Worlds are now generally OP I've begun to wonder about offering them free. Does anyone have any ideas and could we do it from this site or would we need to set something else up ?

[Michael Moorcock]

Ps
I can hear my agent screaming loudly in his sleep from wherever it is he's on vacation...
:D

[Talisant]

For a wider audience spread electronic offering, maybe Project Gutenberg? Or if done through the Multiverse portal here, maybe Project Rosenstrasse?

http://www.gutenberg.org

I quite liked the Sundered Worlds.

Cheers

[Michael Moorcock]

I'd rather do it through here. I know, by the way, that a lot of people enjoyed The Sundered Worlds, but it's not one of my best written books. I am seriously wondering about only reissuing the books I'm proudest of in future, along with the core fantasy series. For the shops, I mean. The others might be made available by some other means. We'll see. Much depends on agents and so on. Just an idea at the moment. I've had the Eternal Champion omnibuses running for some ten years or more and thought I'd try actually reducing the number of books in the shops for a bit. Maybe POD would be the way to go, to keep the books available to those who want copies, but I already have one book that's OP out there free (see RevolutionSF) and like the idea of having some of my earlier titles available free.

[Marca]

Thought I'd stick a link in here to revolutionsf.com[broken link]Breakfast In The Ruins on the RevolutionSF site for those interested. I didn't know it was there, although I'm sure it's been mentioned here before. Free distribution of certain books is an interesting idea, not sure how popular it would be with many writers though...

[Jules]

I've never downloaded a book (couldn't sit at a monitor that long and may as well buy than print out) but the SF author and fellow Argosy contributor Charles Stross has made his latest book available on-line http://www.accelerando.org/ . From his blog apparently this has given some strain to his web-server (with people downloading large amounts of text) so might be best to do it on a seperate machine from Multiverse itself. His request is for people to use BitTorrent is possible as this distributes the job across lots of machines, not just your own web server - and the more people download it the more machines are available to download from. Anyway it's probably not a bad example of how to do it (available in lots of formats) BUT he is a bit of a tech guru too.

His own website is :
http://www.antipope.org/

(Named by typing mistake rather than Anti-Catholicism).

I did enjoy his Singularity Sky - he manages to combine the hard SF space opera thing that has been prominent in British SF of late with satire and literary reference (The Good Soldier Svejk in this case). Some fantastic throwaway lines that made me laugh out loud.