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The newsletter has landed.

It’s been a long week. This newsletter is actually two long weeks because I forgot to hit the publish button last week. 😬😳

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Hey, y'all. I did a tutorial on a relatively easy and cheap process for making armor with a tree/wood texture, in case anyone's keen to do a green knight costume or something elfy/woodsy fantasy or medieval groot or a suit of cottagecore armor anything in that vein. Hope it's helpful!

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It’s been a long time since I last sent out a newsletter. Figured I’d send one so my readers would know I am still alive and haven’t abandoned the project.

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A beautiful conversation with Henry Rollins about his late friend Ozzy Osbourne.

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Ozzy Osbourne passed away on this morning. I’m not sure why that hit me so hard. It occurred to me later in the day that the his concert with Rob Zombie for the Black Rain tour was the best concerts I’ve ever I’ve ever been to. I was seven rows away from the stage. Rob Zombie came out to our row, stood on someone’s chair and expressed disappointment that there weren’t more people dressed up for Halloween or being impressed with his stage decorations. Then Ozzy hit the stage and was running all over the place while singing his heart out. I couldn’t believe how great of shape he was in. My friends and I were winded halfway through, just from singing along and cheering. Meanwhile, this guy is bouncing around all over the stage. I left that concert incredibly happy before going to an incredibly sad party after. So, I looked up the set list and have been enjoying that. The only thing that bothered me about the concert was that it was called Black Rain, but he didn’t perform the song once throughout the show.

Still, it was the best concert I ever attended, and until now, I don’t think I realized how big an impact Ozzy’s music had on my life from high school through college.

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Fantastic Four’s Ride Is Cooler Than Ever.

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Not the crossover I was expecting, but I’m here for it!

Fantastic Four / Gargoyles 1 (2025) by Taurin Clarke

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Hello Mr.Dorkin

What's the cons and pros of being a comic book writer and an artist?

Speaking for myself:

The cons are no health insurance, no guaranteed income, long hours and often bad pay, late payments, people thinking you don't work for a living, toxic fans crapping on you, arm pain/carpal tunnel, being alone a lot in a room most of your life because of work, working almost every day without vacations, working months on a project and no one cares when it comes out, being in a backwards industry that's on the whole pretty shitty to creators.

The pros are enjoying the work (usually), travel (at least back when people wanted me at cons/shops), getting up whenever I want (unless I'm late on a gig), not having to go into an office/deal with people (beyond editors/producers), sometimes working in bed in my pajamas (notes, writing), drawing in front of a shitty horror movie, getting to know other creators, meeting creators I'm a fan of, working with creators/characters I like, sometimes getting free stuff, having the comic or book in your hands after all that work, hearing from readers, having merch made based on your work, getting a failed pilot to work on. Sometimes you make decent money if things work out right.

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I never read Youngblood, but that is a pretty nice cover! 🤩

Youngblood 1 (2025) by Joe Casey & Rob Liefeld

Cover: E M Gist (variant)

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25 posts! Every. Single. Milestone.

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Way to go Europe!

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I have achieved the number I wanted!

I can quit social media now!

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Still Trying To Get By

Hated to do it, but we started a GoFundMe. These are chaotic times, and no mistake, and all of a sudden we realized they were chaosing all over us. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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100 likeable likes!

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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!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/07/audible-exclusive/#audiblegate

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):

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

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:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-auf-deutsche-drm-freie

And please, tell your German-speaking friends!

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/2025/07/21/martin-mensch/#horbuch

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Dr. Pulaski was the real villain all along!