Good news: My friend Julian has a new novel out, Jude in London. Here’s the first review, from the Guardian.
Gooder news: You can read it for free. If you like it, you can pay what you think it’s worth afterwards.
Julian and his publisher needed to get copies out ahead of its scheduled publication date of September 6 for the book to qualify for the Guardian’s “Not The Booker” alternative literary prize, so they sent out PDFs on the honour system. The response was so good that they decided to extend the offer, at least until it comes out officially. This “books on trust” idea could revolutionise the publishing industry more than the eBook and iPad combined. Probably not of course, but it could.
If you need to read a bit of a novel before you decide if it’s even worth downloading for free, I can recommend the excerpt The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble, which was published by the Financial Times as a short story and later converted into a radio play by BBC4 (Listen here). It’s brilliant satire of the market-driven idiocy that got us where we are today – most of it written long before the crash actually happened.
Related articles
- Not the Booker prize 2011: the shortlist (guardian.co.uk)
- The Digitalization of the Book: a new marketing strategy for the Publishing Industry. (globalebooks.wordpress.com)
One reply on “A Brilliant Satire Of Market-Driven Idiocy”
[…] I’ve previously mentioned The Great Hargeisa Goat Bubble by my multi-talented friend Julian Gough, how it was a chapter of the novel Jude In London, the first short story ever published in the Financial Times, and a BBC radio play. […]