David Louis Edelman Interview

It's always fun to touch base with people decades after you first met them; when I heard that David Louis Edelman had a book coming out, I was tickled because I'd known him back when he was a Hopkins undergrad, wandering the JHU campus in a hat. Since then he's been a programmer, a web designer and a journalist, and now the author of Infoquake, the first in an sf series, the Jump 225 Trilogy.

Watching Dave prepare for the launch of Infoquake has been interesting and informative; I've been taking notes for whenever I'm running a book campaign. Beyond a personal blog, he's laid out a lovely and well-organized site for the book with scads of extra information. I'm looking forward to reading the book.

Q: What is the impulse behind Infoquake - what themes are you trying to explore in it?

I wrote Infoquake to give readers a grunt's-eye view of life in the dot-coms. So even though the book is set hundreds of the years in the future, it's full of late-night meetings, fundraising pitches, that kind of thing. I didn't want any of the thriller cliches that you often see in business novels. I wanted to see if I could really write an exciting novel about marketing meetings and product launches.

After 9/11, the book morphed into something else altogether. I started thinking about the clash of cultures between East and West and whether capitalism is a workable system for humanity in the long term. The protagonist, Natch, changed from just a clever entrepreneur into a sort of sinister anti-hero, a mad capitalist run amuck. He became a symbol of Western power, with all the good and bad things that entails.

Q: You have one of the most thorough promotional websites around, including sample chapters, podcasts, supplemental material, two blogs, and an about the author statement. Is your site modeled after someone else's? How did you come up with it?

As you might know, I'm a web programmer and consultant in my day job. So it was simply a matter of using my strengths to promote the book. Everything you see on the site was written, designed, and programmed by me in ColdFusion.

I didn't consciously model my site on anyone else's, but I did a lot of research to see what things I should include. Brandon Sanderson and Tobias Buckell are two authors that have put a lot of great material online, and I've watched their websites carefully.

Q: What have the results of all your promotional diligence been for this book?

It's still too early to see the end result of my promotional efforts, because Infoquake has just been released. I can definitely say that the book has a higher profile than it would have had if I had done nothing, and the book is getting reviewed in places that might have otherwise passed it by. Whether that turns into more book sales and leads to me sipping tea with Mick Jagger on Sunset Boulevard remains to be seen.

Q: What publicity ideas did you not try with this book that you plan to use with the next one?

I toyed with an idea of a blog from the point of view of Jara, one of Infoquake's main characters. The blog would start out like an ordinary blog from some poor, harried cubicle worker, complete with all the mundane day-to-day stuff you see in those kinds of blogs. Only gradually would the reader figure out that the blog was fictional. I wrote half a dozen entries which I thought were pretty good, but eventually I ran out of steam and never ended up posting them.

Q: What's the well-dressed SF neo-pro wearing nowadays? Does your personal style fit your website? Any plans to coordinate the two?

You're asking a guy who's both a web programmer and a science fiction writer what kind of clothes he wears? You are brave.

For the most part, I'm just a jeans and button-down shirt kind of guy. I do like to wear hats. I've got a black fedora that I wear a lot, and it's turned into a nice little bit of marketing. People tend to remember who you are if you're always wearing a distinguishing piece of clothing.

Q: Is there any single promotional technique that you've used that you think is particularly successful? Or not successful, for that matter?

So far, I think the blog is the single most successful thing I've done. It's a lot of fun, and it's gotten my name in front of thousands of people that would have otherwise never heard of me. I've written a few blog entries that have been passed and linked around the Internet, which is a tremendous help in terms of name recognition. Someone walked up to me at ReaderCon this past weekend and said, "Hey! Twenty Ways That Science Fiction Is Like Mozilla Firefox!" You can't get that kind of attention just from a static website.

Q: How much time are you spending blogging? Are you enjoying the DeepGenre blog? Is blogging essential to establishing a name for a writer nowadays?

I'm trying to write two substantial posts to my personal blog and one substantial post for DeepGenre every week. I try not to fill the blogs with throwaway posts about what kind of burrito I had for dinner. I'd like to think that every post I write has some meat to it, something to argue about or think about or discuss. Of course, writing those posts takes time. Especially for me, considering that I'm a compulsive rewriter and reviser.

Q: Is blogging essential for new writers?

Yeah, I think so. People want so much more than a throwaway reading experience these days. They want to immerse themselves in the authors they like. They don't want to wait a year and a half between books without hearing anything from their favorite authors.

Q: How hard was it to create Infoquake CDs? What's on them and what have people said about them so far? What gave you the idea for that?

My editor Lou Anders gave me the idea, actually. The CDs contain a sizable excerpt from the book, an audio podcast read by the author, the complete appendices from the book, and a large JPEG of the Infoquake cover. Basically everything that's on the website.

Creating the CDs was actually pretty easy. You can buy CD labels at any office supply store, and from there it was just a matter of copying files and creating the Autorun table of contents page.

Q: What do people think of them?

Considering I only just started handing them out, I haven't really heard much reaction yet. I put stacks of them on the tables at ReaderCon and they got snatched up in an hour, so I guess that says something.

Q: What's the next project you're working on?

Right now, I'm trying desperately to finish book two of the Jump 225 Trilogy, after Infoquake. The book is called MultiReal, and I'm wading through all the typical middle-book issues. You need to give your readers something familiar but something groundbreaking at the same time, all without pandering to them. It's quite difficult, and I'm really ready to move on to the trilogy's grand conclusion already.

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