I Bookified My Blogerations!

[UPDATE: Personalized Hardbacks are now available for order. Click Here!]

Tuesdays are when new movies and new games get released, and besides this post is a long time coming, but I’m very proud to announce the release of my first book, A Microsoft Life.

The story of how the book came to be is an odd one. This year being my 15th as a Microsoft employee, I took some time to collect a ton of the Microsoft lore and stories that I have written about here on my blog, expand and rewrite them, then compile them into a rough narrative. Once the manuscript was complete I handed it over to a professional editor (the wonderful Joanne Starer) and my friend Mark Pedersen designed the cover:

Joanne made the text readable through a ton of effort, and I think Mark did an outstanding job with the cover, from the hand drawn pointillism portrait of me to the idea of having the monitors each contain an image from one of the stories in the book. I’m immensely proud of the stories in the book, because they are the types of stories that I would be interested in as a geek. Part Memoir, part history book, this project is designed to be a quick, humorous read that you can pick up and put down at any time. To be clear, it’s not a study of the company or some type of expose. But if you’ve ever wanted to know what the Redmond Reality Distortion Field is, why Microsoft buildings are designed to prevent you from attending meetings, or what a pig flu had to do with the Windows 98 product launch…well this is your book. It’s about a geek living an unlikely existence in one of the major technology companies in history.

I read the Windows 98 chapter from the book at w00tstock 2.9 in Austin and 2.10 in Dallas. I was super nervous at actually doing a live reading and announcing that I was going to have a book come out. I mean, at that point that makes shit real ya know? But judging from the number of people in the autograph line who said they were disappointed it wasn’t available yet for them to buy, I guess it got a good reception!

A Microsoft Life weighs in just shy of 50,000 words and is 169 pages. It is available right now from Lulu.com for $15.99 for paperback and $6.99 for a downloadable PDF. It will soon also be available at those same prices from Amazon.com, Kindle, iBook, etc. In addition, I am also working on a hardback version that will only be available from here at Stepto.com that will be signed and personalized for $24.99. I will update this post when that happens.

I’m not DRM’ing the PDF, the main reason I am supplying it via Kindle and iBooks, etc is mostly for convenience for people. As a Kindle app user on my iPad it’s a super easy way to get books. It’s also a severe hit in the return I get, so I figure the least I can do for adding DRM to the process is take a lower cut to make up for the inconvenience and not mark it up. Please note the PDF does *not* contain the front and back cover art, but the Kindle and iBook versions will. Oh, here’s the back cover art in readable size: