CauseWired

Late last week, I got in bound galleys for a book I've been excited about all year: Tom Watson's CauseWired. I market a lot of books in a year, and all of them have something interesting about them -- though you'll probably run away from me if I get into the GAAP vs. IFRS debate, or the impact of the new IRS Form 990 -- but only a very few have much to say to a broader audience.

CauseWired doesn't just have something to say, it has a real, direct connection to what we're both doing right now, and what we're (all of us) doing more and more every day in the 21st century: connecting electronically about the things that matter to us. So this is a book I'm excited about, and want to see spread as widely as possible.

And that's why I want to give away as many of those bound galleys as possible, to bloggers and podcasters, to forum junkies and Facebook super-users, to LiveJournal mavens and MySpace eyeball-destroyers, to people who live in the wired world and who want to know what's going on there. If you want to read this book before it's published, and you have somewhere (preferably online) to talk to people about it afterwards, I'd like to send you a copy. Also, if you work at a bookstore and think your customers might want to know about CauseWired, you qualify as well.

(I've got a few hundred in total, but some of those have to go to the old-fashioned media, and a bunch have already been claimed by bloggers who saw the author's similar request yesterday. Let's say that there's at least a hundred for people who reply to this, and possibly more.)

Here's how I've been pitching it to the big blogs and online media:

CauseWired is the first book to examine how today’s online social networks are changing the charitable, political and consumer landscapes – making businesses and charities more transparent and responsive, making governments more accountable, raising money for and electing candidates, and connecting people to each other and to their causes more strongly than ever before. There have been many books on the techniques and effects of digital media, but none that mapped the explosion of the social web and its effect on the political and charitable worlds. From Barack Obama raising millions through small Internet donations to anti-globalization flash mobs to the vocabulary quiz of FreeRice.com, we now live in a world intensely wired, and utterly connected.

CauseWired is written by Tom Watson, who knows the philanthropic and wired worlds like no one else. He’s been inside Internet start-ups and reported on them, and has been Chief Strategy Officer for the leading philanthropic consultancy Changing Our World for eight years. He’s worked at the confluence of media technology and social change for the past decade, and there’s no one better than him to tell this story.

For more information on CauseWired and Tom Watson, you could check out the Amazon page for the book, or Tom's Author page on the CauseWired blog, or the most recent posts on that blog.

If you're interested, you can comment here, but the best thing to do is to e-mail me at work (where the galleys actually are) -- awheeler at wiley dot com. I'll be sending them out as long as they last.

Thanks for your time; I'll go back to ranting about science fiction really soon -- I promise. (Anybody do anything appalling over the weekend that I should be complaining about?)

Edit, two hours later: I should mention that I also have CauseWired as a PDF -- it's what we made the galleys from -- if there's anyone, for whatever reason, would prefer to have it in that form. (Particularly if you're outside North America, I guess.)