We’ve asked each of our first five rights holders to help us write a blog post introducing themselves to you — giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into themselves and their work. But Unglue.it staffer Andromeda was having entirely too much fun learning about Joseph Nassise, so she wrote this up herself.

You guys!  Zombies.

So when I was getting to know Joe Nassise and trying to think of how to explain to you, the internet, what he’s about, I read about the new series of books he’s just launched and here’s the deal: they’re alternate history steampunk zombies.

Now if that isn’t enough, I don’t know what is. But if you just can’t get enough alternate history steampunk zombies, you can read more in Joe’s own words — he was featured on John Scalzi’s Big Idea just last week. You can even get a quick taste of his work for only $1.99, via this short story prequel. (Which features an utterly perfect cameo in the last scene, and no, I’m not telling who.)

Now this series just launched last week, so we’re not ungluing it (yet?). Joe has a long and distinguished career, including two stints as president of the Horror Writers Association and nominations for the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. His work incorporates horror, sci-fi, suspense, urban fantasy — oh, and while we’re at it, graphic novels and action-adventure archaeology. We’ll be ungluing his debut novel, Riverwatch. Read more about it — and hear an audio excerpt! — at its campaign page at Unglue.it.

(Zombies! You guys!)

Joe is not a zombie.

We’ve asked each of our first five rights holders to help us write a blog post introducing themselves to you — giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into themselves and their work. Here’s what independent, open-access scholarly publisher Open Book had to say.

New cover art for Finnegan’s classic work, Oral Literature in Africa.

Open Book Publishers was founded in 2008 by Cambridge academics Alessandra Tosi and Rupert Gatti. The idea stemmed from Alessandra’s first hand experience of the difficulties of getting her book on a specialist area of Russian literature even considered by university presses; when it was eventually published, it had a tiny print run with an exorbitant retail price – very few people (and virtually no-one in Russia) could read the research she had worked so hard to produce. She realised that many of her colleagues were having a similar experience. There had to be a way to make academic books available to all readers.

The pair saw that many of the university presses were weighed down by tradition and basking in long-standing privileges – and that these expensive, labour-intensive publishing models were no longer necessary in the digital age. Alessandra and Rupert took the opportunity to create a new publishing house that used modern technology to reduce costs at the same time as harnessing research funding and other sources (like Unglue.it!) to make valuable research freely available to readers everywhere, regardless of their income.

Open Book Publishers has now published over twenty books across the Humanities and Social Sciences by authors including Lionel Gossman (Princeton), Maria Manuel Lisboa (Cambridge) and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (Harvard). All are available to read for free online, in their entirely.

Since Open Book Publishers’ beginnings, people are increasingly realising the importance of making publicly-funded research freely available – we are in the midst of what the newspapers are calling an “academic spring”. We are proud to have been one of the earliest adopters of an Open Access model and to show that this model is indeed sustainable.

Despite the recent commitment by many academics and universities to switch to Open Access, funding models are slow to change. We envisage a time when all grant-giving bodies factor in a book’s dissemination into its costs but, for the moment, we often have to get our funding elsewhere.

We are very excited to be working with Unglue.it, especially with such an important classic. We have already published Ruth Finnegan’s latest book, Why Do We Quote?: The Culture and History of Quotation, and were delighted when she proposed to re-issue and unglue her masterpiece Oral Literature in Africa (see its campaign on Unglue.it here). This is an example of a book with a prohibitively high original retail price that, now that it’s out of print, is only available in well-endowed university libraries. It is a tragedy that this seminal study has been largely unavailable in Africa. We hope that ungluers realise the impact that Open Access can have, particularly in developing countries where, at last, students and researchers are beginning to have access to the same knowledge as the West.

We’ve asked each of our first five rights holders to help us write a blog post introducing themselves to you — giving you a behind-the-scenes glimpse into themselves and their work.  Here’s what Nancy Rawles had to say about herself and her novel.

Love Like Gumbo is a coming-of-age story that explores what happens when the needs of an individual clash with the needs of the group. It’s what makes coming out to family such risky business, even in an age when the President supports gay marriage. Being gay (almost always) makes us different from our families in the most personal of ways. Families that are already marginalized due to color or class or religion may feel especially threatened by such a fundamental difference. That’s the case for Grace Broussard, the young lesbian at the center of Love Like Gumbo. Her struggle with forbidden love is certainly not limited to gay people.

I started writing Love Like Gumbo in Japan. I went to Japan (where the group is so important) to understand the United States and our emphasis on the individual. I thought the ideals of individuality and independence were getting in the way of my relationships. I wanted to know what it’s like to live in a place where you always have to consider everyone else. It was good for me to be in a place where nobody worried about being “co-dependent.”

When I nervously came out to my best friend in Sendai, she welcomed the news. It was a chance to divulge a secret of her own. When I grew weary of the taunts from the man who worked besides me, I told him why I wasn’t interested. Much to my surprise, his response was “Wow, the girls must be crazy about you.” Sometimes, there’s acceptance where you least expect it. Other times, there’s unbending rejection from people you count on. I try to remember that it took me a long time to accept my sexuality; I don’t expect acceptance to be automatic. If you had told me when I was young that society would change so much in my lifetime, I never would have believed it.

Read more at the campaign to unglue Love Like Gumbo.

Gumbo from Nancy’s family recipe. Yum!