With a Little Help is Doctorow's first serious experiment in self-publishing. He's published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with traditional publishers, with great success, but for "With a Little Help", he decided to try something new. Doctorow has always released his work under open licenses from the Creative Commons project, so that readers could share and remix the works. A good number of these readers wanted to know why he didn’t distribute the physical book as well, and see what a writer working on his own could do.

With a Little Help, consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for “Epoch,” which was commissioned by the Ubuntu project‘s Mark Shuttleworth for $10,000 (this being the most expensive option for buying the book).

Other formats, and materials about the experiment, including a financial report, are available from craphound.com.