BNW Omnibus at DriveThruFiction Too

BNW-Omnibus-BookI wasn’t planning to sell the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Omnibus anywhere else but here on my site, but my pals over at DriveThruFiction.com asked so kindly I couldn’t refuse them. Honestly, they’re fantastic people, and I’ve known the people behind the site since before ebooks were even twinkles in their eyes, so when they started promoting the release for me even before I agreed to sell the omnibus through them, how could I refuse?

Sure, I could have, but that’s not how I roll. Sooo, you can now grab the omnibus through DriveThruFiction.com too if you like. They offer the exact same files as you’ll find here: copies in ePub, Kindle, and PDF formats, all free of DRM. None of the other retailers can offer that, which is why you won’t find this massive bargain on Amazon, BN.com, iBooks, and so on. Only in the places where it’s the best deal for you.

The New Newsletter

BNW-Omnibus-BookI just launched a newsletter to promote my next Kickstarter, mostly because I was smacking my best fans with four emails at a time every time I sent messages out through Kickstarter. You can read the whole thing online too.

It also talks a bit about the release of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Omnibus and the sale that’s going on for the BNW books right now. (Don’t miss out on that.)

I’ll post most of that information here on my blog as well, but if you’d like the full scoop delivered straight to your email inbox, don’t be shy. Subscribe to the newsletter to be the first to get all the details as they arise. Thanks!

(Cover) Credit Where It’s Due

My friend Joe W. Martin oversaw the principal photography of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World short that debuted at Gen Con a few years ago. It’s a great piece of work, and you can see it below.

Joe dropped me a note today to ask if he’d been credited for the photos on the covers of the books. I checked to see what I’d done in the rush of producing the books and realized that while I’d thanked the fine people at Reactor 88 Studios – who produced the short – over and over again, I hadn’t named Joe or any of the actors who appeared in the photos. I’m here to correct that.

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution and Omnibus

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revelation

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Resolution

Of course, none of the production would have been possible without the work of the countless people who make up the Reactor 88 Studios crew led by Darren Orange, Darrik Cupps, and Phil Norton. Huge thanks also goes to John Zinser and his team at AEG, who own the Brave New World roleplaying game on which the film and the novels are based.

A few fun notes about the photos:

  • Chuck Wagner’s mother made the mask for him, and it looks fantastic. 
  • Zack was posing as the character Charge here, but he was later cast to be Street instead.
  • The shot of Natalie actually comes from the last day of shooting the short and is the only one shot on location in downtown Chicago.

The BNW Sale Is On!

BNW-Omnibus-Standard-CoverI’ve been so focused on writing books lately I’ve let selling them slip. That’s changing today.

I just posted the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Omnibus in the ebooks store on this site. That includes all three ebooks in the trilogy, zipped up into one big file, at a fantastic price. Normally each ebook goes for $4.99 for a total of $14.97. Right now you can grab them for the low price of only $7.50.

That’s 588 pages worth of action-packed superhero fiction for less than the cost of a movie ticket, and I guarantee it’ll last you longer any film. This deal is available only here, on my site, for a limited time.

If you prefer to hold an actual book in your hands, there’s good news on that front too. I slashed the prices of the hardcopies for sale over at DriveThruFiction.com. The hardcovers were $20 and they’re now $15, while the softcovers were $15 and are now a bargain at only $10 each. Also, if you buy them there, I toss in copies of the ebooks for you for free.

The hardcopies will likely stay that way for a while, but I suspect I’ll wind up raising the price of the Omnibus sometime soon, to bring it back in line with the individual books. Grab it now while it’s hot!

12 for ’12: One Year Later

Checking back, I started writing the 12 for ’12 novels back on this day in 2012. As you might remember, this was my crazy plan to write a dozen 50,000-word novels over the course of 2012. I managed to fund four trilogies through Kickstarter drives, which was the biggest hurdle.

(Thanks, backers! I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to express how much that means to me. The best I can do is write great novels for you to read, and I’m working hard at that.)

So, how’d I do with that crazy plan?

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Leverage: The Con Job Is on Sale Now

ConJobCoverMy latest novel, The Con Job, hits shelves today – December 31, 2012 – all across the land. It’s the first novel based on the hit TV show Leverage, which sadly aired its final episode on Christmas night, ending a wonderful five-year run. Two others are slated for later in the year: The Zoo Job by Keith R. A. DeCandido and The Bestseller Job by Greg Cox. 

The Con Job is set at Comic-Con International, the annual pop-culture entertainment festival held in San Diego every July. I’ve gone to the show several times, and it’s the place where I first met one of the show’s creators, John Rogers, long before Leverage ever hit screens. It’s one of my favorite events of the year, and by the time you finish the book, I hope you’ll see why.

The set-up for the plot is that a crook is ripping off aging comic-book artists, then turning around and selling their art in an auction at Comic-Con, with much of the proceeds supposedly going to the Hero Initiative, a real-life organization that helps support ailing comic-book creators in need. The Leverage crew – a team of thieves who use their abilities to do good – discover that the money will be stolen instead, and they set a plan of their own in motion to recover the artwork and the cash and give the crook his due.

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Dangerous Games: How to Win is Done

DG-3DLast night, I wrote “THE END” on the final page of Dangerous Games: How to Win, the third and final book in the trilogy. I just created a PDF of the first draft and sent it out to all the backers at the $100+ level. If you’re one of those kind souls, be sure to check your email for that.

At the moment, I’m diving into the 10th of the 12 for ’12 books – the first Monster Academy novel – which still puts me behind the curve. As I announced on my blog earlier in the month, this means I’ve written 10 novels already this year – including Leverage: The Con Job, which hits stores on December 31st. I’m still shooting to have all of the 12 for ’12 books completed by the end of January, which will mean writing 13 novels in 13 months.

Wish me luck. Meanwhile, I hope you’re all having wonderful holidays. You played a big role in making 2012 a fantastic year for me, and I’m looking forward to 2013.

The Baker’s Dozen: Going for 13 in 13

As December rolls on, it’s clear I’m not going to be able to write a full dozen novels this year. There are a lot of reasons for that – including some cool things I can’t quite announce right now – but at the moment they mostly involve me wanting to be able to enjoy the upcoming holidays with my kids. I might be able to lock myself into a room for the last ten days of the year and get it done, but I have other responsibilities beyond just these books.

However, there is something I’m pretty sure I can manage, and that’s to write 13 novels in 13 months. That means finishing off all of the 12 for ’12 novels and the Leverage novel I wrote this spring in grand total of 13 months.

I’m trying to wrap my head around how that’s a downgrade from doing 12 novels in 12 months, and I can’t. It’s more like extending the streak, right?

So, that’s the new plan. A baker’s dozen of novels in a baker’s dozen of months, all winding up at the end of January 2013. Sound good?

Then it’s time to go make the donuts.

12 for ’12 Update

On Friday, just in time for the end of NaNoWriMo, I finished off Dangerous Games Book 2, tentatively titled How to Cheat. I’ve shipped off first-draft PDFs to my high-end backers, and I’m starting in on Book 3 today.

In November, for NaNoWriMo, I wrote over 102,000 words for Dangerous Games Book 1 and Book 2, plus the script for Magic: The Gathering: Path of Vengeance #4, my twelfth comic in that series. For December, I’m hoping to amp it up to about 150,000 words, which will include Dangerous Games Book 3 (How to Win) and the first two books of the Monster Academy trilogy.

That’s a hellaciously tall order, but if I can make it, I’ll have written a dozen novels in 2012, as planned. You might note that this still leaves me with a third Monster Academy book to write, which I plan to tackle in January.

This past summer, I replaced that one in my 2012 writing lineup with Leverage: The Con Job, a tie-in novel based on the Leverage TV show on TNT. That book was 80,000 words, much longer than the 50,000-word 12 for ’12 books. I also had to polish it and turn in a final draft. As a result of all that, it’s going to be in better bookstores everywhere at the end of this month. It took up a lot of my time, but I think it’ll prove to be worth it.

So, wish me luck on this final sprint to the end of this insane project. All I want for Christmas is another week. Barring that, I’ll take a metric ton of coffee!

The Next Big Thing Blog Tour

My friend Alex Bledsoe tapped me to be one of his minions join in the Next Big Thing blog tour. It’s kind of like a chain-mail letter – the things we used before emails and Facebook by people who don’t read Snopes.com – but instead of wasting postage it infects the blogs of authors around the net. Since it’s really just an excuse for each of us to tell people about our latest works, most writers don’t do much to avoid it – unless they’ve already had it recently.

The only cure for this infection, it seems, is to answer the questions and tag more folks. So, bear with me as I try to get this out/off of my system. For purposes of this self-interview, I’m going to talk about the Dangerous Games trilogy I’m writing at the moment.

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