Brave New World: Revolution On Sale!

I just uploaded the files for Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution – the first book in my 12 for ’12 series – to a number of ebook retailers. It should be available soon for the Kindle and the Nook, and I’ll post links for those formats as soon as they’re ready. In the meantime, you can order the ebook immediately through DriveThruFiction.com and directly through this website in my spanking-new ebook shop. Both of those offer the book in ePub, Kindle, and PDF formats at a single price without any DRM getting in your way.

I set up the shop today (using Jigoshop for WordPress, for those who care to know such things), and it seems to work well so far. If you have any issues with it, though, don’t hesitate to let me know.

The Next Kickstarter: Dangerous Games

I’m in the final stages of planning my next 12 for ’12 Kickstarter. It’s for a trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop games convention in the hemisphere. I call it Dangerous Games.

This combines two of my great loves – fiction and games – and just thinking about it gets me excited for it. I’ve been a professional game designer for over twenty years and a published novelist for eight. If the success of a book comes down to “Write what you know,” these books will be amazing.

I hope to launch the Kickstarter drive this week. I have a preview of the page up now. Head on over there to get a taste. 

The Next Kickstarter

I’m hoping to start my next Kickstarter for the third 12 for ’12 trilogy (a trio of thrillers set in the largest gaming convention in this hemisphere) sometime next week. This schedule is relentless, but I knew that going into it. Despite that, I’m having fun riding the wave so far.

I’m thinking about altering the structure of the Kickstarter a bit this time around. Rather than try to fund one book for $3,000 and set the others as stretch goals, I’m considering setting the goal as $10,000 for all three books. This comes with its own set of risks and benefits.

The reason I went with the original structure is that it’s great to be able to step forward and say, “Hey, we hit our goal right away! Here are some stretch goals to go even farther!” The trouble comes in the way I set up the reward structure to go with that. If you went in for a trilogy right away, you risked the stretch goals not being reached and then feeling like a fool for paying so much for one or two books rather than all three.

I never want a backer to feel like they made the wrong decision by choosing a higher level. Setting the whole trilogy as a goal means that no one has to worry about that. You know that if the drive succeeds, you’ll get all three books – and if it doesn’t, you’re not out a thing. That seems fairer, right? Of course, it means a higher risk of not getting funded at all, but if that happens, at least it’s a clean break.

That raises another question, though, which is whether or not I should restructure the reward levels to eliminate the single-book levels. I’m inclined to leave them in place, but I can see the allure of streamlining the structure down to just three or four regular levels, plus the premium ones.

I’m looking for feedback on this one. What do you think?

Gaming Hoopla Today

Marty and me at last fall's Gaming Hoopla.

Later today, I’m off to the Gaming Hoopla in Janesville, WI, just up the road from where I live. This is a great little convention that the folks here run twice a year, and the proceeds all go to Relay for Life, the big event for the American Cancer Society. So, you get to do something for a good cause and have a ball doing it.

I’ll be there with my son Marty this afternoon and maybe into the evening. (I’m still trying to catch up with my work after that horrible illness last month, so I may cut out at a reasonable hour to get back to my keyboard.) At 2 PM, I’m running a seminar on designing and publishing games. If you’re around, come on by, ask me questions, get things signed if you like, and play some games. Hope to see you there!

Back from the Bed

I really hoped I wouldn’t have to write this kind of note this year, but here we go.

I’m not going to get 12 for ’12 Book 4 (Shotguns & Sorcery Book 1) done by the end of the month, which is today. I had two kids down with a terrible cold this month. They’re good boys – even when sick – and are on the mend. Even so, taking care of them slowed down my writing a bit. It’s one of the hazards of working from home – and one of the great benefits too.

I still had high hopes to get the book done on time, right up until I came down with the same thing myself last week. I even wrote through the coughing, sore throat, and headaches for the first few days, but then last Friday the whole thing morphed into a sinus infection with a high fever that knocked me flat for three days. I’m back out of bed now, but not quite up to full speed.

So, does this torch 12 for ’12? Not at all. I’m still going to write 12 books this year. I just won’t finish one of them in April. I plan to wrap this book up by the end of the week, just a few days into May.

As a longtime professional writer, I know all too well how a little slip can cause a domino effect on a schedule. I’m determined to catch up as fast as I can to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

My apologies for this. Believe me, no one’s more disappointed than me. However, it shouldn’t affect the writing of the stories and the delivery of the books by much at all.

As always, though, I want to do my best to keep you in the loop. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll field them as best I can between chapters. Thanks!

Gen Con Industry Guests Announced

Last night, Gen Con announced this year’s slate of Industry Insider Guests of Honor. It includes an all-star list of talent:  Tavis Allison, Steve Kenson, Mark Rein-Hagen, Wolfgang Baur, T.S. Luikart, Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sampat, Stan!, Michelle Lyons, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Dennis Detwiller, Ryan Macklin, Christina Stiles, James Ernest, Dominic McDowall-Thomas, George Strayton, Jason Morningstar, Richard Thomas, Jess Hartley, Susan Morris, Rodney Thompson, Kenneth Hite, James Wyatt, and me.

That’s a fantastic lineup by anyone’s standards – and in this case Ken Hite, Stan!, and I helped out with setting those standards in our roles as members of the Industry Advisory Panel. While this is the largest slate of Guests of Honor ever for the show, we still had a hard time narrowing down the applicants. Any one of them would have been an excellent addition, and I hope those who didn’t make the slate this year submit their names next year as well.

This makes 2012 my tenth year running as a guest of honor at Gen Con. It’s always been my favorite time of year, and the honor tickles me every time. Come on down and join us in Indianapolis this August 16—19 if you can!

Global Domination

I built my career as a game designer before I became a novelist, and I still get back to it from time to time, although maybe not as often as I would like. I’m fortunate enough to have friends that tap me on the shoulder every now and then though and drag me back into gaming, even just for a bit.

Case in point: Dan Verssen asked me to write the flavor text for his upcoming deckbuilding game Global Domination. It’s set in a dark, war-torn future in which the players take the part of various factions struggling to take over the world. It’s good, meaty fun.

The game’s still in development at the moment, although Dan’s starting to rack up pre-orders in preparation for the first press run. You can see a rough draft of the rulebook (which features the fiction snippets I wrote) at Dan’s site. Be sure to check it out.

BNW Revolution Cover

I’m getting the print edition of Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution ready to go, so I thought you might like to see what the wrap-around cover looks like. This is, of course, the version that goes out to the backers of my Kickstarter drive for the book.

The regular edition will much like this, but without the Kickstarter logo – and unsigned too, of course. I’ll be publishing it as a print-on-demand book through DriveThruFiction, which offers great terms for hardcovers and softcovers alike. More details as we get closer to the release, but it’s only weeks away.

Carpathia’s Centennial

The Titanic went down in the North Atlantic 100 years ago yesterday, something I’ve thought about for a long while. As you know, my latest novel, Carpathia, is set on both the RMS Titanic and the RMS Carpathia itself (the ship that picked up the disaster’s survivors), and I’ve done a ton of research about the disaster, trying to figure out what it must have been like to have been aboard that ship in that time.

Despite the fact that the timing of Carpathia‘s release was set to coincide with the tragedy’s centennial, I didn’t much feel like pimping the book at the exact moment of that anniversary. The novel’s meant to be a fun, scary, thrilling tale set against the backdrop of one of the most dramatic moments in naval history, but at that point that moment seemed better set aside to remember the horrors those real people faced and to which many of them lost their lives.

Of course, now that the real-life RMS Carpathia is steaming back toward New York, go grab yourself a copy of the book. If you’re a Kindle reader, Amazon has the ebook on sale for only $3.03 for some unfathomable reason. I’m told it’s also on the front table in Barnes & Noble stores across the nation, and you should be able to find it at just about any reasonable book retailer.

(Speaking of which, I’d not thought to check this before now, but you can even pick up Carpathia through Target and Wal-Mart. How wild is that?)