Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 26

Guest Post: Steven Saus on What Fates Impose

Steven Saus over at Alliteration Ink recently launched a Kickstarter for a new anthology of speculative fiction stories edited by Nayad A. Monroe. It features a fantastic lineup of storytellers, including Maurice Broaddus, Jennifer Brozek, Cat Rambo, Lucy A. Snyder, Tim Waggoner, and LaShawn M. Wanak, and it leads off with an introduction by Alasdair Stuart. 

These are all writers you should be reading. 

The anthology — What Fates Impose: Tales of Divination — is packed with stories about what happens when people can predict their future. Many of them go wrong, of course, in spectacular and entertaining ways. By way of a taste for the book, Steven sent me this guest post about his visions of the future. 

There are no freaking hovercars.

Okay, so hovercars would be a massive energy waster. And probably the cause of a gibizillion sagans worth of accidents. So let’s narrow our focus.

I don’t have a freaking hovercar.

Or a cybernetic arm, for that matter. My first Cyberpunk 2013 character — and my online handle for over a decade — was named Surgical Steel. “Master of the Twirling Knives,” no less. He was a medic. With a portable computer and modem. And a cybernetic arm.

Well. It’s freaking 2013, and I’m at an age that my teenage self simply couldn’t comprehend as being anything but stat-loweringly old. I don’t have the cybernetic arm, but somehow I ended up in medicine, and I currently have, stashed on my person, two pocket-sized computers, both far and away more powerful than anything anyone thought reasonable in that earlier age.

We’re also missing the huge corporate buyout of American society and culture — er, wait. No, we’ve got large chunks of that. Nevermind.

I remember trying to imagine what it would be like in 2013. How I would feel. What it would be like. My not-yet-able-to-drive self simply couldn’t imagine the experience of being just shy of my fortieth birthday.

But more than that, I couldn’t imagine the fundamental and transformative differences that happened in the last twenty to thirty years. And that’s the danger of fortunetelling.

You can provide nuggets of data. They might even be accurate. But without the context around those artifacts from the future, there’s no way to really realize how they transform society. We have the news-on-a-screen from 2001. In many ways, we have the tricorder from Star Trek.

But we didn’t see how Twitter could be a shaper of news. How Facebook could form and twist opinion. How that portable screen can be something other than a glowing bit of paper.

That’s the challenge thrown down to writers, and particularly to the writers in What Fates Impose, a collection of short stories edited by Nayad Monroe. We’re running a Kickstarter campaign to pay the authors. If there’s a hope of keeping the conglomerate corporate ownership of our culture at bay, independent projects like this one, funded through mechanisms like Kickstarter, are the way to go.

I’d like to ask two small things of you. Take a moment to check out our Kickstarter. The video features Alasdair Stuart (of Pseudopod) reading a portion of his introductory essay “Singing From the Book of Holy Jagger.” I love hearing Alasdair talk about stories and culture and life; I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.

Second, please help spread the word. We have a special page to make it a matter of three clicks. If you can’t back the Kickstarter financially, this is a quick and easy way you can still help out.

These are some amazing stories by award-winning authors, and they deserve your support. They’re showing us the way into the future.

And I can’t wait.

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The Bundle of Holding +3 Has Launched!

Late on Wednesday, Allen Varney launched the Bundle of Holding +3. You might recall that the first one ran back in February and that you got a copy of Hard Times in Dragon City if you paid more than the average for it. The sequel — Bundle of Holding +2 — ran last month and featured a number of excellent indie roleplaying games.

This time around, the Bundle of Holding returns to its roots, featuring fiction from veterans of the tabletop gaming industry. Pay as little as $1, and you get ebook editions of:

Oathbreaker: The Knight’s Tale and Oathbreaker: The Magus’s Tale by Colin McComb
Switchflipped by Greg Stolze
The Afterlife Series (five short novels) by Mur Lafferty
A Prayer for Dead Kings and Other Tales by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Pay the current average or more, and you get a number of bonus ebooks too.

Delta Green: Strange Authorities by John Scott Tynes
New Tales of the Yellow Sign by Robin D. Laws
Dangerous Games: How to Play by Matt Forbeck (um, me)

That’s a lot of reading for not much cash, and better yet, a portion of the proceeds goes to charity. This time around that bit of the bundle goes to two organizations that promote freedom of speech: PEN International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Ironic bit of trivia: Allen Varney — the man behind the Bundle of Holding — is also a murder victim in Dangerous Games: How to Play. He not only agreed to have his fictional self get killed but then helped revise those bits to make sure I did it right. Here’s what he has to say about the book:

“In How to Play, Matt Forbeck writes a blood-soaked love letter to Gen Con and the roleplaying hobby. If you enjoy seeing famous game designers brutally slaughtered (and who doesn’t?), Dangerous Games is your victory condition.”

— Allen Varney, with the Lead Pipe in the Dealer’s Room

This is a fantastic lineup of books from a team of authors I’m honored to call friends. If you’ve been thinking of picking up Dangerous Games: How to Play, this is a great chance to do that and top it off with a stack of fantastic tales from other folks too.

There are less than 10 days left on this deal, so don’t delay. Get in on it soon, grab some great books, and give a little bit to some fantastic causes too.

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The Dangerous Games Gen Con Writer’s Symposium Contest Results

That’s one long title.

Earlier this week, I launched a contest to give away a couple of Gen Con badges that the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium slipped my way with a wink and a nod and a “You know what to do.” I didn’t, really, so I did what I always do when confronted with such riddles: I made something up on the fly. Entrants had to post who they wanted to see at the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium either on Twitter or on that original blog post, and away we went.

In total, we had 57 entries into the contest. Some people mentioned multiple authors, and I went along with that in the enthusiastic spirit of fun I’m sure they were intended. Each person only got one entry into the contest though, no matter how many writers they name-checked.

The winner of the two badges for Gen Con and two ebook copies of Dangerous Games: How to Play is Kimberly Burke! She said she wanted to meet Maurice Broaddus at the show, and hopefully now she can make that happen.



On top of that, the five runners-up, each of whom wins a copy of Dangerous Games: How to Play are:

Lyndsay Peters
Patrick Stutzman
Eric Bell
Meagen Voss
Stephanie King

If you’re one of the winners and you haven’t heard from me yet, drop me a note at matt@forbeck.com, and I’ll get you set up.

As for the authors, the tight race for most mentions stayed clustered to the end. The final results are:

Gen Con Writers Mentioned During Contest | Create infographics

You’ll note that I had the most mentions, but since it’s my contest, that’s hardly fair. Pat Rothfuss topped the non-Matt votes with 12 — narrowly beating out Mike Stackpole — so I’ll be sure to give him a cameo appearance in Dangerous Games: How to Win, the third and final book in the trilogy. Since I’m polishing it up for release right now, that’s handy timing.

Special thanks to Marc Tassin (who runs the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium and approached me with the badges) and to Gen Con (for the badges!). Congrats to all the winners, and thanks to everyone who joined in for the fun! I hope to see you at Gen Con!

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Sales on eBay

Now that summer’s here, my eldest son Marty is back to posting things on eBay for me once again. It’s hard to keep track of the steam of things he puts up there for auction, but they’re mostly games and books we don’t need around here anymore. This includes some author’s copies of things I worked on, like  (of which I wrote a chapter), , and a whole slew of  stuff.

If you win the auction for one of the items I helped create and would like them autographed or personalized, just let me know. I’d be happy to scribble something on them for you before Marty ships them out.

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The Dangerous Games Gen Con Contest Update

So far, we’ve had a lot of great entries for the The Dangerous Games Gen Con Writer’s Symposium Contest. Once again, to join, all you have to do is write on Twitter something like: “I want to go to Gen Con and meet . #GenConWriters http://wp.me/ph1fv-1hT”

Your entry needs to include the following bits:

#GenConWriters
The name (or Twitter handle) of a writer who is part of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium.
A link to the original post. Use your own, if you like, or the one provided above.

Alternatively, you can leave a comment on that original post. The grand prize is a pair of badges to Gen Con, plus that winner and the next five runners-up get copies of Dangerous Games: How to Play. 

At the moment (10 AM Central Time on June 13), we have 73 entries, and they mention the following authors:

Gen Con Authors Mentioned | Infographics

Note that superhuman fantasist Patrick Rothfuss is way in the lead, tied only by me. I have an unfair advantage there, of course, as I’m running the contest on my site, and I’ll let you in on a not-so-secret: I’m already in the Dangerous Games books. Mike Stackpole and Mercedes Lackey are close on Pat’s heels though, and it wouldn’t take much to swing the numbers their way. At the moment, though, it looks like Pat’s going to make an appearance in Dangerous Games: How to Win.

Which reminds me: I need to get back to polishing that book!

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The Dangerous Games Gen Con Writer’s Symposium Contest

The fine folks in charge of my favorite event of the year (Gen Con) have given me two badges to the show to give away in support of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium. Since Gen Con is the greatest gaming convention in the world, I decided to run a little contest to see who gets them both — one for you and one for a friend. Here’s how this works.

The contest runs on Twitter from now until noon Central Time on Friday, June 14. To join, all you have to do is write on Twitter something like: “I want to go to Gen Con and meet . #GenConWriters http://wp.me/ph1fv-1hT”

To be clear, your entry needs to include the following bits:

#GenConWriters
The name (or Twitter handle) of a writer who is part of the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium.
A link to this post. Use your own, if you like, or the one provided above.

For your convenience, the Gen Con Writer’s Symposium website has a full list of the writers who will be helping out with the seminars this year. You can name anyone on that list that you like. I’m taking part in the symposium, but you get no extra points for naming me.

At the end of the contest, I’ll randomly select a qualifying entry to win — probably by rolling a lot of dice — and I’ll announce the winner here on my site. The grand prize is a pair of 4-day badges for Gen Con. Marc Tassin, who does a fantastic job running the Writer’s Symposium, will mail the badges out to the winner. If that’s you, I’ll need your mailing address at that point.

The badges do not come with hotel, travel, event tickets, and so on. That’s all up to you to cover on your own. The badges are $70 each right now or $80 each after June 29, so it’s a nice prize as-is. To top it off, I’ll toss in free copies of Dangerous Games: How to Play ebooks for both you and your friend.

I’ll also randomly select another five runners-up, and I’ll give each of them an ebook copy of Dangerous Games: How to Play too.

In addition to that, I’ll keep a rough tally of the number of people who request each writer. I’m in the middle of revising Dangerous Games: How to Win — the third book in the series — right now, and I’ll give the writer with the most mentions a cameo in the book.

Spread the word, and have some fun with your entry if you like. Embellish all you want. Tell me what you want to learn from that writer, what you’d say to him or her, or even what game you’d play together. All that’s not necessary, of course, but it’s better, as in “more fun.”

Now, I realize some people don’t truck with Twitter. If you’re one of them, you can enter the contest by leaving a comment on this post instead. You don’t have to bother with a link or the #GenConWriters hashtag here, but make sure you include a writer’s name either way.

Thanks for taking part, and good luck!

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Kickstarter: Figuring Your Costs

One of the first things you need to do if you’re running a Kickstarter is figure out what you want to produce and how much it’s going to cost. For my 12 for ’12 Kickstarters, this turned out to be pretty simple. The things you need to think about include:

Production of the files for both the ebook edition and print edition.
Editing
Cover
ISBNs
Shipping (Mailers and Labels)
Printing

There’s one huge thing I’m skipping over there, but I’ll get to it in a moment. First, let me tackle these things in order.

Production

I spent four years as the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, which was a a top-five tabletop RPG company at the time, and I trained the entire production department. Roleplaying game books are far more complicated to produce than a novel, so I felt confident I could handle most of the production of the books myself. I could have hired it out to someone, but I’m picky about my work — and I like to fiddle with things — so I decided to take care of it myself.

I didn’t know much about producing ebooks, but the basic principles are the same as they are for printed books. My friend Steven Saus was kind enough to give me a copy of his So You Want to Make an Ebook?, which served as an excellent primer. Then I figured out how to manage an even smoother workflow using my writing program of choice, Scrivener. I’ll get into that more in a later post.

My costs here are effectively zero, although that doesn’t account for the years of training and experience that allowed me to get away with that. For most people this will run roughly $250–$500 per book, although that can vary a lot. You can ask around for recommendations for good people, or you can try your luck with a new service-matching site like Writer.ly.

Editing

I also spent years as a freelance editor before I co-founded Pinnacle with my pal Shane Hensley. Again, I could have hired someone else to edit my books — and in a perfect world, I probably would have — but I opted to tackle it myself. I shanghaied a few friends and family members into helping me out with the proofreading, including my wife.

Again, my costs here are zero, but I recommend that most people hire an editor. For that, you can expect to pay anywhere from 1¢ per word on up. There are lots of great editors out there who are hungry for work.

Cover

There are two costs for a cover, actually: artwork and design. I’ve won awards for graphic design, so I felt comfortable polishing up my rusty Photoshop skills to handle that. I decided to go with iconic imagery and design because I want customers to be able to understand the cover at a glance when it’s only an inch or two tall on a screen. That also kept the design requirements closer to my skill level.

For the covers, I’ve used stock art — sometimes heavily modified — from sites like iStockPhoto and GraphicRiver, spending up to $50 a crack. If you do this, make sure that you pay for the proper rights for the art. The basic agreement usually only lets you use the imagery on a single website. If you want to do more — like use it on the cover of a book — you need to pay more too. 

My pal Jim Pinto helped me out with the logo for the 12 for ’12 challenge and with the Shotguns & Sorcery logo too. Because we’re old friends, he offered to do it for free, and I insisted on repaying his kindness with autographed hardcover omnibuses of the books his work graces. If you need to, you should hire Jim or someone with similar skills — like Aaron Acevedo, who created the Crescent City maps for my BNW novels.

You can hire a top-level artist for a brand-new book cover too. A great cover is maybe the best marketing tool you can have. Rates can range from $100–$5,000, depending on the artist’s quality and the demands on his or her time. If you go this way, though, don’t forget to hire an excellent graphic designer too, so you can get the most out of that wonderful cover you commissioned.

ISBNs

If you want to sell your book in a bookstore or through electronic stores like iBooks and Kobo, you need to purchase an ISBN, a unique number that identifies the book for the electronic sales systems. In the US, a single ISBN costs $125, 10 cost $250, 100 cost $575, and 1000 cost $1000. I knew I’d need more than 10, but I didn’t want to spend $575 on them, so I skipped this.

It turns out that Amazon — which sells more ebooks than all the other markets combined — doesn’t require ISBNs, nor does Barnes & Noble. To get my books into the other stores, I turned to Smashwords, which offers a free ISBN if you sell through their store too. They take a small cut too, but it takes a while for that to add up.

So my costs here are zero too.

Shipping

This is where it starts to get tricky. Your best bet is to figure out what the flat rates are for shipping something of the size of your book and assume that this is your worst-case cost for actual shipping. A padded flat-rate envelope from the USPS is $5.70 to send to what fits inside it to anywhere in the US, and it comes with a free envelope you can order from the Post Office.

The same envelope sent to China costs $23.95. That’s a huge jump, and it’s why you often see reward levels on Kickstarter say things like, “Add $20 for shipping outside of the USA.”

Depending on what you’re shipping, you can often get away with spending less than that. It may not be much, but over the course of hundreds of shipments, it can add up. I usually buy mailers and adhesive labels for my laser printer on eBay. Lots of the people selling things there need these kinds of supplies, and the companies selling those supplies compete hard on the prices for their business. A good padded envelope and a label should cost about 30¢ per book.

The USPS site doesn’t allow you to send Media Mail — a special type of mail service meant for shipping books in the US cheap — through its website. However, you can do this through PayPal. It’s $2.53 for anything up to a pound, and $2.98 for up to two pounds. They even toss on delivery confirmation for just 20¢ more, to help you make sure the packages actually arrive.

Printing

Printing can be the largest external cost to any novel project. If you’re printing less than a few hundred books at a time, you’re probably best off going with a print-on-demand (POD) service. In any case, using POD is a great way to figure your costs, as that gives you your worst-case scenario. You’d only switch over to a traditional printer if it brought the costs down.

I print my books through DriveThruFiction, which uses Lightning Source as its provider. The price for your book varies depending on the size of the book, the number of pages, and whether or not you have color pages inside it. DTF posts its prices openly, so you can compare them with others as you like. There may be other cheaper sources out there, but not by much, and there’s a kicker. If you sell your books through DriveThruFiction after the Kickstarter, they waive all setup fees. With most other POD services, those can stack up fast. Most charge something like $200 to set up a hardcover, for instance, but at DTF that doesn’t cost a dime.

I print my books at 6.14 x 9.21 inches. That’s the smallest trim (page) size available that matches for both hardcovers and paperbacks, which means I can use the same files for the interiors of both types of books rather than have to create separate ones for each. I just need to generate different files for the covers because the hardcover’s trim is a wee bit larger than the softcover, of course. Either way, the books run roughly 198 pages each.

The Big One: Writing

The largest cost for any novel, of course, goes to the writing. Some authors ignore their own time when they total up their costs. They don’t feel it’s right to account for their own time when setting their Kickstarter’s goal.

That’s their right. But they’re wrong.

Okay, they’re wrong from my point of view. This isn’t a hobby for me. I write full-time for a living. If I don’t make enough to cover my time when I’m writing, I can’t afford to write the book, and I need to write other things instead.

Literally, if I don’t make enough on the Kickstarter, I won’t write the book. I prefer that my kids eat.

How much your time is worth, though, is entirely up to you. Some may not be willing to turn on their computers for less than $30,000. Others might be thrilled with enough backing to pay for a snazzy cover.

Either way and everything in between is fine, as long as it fits your needs and your dreams. Good luck!

Bonus Section!

Bart Lieb reminded me that I should have mentioned one other cost: the percentage that Kickstarter takes before it passes the rest along to you. In my head, this falls more under “financing details” than “costs,” but either way, you need to account for it.

Kickstarter takes a flat 5% of the funding for any successful project run on its site. If you take in money on the side through some other method — like a PayPal button on your site, for instance — they don’t take any of that, but then it doesn’t count toward reaching your goal on the Kickstarter site either.

Kickstarter collects its funds through Amazon Payments. That makes it easy for anyone with an Amazon account to back a project, but it’s a challenge for those who can’t set one up, which is why some creators set up side deals on their own sites to accept PayPal or other means of payment. Amazon takes the fairly standard 3–5% to process those payments. The exact number depends on the amount of the various pledges, which makes it hard to pin down until the end. To be safe, figure on Amazon taking 5%, and you get to enjoy a happy surprise if they don’t do that every time.

In short, expect Kickstarter and Amazon to take 10% off the top of your successful project’s fund. You can figure that into your costs and should set your goal at least that much higher to compensate.

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Happy Birthday to My Quadruplets!

Eleven years ago today, my wife Ann gave birth to four of the most wonderful people in my life: Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen Forbeck. The quadruplets were born within two minutes of each other, eleven weeks premature. They weighed between 2.75 and 1.5 pounds.

Ann spent sixteen weeks on full or partial bedrest at home and another ten in the hospital, drugged up past her eyeballs on muscle relaxants meant to keep those kids in her as long as they could manage. She’s my hero in so many ways, but that’s the most amazing and dedicated act I’ve ever seen anyone perform. And she did all that and much more for those kids.

Those beautiful babies spent eight to eleven weeks in the hospital before they could come home. We had a platoon of doctors and nurses taking care of them down at Rockford Memorial, and we came home to an army of volunteers, including my mother, who moved back from DC and lived in our unfinished basement for six months.

During that first year, I sent out weekly email updates to our family and friends, complete with stories and pictures about the kids. At one point, I thought I’d make a book about it, and I prepared a pitch package for it, complete with a couple sample chapters. I never got far with it, perhaps because many other things demanded my attention in those days.

However, lots of people ask me about my kids and what their birth was like. On this, their eleventh birthday, I’d like to share that with you. I’ve taken the pages from that forgotten book pitch and trimmed them down into an 11-page PDF packed with dozens of photos from the most amazing day in my life. It’s free for you to enjoy. 

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Dangerous Games: How to Play Books on Sale

The print edition of Dangerous Games: How to Play — the first in my trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in America — just went on sale to the public for the first time ever. It’s available in both hardcover ($15) and softcover ($10) through DriveThruFiction.com.

One of the great things about selling the printed book through DriveThruFiction is that I can toss in the ebook version of the book for free. You can get it in the binding you like and grab it in three different ebook formats too. Read it however you damn well please!

In a happy coincidence, Abhinav Jain of the Founding Fields reviewed the book yesterday. He said many kind things about it, including:

How To Play is definitely one of the geekiest books I’ve ever read and it is certainly among my most favourite novels of all time, alongside a number of other Matt Forbeck novels. With this one, he has once again proven his incredible consistency in writing good fiction that is fun, adventurous and everything in between.

With a Matt Forbeck novel, there’s never a dull moment.

Rating: 9/10

Make sure to order your copy soon, and if you’re lucky enough to make it to Gen Con too, be sure to track me down and make me sign it!

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Dangerous Games: How to Play in Print on Tuesday!

If you like your books on paper, here’s something good for you. I have the print proofs for Dangerous Games: How to Play in hand, as you can see in the photo above. I’ll make them available for sale on Tuesday, June 4, 2013, over at DriveThruFiction.com.

The paperbacks will be $10, and the hardcovers will be $15. Both come bundled with the ebook edition in ePub, Kindle, and PDF formats, which are regularly $4.99 alone.

If you just want the ebook version, of course, you can grab it right now. The weekend’s coming, after all, and you deserve a good read.

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