Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 31

BNW Omnibus at DriveThruFiction Too

I 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

I 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

Cover Photo:
Cover Model:
Cover Design: and Matt Forbeck

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revelation

Cover Photo:
Cover Model:
Cover Design:  and Matt Forbeck

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Resolution

Cover Photo:
Cover Model: 
Cover Design:  and Matt Forbeck

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!

I’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?

In the strictest sense, I failed. As of December 31, 2012, I managed to write ten novels, nine of which were part of the 12 for ’12 project. The extra one was Leverage: The Con Job, which hit stores at the very end of the year.

The Leverage book clocked in at 80,000 words, so that wound up taking a bit more time than the regular 12 for ’12 books. On top of those, I wrote nine comic book scripts for the Magic: The Gathering comics I write for IDW. (Paths of Vengeance #2 is on sale today, by the way.) I also:

Wrote an unannounced tie-in novelette (10k words)
Finished off a massive story bible for an unannounced game (30k words)
Wrote a short story for the Don’t Rest Your Head anthology Don’t Read This Book (3k words).
Wrote an even shorter story for The Lion and the Aardvark anthology (600 words)
Wrote pitches and samples for books for which I’m waiting on imminent offers.

All told, that’s well over half a million words of fiction, plus the comic books. Beyond that, I produced and shipped the first four books in the 12 for ’12 series. As you might imagine, there was a bit of a learning curve there.

While I’ve published many books before, that was all in the days before ebooks, so that was a bit of a new world for me. A lot of the skills from the old ways carry over to the new, but I put a lot of trial and error time into getting things exactly right.

If anything, this is where the 12 for ’12 plan fell down. I didn’t estimate the time that book revisions and productions would take very well, and that ate into my writing time. Between that and conventions and spending time with my kids while they were out of school, I didn’t write any books in the middle of the summer, which put me way behind come fall.

Still, I made a game attempt to catch up, ending the year on a strong note. I stopped producing the books so I could write them, which allowed me to write two books in November and (with luck) two this month too. To make that up to my backers, I’ve been sending them PDFs of my first drafts, something that would normally be reserved for those who backed my Kickstarter drives at higher levels.

So far, everyone’s been wonderfully understanding, despite the delays, and I’m grateful for that, as I want to make sure that the final books are as good as they can be. As my friend Mike Selinker says, “It’s late once, but it’s bad forever.”

It’s wild to say I wrote that much in a year and strictly speaking failed to hit my goals, as insane as they might have been. Still, there’s a less strict way to look at this, as I mentioned last month when I announced I was going for 13 books in 13 months instead. At the moment, I have 11 of those books written. Given that I started the project on January 16, 2012, that would (in a generous person’s mind) give me until February 16 to meet that challenge.

That’s still doable. I finished the first Monster Academy book on Friday, and I have outlines in hand for Books 2 and 3. So, I’m putting my nose back to the keyboard once more. Wish me luck. 

P.S. Oh, yeah, the one time sink I really forgot to think about: running a Kickstarter. This takes a tremendous amount of time to do well and sucked up every available brainwave I had while they were going on. Demanding but rewarding too.

Leverage: The Con Job Is on Sale Now

My 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.

As you might imagine, I had an absolute ball writing this book. I jammed in as many pop-culture references as I could, dropped the names of many comic-book industry friends, and even engineered some head-tripping encounters with Wil Wheaton’s villainous character from the show, Cha0s. In many ways, it’s a love letter to both the con and the show itself.

Now that the show’s over, it falls to the books to carry on in its stead. Go grab the book, and give it a read. I hope you find it lives up to the show that spawned it. Here’s the summary from the back of the book:

The rich and powerful take what they want. We steal it back for you.

When a disreputable dealer starts swindling aged and ailing comic-book creators out of their wealth—and their high-valued comics and artwork—the daughter of one victim comes to ex-insurance investigator Nathan Ford and his team of counter-crooks for help.

Their scheme: run a con at the Comic-Con International, where the crook intends to sell the goods. But there’s more going on than simple theft. An arson plot is in motion that will not only destroy countless rare collectibles, but may end up costing lives.

With time short, the team must take down a ruthless mark whose true motives have yet to be revealed…

You can purchase The Con Job at better bookstores everywhere. You can also find it online at:

Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Google Play
iBooks
IndieBound
Kobo
Nook
Kindle

Dangerous Games: How to Win is Done

Last 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.

What is your working title of your book?

Dangerous Games. It’s actually the title for a trilogy of short novels I ran a Kickstarter for last year.

Where did the idea come from for the book?

It’s a trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in America. I’ve been going to Gen Con since I was a kid, and I’ve been a guest of honor there for the past ten years running. I love the show, and I wanted to write something exciting set there, something in which I could describe what it’s like and virtually kill off lots of my friends (honest!) at the same time.

What genre does your book fall under?

It’s a modern-day thriller. It’s a bit of a departure for me in that it’s it has zero fantastic elements in it. No magic spells. No tech that doesn’t exist. It’s mundane and yet thrilling at the same time.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I’d have my friends play themselves. Many roleplayers have some decent acting chops, and I think they’d do a good job. The hero, though, is a young man named Liam Parker, an unemployed guy fresh out of the police academy and an aspiring game designer. I could see a lot of people playing him, from Josh Hutcherson to Donald Glover.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

When a world-famous game designer turns up murdered at the convention, a group of gamers makes it their quest to figure out who killed him, and why.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

This is part of my 12 for ’12 series, in which I’m trying to write a dozen short novels this year. I’m self-publishing each of these.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I wrote the first two books in the series — a total of 100,000 words or so — in about a month. I kept track of it as part of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I should have the final book completed within about ten days.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

The easy comparison is to my upcoming novel The Con Job, which is based on the Leverage TV show. That novel’s set at Comic-Con, so the parallels come right out and smack you.

As for other books, each novel in the series is different. The first is a murder mystery involving a serial killer. The second is a crime novel involved hit men. The third ramps that all up to something more like Die Hard set at a huge gaming convention.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

As I writer, I’m always thinking about what ifs, and I’ve spent so much time at Gen Con over the years that I’ve had the chance to go back to some of those over and over. It’s one of my favorite events of the year, and I wanted to explore what might happen if everything there went wrong. I’m happy to report that the convention survives just fine — so far.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

If you’re interested in tabletop games and the people who make them, you’ll get a huge kick out of these books. Even if you’re not, there’s plenty of spectacle, mystery, and thrills for anyone. They should be available in early 2013.

Thanks to Alex for tapping me on the virtual shoulder for this. Next week, be sure to check out the five writers to whom I’ve passed the list of questions along:

Mur Lafferty, author of The Shambling Guide to New York City and host of the I Should Be Writing podcast
Aaron Rosenberg, RPG designer and author of No Small Bills
Wesly Chu, author of The Lives of Tao

BONUS ROUND: 

My friend Myke Cole, author of Shadow Ops: Control Point, was happy to answer the questions but didn’t want to be a part of the chain-post thing — which I totally understand. So, he’s answered the questions as an interview from me, and he is not forwarding the questions on to anyone else.

What is your working title of your book?

Shadow Ops: Breach Zone

Where did the idea come from for the book?

The novel has a few major influences. The first is Joe Abercrombie’s amazing novel, The Heroes. It’s a book-length description of a single battle. The second was my moving to New York City, and joining a guard unit that does the majority of its patrolling around the island of Manhattan. Those two seeds germinated in my hand to produce . . . a novel chronicling a single battle on the island of Manhattan.

What genre does your book fall under?

Fantasy. Other than that, your mileage may vary. People have alternately called my work “Contemporary Fantasy,” “Urban Fantasy,” and “Military Fantasy.” I’m really more interested in the work than the labels.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

There’s already a detailed blog post on this very topic. You can read it here.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Love, tragedy, and monsters rampaging through Wall Street. Who could ask for anything more? Yeah, I cheated there. Sue me.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

It is represented by the Jabberwocky literary agency and will be published by Ace.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’m still working on it. It will be roughly a year when it’s turned in.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

I hope I don’t come across as bragging, but I honestly don’t think it’s like any other book that I know of.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Wanting to deliver on my book contract?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Fans of the Shadow Ops series will get to dive deep into the back stories of two major characters in the series who have thus far not been fully explored.