Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 37

New Dangerous Games Stretch Goal!

All right, I give up. I just can’t stop thinking about new stretch goals for the Dangerous Games Kickstarter. I finally figured out one that I thought would be both cool and fun. At $16k, I’ll produce a Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco!

For those that don’t know, Fiasco is Jason Morningstar’s excellent tabletop storytelling game of people with “powerful ambition and poor impulse control.” It’s so good that it won the Diana Jones Award last year (Jason’s second!), and Jason and his friends and fans have done a great job supporting the game with free playsets, short bits that allow you to play the game in different settings and eras.

Since I made my living exclusively as a game designer for many years, it only seemed natural to come up with a game or supplement for the books, and Fiasco fits the bill like a custom dice bag. Jason kindly offered to help me out with it as best our mutual schedules permit, and that sealed it for me.

I haven’t done much tabletop design over the past couple years, so this will be a fun chance to get back to my roots and support the books at the same time. Plus, the fact that Fiasco playsets tend to be short (about 12 pages) means this won’t cut murderously into my 12 for ’12 time.

So, if we reach $16k by the end of the drive — which is Sunday evening, only two days away! — I will produce a Dangerous Games playset for Fiasco. As is the tradition with Fiasco playsets, I’ll release it to the public as a free PDF, but I’ll send it to every one of my backers first! I’ll also slip it into the back of the omnibus print editions at no charge.

If you don’t have Fiasco, I urge you to check it out. It’s only $12 for the PDF, and you can get it bundled with the printed book for only $25. While you’re at it, check out Jason’s own Kickstarter for Durance, a new game in the Fiascovein.

Why am I shooting for $16k? Well, it seems natural after having the last two stretch goals at $12k and $14k. Also, if we break $16k, that would make this the #8 project on the all-time bestselling fiction list on Kickstarter. And that would be something we could all crow about.

2nd Dangerous Games Stretch Goal Unlocked!

We smashed through the second Dangerous Games stretch goal last night. This means that anyone who backs this drive at the $75+ level gets not only the regular reward but free standard ebook editions of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World and Shotguns & Sorcery trilogies. That’s a total of nine ebooks, plus a printed Dangerous Games omnibus!

Thanks to everyone who made this happen!

I don’t have any other stretch goals planned at the moment, as I’d rather spend the time writing and delivering the books than coming up with other incentives. If a great idea comes my way, I might leap on it, but I haven’t found it yet.

Meanwhile, though, I’m still hoping to get a group of friends to grab those Alpha Gamer rewards, which gets your entire gaming group in the book, so I decided to bump the benefit for them hard. Now each named player in your group (up to 10) gets the Game Designer package, which includes the autographed ebooks, an autographed hardcover omnibus, and early access to the manuscript. I’ll toss in shipping the books to a single address for free.

In addition to all that, I’ve been chatting up the 12 for ’12 plan at various venues. In particular:

I wrote my first post for Huffington Post Books, and it’s all about 12 for ’12, of course. It seems to have caught a lot of attention. The HuffPo reach is wide!
Check out the Crucible of Realms podcast released yesterday. In it, the hosts and I came up with a science-fantasy setting on the fly. Best of all, we released it under a Creative Commons license so anyone can use it for free.

Anyhow, we still have four days left, so don’t be shy of telling your friends about the great deal the higher packages have now become, and about the pumped-up Alpha Gamer package. Thanks for all your support!

12 for ’12 Record Smashed!

Yesterday evening, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter crossed the $13,276 mark set by the Brave New World trilogy, which officially makes this the best-funded of the three 12 for ’12 drives! We’re still a little shy of the number of backers the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy had, but if we can add another 24 people in the next five days, we’ll snap that tape too.

As I write this, we’re a bit more than $500 away from cracking the $14k stretch goal, which unlocks the second Respect the Streak reward: free copies of the Shotguns & Sorcery ebooks for all backers at $75 or more. That totals up to nine ebooks and a print omnibus of the three Dangerous Games books too.

We have just five days left in this drive. It ends on Father’s Day, June 17, so don’t be shy about spreading the word. And if you have a dad in your life who might like a whole load of good reading, might I suggest a gift?

As always, thanks for your support. My backers are the best!

Dangerous Games Stretch Goal #1 Unlocked!

Yesterday, the Dangerous Games Kickstarter drive smashed through the $12,000 barrier, which unlocks the first Respect the Streak stretch goal! That means all pledges of $50 or more get free ebook copies of the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World trilogy of novels. Since the first one is already out, I’ll send that to all the eligible backers as soon as this Kickstarter drive ends.

We’re already on the road to our second stretch goal at $14,000. At that point, all backers at the $75 or higher level get the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy ebooks for free too. I just added a $75 backer level (Bargain Hunter) to make it easy for you to take advantage of that, should we unlock that goal. With 9 days to go, that looks like a real possibility.

Besides backing the project, the best thing you can do is help me spread the word. If you have a blog/website/podcast, etc., that would like to lend a hand by running an article, post, or interview, that would be fantastic. In the past few weeks:

Steve Jackson plugged the trilogy in an Ogre Designer’s Edition update
Tony Lane interviewed me for his website
I wrote a guest post for BookLife
I did an AMA (Ask Me Anything) over at Reddit
Meet the Gamers interviewed me
Timothy C. Ward interviewed me for his podcast
Plus I’ve done a few more bits that should show up in the next few days.

Meanwhile, please tell your friends and neighbors on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, etc., about the project, and send them my way. That kind of word-of-mouth personal recommendation is the best kind of publicity I could hope for, especially coming from enthusiastic and articulate advocates like you.

Thanks again to each and every one of my backers for your support. I’m stunned, humbled, and happy. With 8 days left in the drive, we’re doing fantastic!

Falling Behind and Catching Up

As you might guess, if you’ve been following me on Twitter, I’m a bit behind. I had that horrible cold at the start of May that laid me out flat for a week, and it also ran through every member of my family. Since I work out of my house, a good bit of the responsibility for taking care of sick children falls to me, and that takes a chunk of writing time out of those days. At the end of May, my wife finally caught the virus too, and she wound up in bed for five out of ten days.

The good news is that she’s on the mend now, armed with a fistful of antibiotics, and the rest of us are too, with just a few lingering coughs circling about the place. To complicate matters, school ended this week, and my quadruplets turned 10 years old. (Which took up a bit of time, but woot!)

So, where does that leave us?

I have the first four books of the 12 for ’12 written. Book 1 (Brave New World: Revolution) is not only in my backers’ hands but has also been released to the public. Since it’s the now the start of June, I should have finished a fifth novel by now, but I’m still scrambling to catch up.

My fifth novel of the year is not actually one of the Kickstartered books but instead a tie-in novel based on the Leverage TV show on TNT. My friend John Rogers is one of the creators of the show, and I helped set up the book deal, so when it finally came through earlier this year, I was offered a shot at one of the books. Given that I’d already planned to write a dozen novels this year, I took a big step back to figure out if I could handle this one too, especially given that it’s an 80,000-word book as opposed to the 50,000-word ones I’d planned for the 12 for ’12 challenge.

I decided I just couldn’t pass it up. This is one of the crazy parts of freelancing. You can work on setting up a deal for years, kicking the gears in motion one at a time and hoping the engine will finally fire up and getting rolling on its own power. When it does, you’d better be ready to jump on right then, or it’s going to take off without you.

I often have a half dozen or more such projects in various points of progress. Many of them don’t pan out. That’s the nature of these things, and it’s why you have to poke away at so many of them at a time, working your averages and worrying that all of your big dreams might come true at once. (That’s an excellent problem to have, but it’s still a problem.)

So I took the Leverage book on. I figured I’d buckle down in May and get it done, but that’s, of course, when the plague hit us, and now I’m farther behind then I’d hoped. Still, while the target receded a bit this month, I’m gaining on it again.

At the moment, I’m not sure if I’m going to count the Leverage book as one of the 12 for ’12 books, which is certainly a legitimate way to do it. After all, it’s not just a novel but a much bigger novel than the others. Right?

However, if I can manage to gain some serious ground over the next couple months, I may still try to go for 13 novels this year instead. I don’t have to make that call until we get to the point of launching the fourth Kickstarter, and that won’t happen until the middle of August. By then, I should know for sure.

Meanwhile, I’m heading back to the Leverage novel. Once I’m done with that, I’ll be editing and revising Books 2 and 3 to get them out the door, and then I’m back to writing Book 5, the second in the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy.

On top of all that, of course, we have the current Kickstarter for the Dangerous Games trilogy. That only has 10 days left, so please jump on in and back it before it’s too late. If you can help spread the word, too, I’d truly appreciate it. As I’ve often said throughout this whole project, I can’t do this without you, and that more true than ever.

Thanks for your support!

Kobold Guide Wins Origins Award!

Last night, the winners of the 38th annual Origins Awards were announced. Michael Tresca has a full list, including the nominees, along with a slideshow of the covers of the winners. Arcanis picked up the Best Roleplaying Game nod for my pals at Paradigm Concepts, beating out the Leverage RPG on which I worked. Still, I can console myself with the fact that The Kobold Guide to Board Game Design won the award for Best Game-Related Publication.

Mike Selinker edited the book, and John Kovalic created the cover, and Wolfgang and Shelly Baur of Kobold Quarterly published it. The book includes essays on various elements of game design from Richard Garfield, Steve Jackson, Dale Yu, James Ernest, Lisa Steenson, Rob Daviau, Dave Howell, Richard C. Levy, Andrew Looney, Michelle Nephew, Paul Peterson, Mike Selinker, Jeff Tidball, Teeuwynn Woodruff, and me. I’m proud to call many of those people my friends, and pleased to see their fantastic work get the recognition it deserves.

Congratulations to each and every one of them, and to all of the rest of the Origins Awards winners as well. Also, many thanks to the people at Origins who voted for the Kobold Guide. I’m thrilled to be counted in such fine company.

Stone Skin Stories News

My pal Robin Laws is heading up a new fiction venture called Stone Skin Press, a division of the well-respected game publisher Pelgrane Press, run by another friend, Simon Rogers. Robin asked me to contribute to a couple of his upcoming anthologies, and I jumped at the chance to work with him again. The covers for the two books I’m involved with were just released today.

The first, The New Hero, Volume 2, features my name on the cover, along with Jesse Bullington and my friends Alex Bledsoe and Tobias Buckell. My story is called “Friend Like These,” and it’s the first Shotguns & Sorcery tale I wrote. You can see two of the main characters in the story — Max Gibson and Moira Erdini — slipping out of the building in the center of the cover.

Artist Gene Ha did a fantastic job with the whole piece, representing every major protagonist in the entire anthology and rendering it all in the style of a classic Japanese print. He even managed to slip the Pelgrane Press logo into the curtain that covers the door that Max and Moira step out through.

I’m told the book will arrive in February of 2013. By that time, I should have a full trilogy of Shotguns & Sorcery novels out as part of my 12 for ’12 plan.

The second book is called The Lion and the Aardvark: Aesop’s Modern Fables. I pitched in a short but personal piece for this one that offers not so much a moral as some kind of hope.

The excellent Jim Zubkavich of Skullkickers fame provides the artwork for this cover, and I hear he chipped in a story of his own too. I can’t wait to read it along with the rest of the new fables for our post-modern age. This book, Robin says, should be available by Christmas this year.

Kicking a Kickstarter

I’ve wanted to write something about how the 12 for ’12 Kickstarter drives have been going — and what’s made each of them different — for a while. Then I woke up to find out that Steve Jackson had personally plugged the Dangerous Games Kickstarter in an update for his phenomenally successful Kickstarter for his Ogre Designer’s Edition. Last night, we stood at 84% funded and 196 backers. As I write this, we just ran up to 238 backers and cracked our funding goal!

So, I’ve been spurred. The main point is that social media has made a huge difference for my drives, and this latest drive has highlighted that even stronger than before. Let’s take a look at the funding curves to see what I mean. (Warning, this gets long and involved.)

For each drive, Kickstarter offers you a dashboard to keep track of how it’s going. The top of the page features a graph that shows you how the funding level rises over time. In most Kickstarters, you get a fast start, a lull in the middle, and then a spike at the end. That’s because lots of people jump in as soon as it begins, while others only leap on board when they see that time is running out.

This is one reason why Kickstarter advises creators to keep their drives short. Making the drives longer tends to only extend the lull.

The drive for the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World trilogy has a curve that looks a lot like the typical model. It starts out strong, is mostly flat in the middle, and finishes strong too.

(The one bump during the lull came from fellow game designer Matt James, who chipped in a large chunk of change for a premium backer level. He has a great character who figures large in the BNW series now.)

By contrast, check out the curve for the Shotguns & Sorcery drive. It starts out strong, but the lull isn’t quite flat. It starts to pick up at the end, but not at the same rate. Then it skyrockets on the last day.

Honestly, I was worried at that point. For the first two drives, I’d set a low funding goal for the first book and put the next two books as stretch goals. The idea was to plant a flag in the fast success and use that to build momentum toward the final stretch goal. It seemed to work well for the first drive, but not so much for this one.

When I went to bed the night before the last day, it looked like there was no chance we’d reach that last stretch goal up to $12k. We had 205 backers who’d pledged $7,644, which wasn’t nearly enough. Up to that point, the best funding day I’d had brought in $1,961, and we were $4,346 short — more than twice that best day — with only a day left.

This meant I’d probably be faced with a hard decision. Do I write the last book anyway to make sure the people who backed me for the omnibus editions (all three books) didn’t feel ripped off? Or do I stick to the stated deal and just write two books, which was bound to annoy the people who’d put the most faith in me?

All right, I couldn’t do that, I admit. I would have found a way to write that third book and get it to the backers, much as it might have hurt my pocketbook. Still, I didn’t want to let it get to that point.

I pulled out all the stops. I lowered the top stretch goal from $12k to $10k. I poked and prodded everyone I could to ask for help. And what do you know? They came through.

That last day (it shows two on the graph, but that’s because the changeover to Daylight Savings Time pushed my midnight deadline into the next day), we brought in 127 backers and $5,156. We blew past the lowered stretch goal and cracked the one I’d originally set. I was stunned.

How did that happen? First, Michael Harrison ran an article about the drive on Wired.com’s Geek Dad blog (to which I occasionally contribute too). This brought in a lot of new backers, just when I needed them most.

Second, social media came to my rescue — and I got lucky. Many of my friends tweeted about the drive and how much help it needed, including my pals John Kovalic, John Rogers, and Scott Sigler, each of whom has far more followers than I do. Top of that list is Wil Wheaton — and his staggering two million followers — who retweeted John’s tweet.

Meanwhile, Brian White of Fireside Magazine (who, by the way, has a new Fireside Kickstarter of his own) caught me on Twitter and suggested I ping Neil Gaiman with a request for a retweet. Now, I’ve been a fan of Neil’s work since he wrote Don’t Panic: The Official Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Companion. (Man, I loved Douglas Adams’ work.) But I don’t know him. We run in some of the same circles (fiction, comics), but we’ve never met.

Still, I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask. We both live in Wisconsin. That’s got to count for something, right?

(Neil’s wife, Amanda Palmer, by the way, recently shattered the Kickstarter record for music projects. The drive for her new album, art book, and tour is up over $1,115,000 with nine hours left.)

Except Neil has 1.7 million followers himself, most of a literary bent, and I’m sure he gets flooded with requests all the time. He might have ignored me and moved on with his Sunday, but for the efforts of John Kovalic, who’s our mutual friend. John not only vouched for me but also explained to Neil that although it looked like I was doing fine (we’d smashed through that first goal, remember), I really did need to reach that last stretch goal.

(John’s a true gentleman who’s happy to quietly do things for his friends with no credit. I would never have known about this but for the fact he accidentally made one of his intended direct messages to Neil public, and I spotted it.)

So, together with my friends — and all my wonderful backers! — Neil helped push the Shotguns & Sorcery Kickstarter to a record-breaking day for me. We more than doubled my previous best day and saved the drive. Many thanks to them all, as I literally couldn’t have managed it without them.

For the third drive, I decided, as I mentioned, to set a higher goal for the whole trilogy rather than set the second two books as stretch goals. I wasn’t sure if this would work, but I thought it would bury any question about whether or not I’d start a series I couldn’t finish if we failed to reach the final stretch goal. Let’s see what happened.

 

 

As you can see, we got off to a fantastic launch. The first day brought in 79 backers and $3,883, by far the best start yet. I attribute this to a number of things.

First, the first two drives gave me a built-in audience of people who have already signed on for 12 for ’12. That doesn’t mean they’ll be interested in every trilogy, of course, but if they’ve come aboard once, they’re more likely to join me again.

Second, I do lot of different kinds of projects, and that means I have a number of different streams in my fan base. (That seems odd to use that term about the people who enjoy my work, but it fits.) People who like my novels might not care much about my games, and vice versa. There’s a lot of crossover, but it’s not complete.

Dangerous Games, however, can appeal to both gamers and readers. It crosses the two main streams in my fan base in a fun and intriguing way.

After Day 1, the drive levels off a bit but doesn’t fall into that typical lull. Instead, it grows at a steady pace, right up until May 22. I think the spike here comes from a mention on the Gen Con community forums. Maybe I should have posted there myself, but it didn’t occur to me. Either way, coming from an active member of that community added made it that much more valuable, I’m sure.

That burst lasted for two days, and then the curve starts to level out again. It’s almost flat on May 30. Then Steve Jackson plugged it in an update for his Ogre Designer’s Edition drive. So far, in less than 12 hours, that’s been good for 45 new backers pledging a total of $1,660, which hit the funding goal!

So you can see what a few good, well-placed plugs can do for a Kickstarter. It’s amazing.

Meanwhile, we still have 17 days to go until the Dangerous Games Kickstarter ends on Father’s Day, June 17. So, do me a favor?

Don’t be shy about spreading the word.

Thanks!

Reddit AMA on Sunday

This Sunday, May 27, I’ll be taking part in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit. The thread should be up in the RPG section early Sunday afternoon. Just jump in and start shooting out questions, and I’ll stop by to answer them in between writing sprints on the Leverage novel I’m writing. 

I’ve never done one of these before, but they look like a lot of fun. Thanks to Fred Hicks for pointing me toward this and to Daniel Mckenna for showing me the ropes and getting this set up.

While the thread’s in the RPG section, feel free to ask about my books, 12 for ’12, or whatever else you like. As they say, it’s Ask Me Anything.

Why Do Ebooks Sometimes Cost More?

It seems crazy, but sometimes you can find ebooks on Amazon and other online stores for more than you’d pay for the hardcover. Case in point:  I Am A Pole (And So Can You!), the new kids’ book by Stephen Colbert. As I write this, the price for the ebook is $9.99, yet you can grab the hardcover for $9.59.

So why is that?

It’s because the two editions of the book are sold in different ways. The hardcover is sold on the standard wholesale model used with most physical goods. The publisher sets a suggested price ($15.99, in this case), but then sells it to distributors or retailers at a substantial discount, often around 50% off.

That means a company like Amazon pays roughly $8 for that book and can then sell it at whatever price it likes. In this case, it wants to move a lot of the book, so it cuts its price to $9.59. It only makes $1.59 for each book, but it supposedly makes up for that by selling lots more books.

Ebooks, however, work on the agency model, which is what the music industry uses too. The publisher sets the price for the ebook, and the retailers have to then sell it at that price. Since there’s no physical product to ship, the retailer doesn’t take any risks in carrying the ebook — not even the negligible risks involves with carrying returnable books — so the publisher only gives the retailer an agent’s cut of 30% of the price.

In the case of Colbert’s book, the publisher gets $7 for the ebook rather than $8 for the hardcover, and Amazon takes $2.99 profit instead of $1.59. Even though the publisher makes less money on the ebook, most of them would rather go with the agency model to ensure that retailers don’t discount the ebook so heavily that it destroys their hardcopy sales. In cases like this, it’s just worked a little too well.

Of course, the Department of Justice just filed a lawsuit against the Big Six publishers for allegedly colluding with Apple to force the agency model on its ebook retailers. This means the agency model might go away soon, at least for a while, and we’ll go back to the wholesale model for ebooks too.

It’s a little insane to sell two editions of essentially the same product — at least in the minds of many readers — in two different ways. Moving everything over to one model or the other would solve that, but it’s likely to get more confusing in the short run as some of the publishers ditch the agency model while others fight to keep it.