Matt Forbeck's Blog, page 38

Magic #4 Preview

Magic: The Gathering #4 came out on Wednesday. If you don’t already have your hands on a copy, you can read a free preview below. You can also grab a copy at your local friendly comic shop or download it through Comixology too.

Open publication – Free publishing – More idw publishing

What a Week!

Yesterday marked the end of the first full week of the Dangerous Games Kickstarter, and we’re already up to 68% 70% of our goal! I can’t tell you how thrilled that makes me, and yet humbled at the same time. I want to thank each and every one of my backers, and I want to give a special shout-out to David Chamberlain, who’s signed on to help create a character for each of the trilogies so far. You all rock.

We still have 32% 30% to go, of course, and with 24 days left, that seems like a lock. Still, I don’t want to take anything for granted, so I’m continuing to push the drive where I can. In the past week, I did an interview with Charisma Bonus about Dangerous Games, and I also plugged it during an interview about my Magic: The Gathering comic with Gathering Magic. For the future, I’ve lined up an article onWired‘s Geek Dad blog (to which I sometimes contribute), I completed an interview with Meet the Gamers, and I recorded an episode of Crucible of Realms, which should be out soon too.

It never seems like enough, of course, so if you can help me spread the word about Dangerous Games, I’d be grateful. Tweet it, Facebook it, Google Plus it, and chat it up with friends. If you have a blog or a podcast and would like to interview me about it — or you know someone who does — I’d be happy to chat about it.

Meanwhile, I want all my backers to bask in the knowledge that we’ve shot through this first part of the drive fast. By way of comparison, the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World drive took 28 days to get to the same total, and the Shotguns & Sorcery drive required 24. Thanks so much!

Magic #4 on Sale Today!

Magic: The Gathering #4 — the final issue for the first miniseries I wrote based on the hit CCG — hits shelves today. Dack finally gets to have it out with his nemesis Sifa Grent, with the fate of an entire town in the balance. You can read a free preview of the issue over at MTV Geek, and you can check out a review of the issue by Stefan over at Civilian Reader too. As he says: “Ultimately, this is a great, fun sword-and-sorcery-with-thieving fantasy comic, and I really look forward to reading more in the series.”

You can also read an interview with me about the comics over at GatheringMagic.com. Brendan Weiskotten asked me all sorts of questions about how I got the gig, what it’s like to work with Wizards and IDW, and how I keep Magic‘s long backstory straight. It’s good stuff.

Don’t forget, though, that the fun doesn’t end with the first miniseries. IDW already announced the second Magic miniseries a while back, called Spell Thief. As a preview, here’s a look at the cover of issue #4 of that series, solicited for August. My old friend Alex Horley provides the stunning artwork, which features a demon-dragon longtime Magic players may recognize.

Marvelous News

I’m now cleared to report that I spent some time last year writing for the Marvel Heroes MMO! Many thanks to Andy Collins who assembled the team, which included Monte Cook,Mike Selinker, Will McDermott, Logan Bonner, Ari Marmell, Stan!, and Brian Michael Bendis, who — along with Andy — tackled the bulk of the work, including most of the stories in the game. I wrote much of the dialog for Captain America, Iron Man, and Ms. Marvel, among the announced characters, and I had an absolute ball.

Writing is usually one of the earlier steps in making a game, and this was no exception. I wrapped my work on this months ago, giving the rest of the team time to record the voices, insert them into the game, set up the code for them, and so on. I haven’t played the game yet, but from what I’ve seen, it looks fantastic.

More Kickstarters to Check Out

As you probably know if you follow me on Twitter (@mforbeck), I’m a huge fan of Kickstarter, and not just because I’m using it to fund my 12 for ’12 plan. (Check out my latest for the Dangerous Games trilogy!) At last count, I’ve backed 66 projects myself, not all of which succeeded. I’d like to see what I can do to help up their percentages, so here are a few of the projects I’m currently backing. Go ahead and check them out.

Dice Chuckers is a documentary about roleplaying gamers being headed up Wes Kobernick, Joel Allen, and my pal Christian Lindke. Christian’s a longtime gamer, and you’re not going to find anyone who’s more passionate and articulate about RPGs and the entire hobby that surrounds them. They plan to interview all sorts of gamers for the film, including John Rogers, Cam Banks, Ashley Miller, Jeff Tidball, Keith Baker, Ken St. Andre, Steve Jackson, Wolfgang Baur, David Nett, and even me.

I’d love to see this one happen, and I’m willing to put in some time for that. If you back at the $200 level — and the project succeeds — you can get an autographed copy of Amortals, Vegas Knights, and Carpathia, plus have lunch with me at Gen Con. They’re running shy at the moment, so they’ll doubly appreciate anything you can do to help. We only have six days left on this one, so move quick.

Deadlands Noir, on the other hand, shattered its funding goal fast. This is a new Deadlands RPG setting from my pals Shane Hensley, John Goff, and Cheyenne Wright, the A-team of the Pinnacle mainstays. It’s set in the 1920s of the Deadlands world, which should be enough to sell you right there. Since the drive already topped 500% of its funding, with 23 days to go. I think a lot of people already agree.

Fat Kid Rules the World is an indie film by Matthew Lillard, best known as Shaggy from the Scooby Doo movies. It also stars the coolest actor in the world, Billy Campbell (The Rocketeer, The 4400, The Killing, Once and Again), who’s not only a longtime gamer but also was kind enough to give me a blurb for Amortals. It’s a great coming-of-age film about a fat kid who discovers punk rock and learns how friendships really work. It features some unique and cool rewards, like Lillard recording your outgoing voice mail message as Shaggy. It stands at 22% funded with 25 days to go.

Flame Wars is the second Kickstarter game from the folks at Fun to 11, headed up by my pal Luke Peterschmidt. It’s a card game about moderating internet forums, by the hyper-talented Andy Chambers, whose last job was being a creative lead for Starcraft II. It hit its funding goal and is reaching for stretch goals now, with 12 days left.

Amanda Palmer’s New Record, Art Book, and Tour is also being funded on Kickstarter. Amanda was the lead singer of the Dresden Dolls and recently married literature’s greatest rock start, Neil Gaiman. She rocks in several ways, and you can pick up the music for as little as $1, or you can grab one of the cool higher rewards too. She’s nearly at 800% funding with nine days left. I predict (hope!) she’ll crack $1 million.

Storybricks is a very cool MMO that gives you innovative tools for building your own stories inside it. It’s at under 10% with 10 days to go, but watch that pitch video and see what’s so cool about it. There’s little out there like it.

Comedy of Doom is a fun book filled with geek humor by comedian Joseph Scrimshaw, who performed on the last JoCoCruiseCrazy. He smashed his first goal and unlocked an audiobook as a stretch goal. Now he’s just shy of the next stretch goal, which adds illustrations by my friend Christopher Jones of Dr. Blink, The Batman Strikes, and Young Justice fame.

The Pathfinder Technology Demo is different in that you’re not backing a product but the Pathfinder MMORPG model, which will then be used to go out and find big investors for the full game. Despite that, it smashed through its funding goal in short order and still has 17 days left. It features some cool premium rewards, and the lower levels offer exclusive bits for your tabletop Pathfinder game.

Gen Con or Bust is author Patrick Stutzman’s effort to sell enough of his novels that he can afford a trip to Gen Con this summer. I actually met Patrick at Gen Con a couple years back, and I’d love to see him return. He only has 15 days left.

Haunts: The Manse Macabre is a turn-based horror video game by my friend Rick Dakan. He was one of the original guys behind City of Heroes, and back when I was the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, we hired him to write for us. He’s a sharp guy, and the game looks like fun. The project is 42% funded with 45 days to go.

The Real Way Ebooks Save Publishers

Part of my 12 for ’12 plan involves moving into self-publishing. This is the first of (I hope) a series of posts about why I decided to do this and how being an indie publisher works. 

If you’ve been following the ebook revolution, you’ll often hear publishers justify higher prices for ebooks by claiming that it doesn’t cost much less to produce an ebook than it does for a printed book. After all, the writing, editing, cover, and so on — the fixed costs for developing a book — all cost the same amount no matter the book’s format. The only difference is that paper books must be printed and shipped, which we’re often told is a relatively minor portion of the costs of the book.

Even if you take that as true, it misses a huge part of the brick-and-mortar book-selling business that skews things in the favor of ebooks and print-on-demand books, at least for smaller publishers. It’s all about inventory management.

If I’m a publisher and I sell a book to a bookstore (or a chain, or whatever), I sell it on a returnable basis. This means that the store doesn’t pay me for the book until it’s sold. Books are heavy, and rather than pay money to ship them back, most publishers only ask the bookstore to rip the covers off the unsold books and send those back instead. (This is a point against those that argue that it doesn’t cost all that much to ship books around. If not, why worry about shipping covers back instead of full books?)

Somewhere around 40% of all books sent to booksellers are either returned or destroyed. That means that the average book is overprinted by 66%. Even if the cost per book isn’t all that much, that kind of regular, systematic, purposeful overage adds up.

Books that are returned sometimes get sent back out to other stores that somehow found an audience for the book that was bigger than expected rather than less. Others are held onto for reorders later in the book’s life. Those that remain in the publishers warehouse at the end of the year can be taxed as assets, so there’s a strong incentive to get rid of them after a certain amount of time and let the book go out of print.

With ebooks and POD books, you don’t have to worry about any of this. The cost of making another copy of an ebook approaches zero. While POD books cost more per unit to make than regular books, there’s no risk of overprinting or underprinting.

The real trouble comes with trying to estimate the demand for a book. While longtime professionals can have a decent feel for how many copies of a book might sell, so many different factors come into play that it’s impossible to get it right all the time.

Let’s say you decide to print 5,000 copies of a book, and it sells out. Now what do you do? You can take the money and sit on it, or you can go back to press. If you reprint the book, how many do you print?

Let’s say you’re an optimist and order another 5,000 copies of the book. But maybe the whole audience for such a book is 6,000 people, so you only sell another 1,000 copies. You wind up having to pulp the rest of them. That little mistake can amount to a good chunk of your thin margins on the book and turn it from a profitable seller into a money loser.

Now, for a big publisher, multiply that by hundreds of releases in a year, not to mention the thousands of titles on its backlist. It’s easy to see how a few bad mistakes can cost the company a great deal of money, but over the years the risks tend to average out. The smart publishers know this and fold it into their cost of doing business the same way a Las Vegas casino knows that it’s going to make money in the long run by rigging their games in their favor. That’s smart inventory management.

But what if you’re a small or independent publisher? The numbers aren’t on your side. You’re not a casino owner. You’re a player. A good streak can put you at the top of the heap, but a bad run can leave you flat busted and trying to figure out if you can hock your watch for bus fare out of town.

(In the gaming industry, I’ve seen lots of publishers go out of business. In every case I remember, they had a warehouse full of unsold product. Poor inventory management — among other things — killed them off.)

For small publishers, then, ebooks and POD remove every bit of risk involved with inventory management. There’s no inventory to manage. No book is made until someone pays for it. Instead of gambling your company on every book you publish, you reduce your risk to zero — as long as you can sell enough copies to cover your fixed costs.

The other benefit of ebooks, of course, is the higher profit margins. Most books sold through bookstores give the publisher something between 40–50% of the retail price of the book. With ebooks, they get 70% (in most cases). (The profit on POD books depends on what you charge, as the printing costs on each book is fixed.)

The ebook revolution is the main reason I — and many other authors — have been able to go into publishing our own books. The higher margins and lower risks — coupled with the lower costs of producing a book that modern computers provide — mean we can make money without having to mortgage our houses or line up investors. It’s taken a lot of the guesswork out of the business for the small publisher, and it’s hard to overstate how much of a difference that makes.

Launches and Other Things

It’s been a crazy week. I launched the Dangerous Games drive on Wednesday, and it’s already up over $5k, which is the best start yet, by far. Thanks to everyone that’s pitched in over there! The rest of us have until June 17, Father’s Day, but please don’t put it off until the last second. My poor heart can’t take it.

Meanwhile, I’ve been sending out the hardcopies of Brave New World: Revolution to the people who backed at the $35 and $50 levels. I still have a few folks who haven’t responded to the survey yet, so if you’re expecting to get one of these and didn’t get a survey from Kickstater, don’t be shy. Check your spam filter, or drop me a line at matt@forbeck.com.

In other news, Brave New World: Revolution hit the #1 spot onDriveThruFiction.com the day after the ebook debuted! It’s since slipped to #2 and been hovering there all week, right behind Don’t Read This Book, an anthology by Chuck Wendig, in which I have a story. I’m just thrilled to see it rocket so high. Many thanks to everyone who’s bought it.

If you enjoyed Brave New World: Revolution, I’d appreciate if if you could take the time to tell people about it. The best way is often through online reviews. The ebook is now for sale through most major retailers, so if you frequent one of these places, stop by and tell the folks there how much you liked the book. It’s also up at GoodReads — thanks to some help from Abhinav Jain — so you can leave a rating or review there too.

GoodReads
Kindle
Nook
DriveThruFiction.com
Forbeck.com store

Thanks again for all your support! It’s both humbling and thrilling at the same time, and I truly do appreciate it.

Dangerous Games Is On!

I just launched my latest Kickstarter for my third trilogy in the 12 for ’12 series: Dangerous Games. The pitch goes something like this:

Once a year, the greatest tabletop gamers in the world descend upon Indianapolis for Gen Con, the Best Four Days in Gaming, to play games, see friends, and have fun. They play things like D&D, Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer 40,000, Settlers of Catan, Munchkin, and everything else they can get their hands on. Mostly the competition is friendly.

Sometimes it is not.

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. As they dig deeper, they start to question everything they thought they knew about the man: who he is, why someone hated him enough to kill him — and if he’s really dead. In the end, they must figure out who’s playing whom or risk not only losing this most dangerous game but their lives.

If that sounds like fun, check out the video below too, and then head on over to Kickstarter and place your pledge. The drive ends on June 17 (Father’s Day!), but that’ll be here before you know it. 

If you can also help spread the word, I’d appreciate that. The 12 for ’12 plan has been a huge success so far, but that all falls apart without help from wonderful people like you. Thanks!

BNW Revolution Bestseller! — Also for the Kindle & Nook

Yesterday, I put Brave New World: Revolution up for sale on DriveThruFiction.com and here on my site. You can now also get it for the Kindle and for the Nook through their direct stores.

Best of all, although the book’s only been available for about 24 hours, it’s already hit #1 on DriveThruFiction.com! To frost that cake, Don’t Read This Book — Chuck Wendig’s Don’t Rest Your Head anthology, in which I have a story — sits at #2, and Gareth-Michael Skarka’s Tales of the Far West — in which I also have a story — stands at #7.

Thanks to all the people who have backed and bought the book so far. I’m just thrilled with the response. If you’ve enjoyed it, don’t be shy about posting reviews, whether on your own site, at Amazon, on Goodreads, or wherever else you like. Woot!

Carpathia Audiobook on Sale

Amazon jumped the June 1 release date and has the audiobook of Carpathia for sale already. This is my first-ever audiobook release, and I cannot wait to hear it. The talented Ralph Lister provides the voice for it.

Amazon has it for the low-low price of only $11.24 at the moment for the whole nine hours. If you like your historical horror served up with a proper British accent — which only seems fitting, given the fact the heroes are all English — be sure to check it out.