Matt Forbeck

I'm a novelist and game designer and a proud husband and father.

Gaming Hoopla Today

 Con Report  No Responses »
May 052012
 

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

 12 for '12, Shotguns & Sorcery  No Responses »
Apr 302012
 
12 for '12

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

 Con Report  No Responses »
Apr 192012
 

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

 Professional  No Responses »
Apr 162012
 

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

 Brave New World  1 Response »
Apr 162012
 
Brave New World

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

 Carpathia  No Responses »
Apr 162012
 
Carpathia

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?)

Signing Ebooks

 Brave New World  No Responses »
Apr 162012
 
Brave New World

Over the weekend, I released the first ebook editions of Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revolution. These went out to the backers of my Kickstarter drives, and a good number of them (over 200) were autographed. This took me forever to pull off, but it gave my backers something unique and special, so it was worth it as a way to thank them for their support.

When I first promised to sign ebooks for my backers, I really had no idea how I was going to manage it. Since I planned to publish the books myself, I knew that at the worst, I’d take the brute-force approach.

To pull that off, all you need is a stack of blank paper, a scanner, and a lot of time to get the images of the signatures into your computer and then generate unique copies of the ebook one at a time. It’s clearly doable, but painstaking and slow.

Fortunately, Paul Cooley contacted me about an iOS app he’d produced called MyWrite. It’s a clever solution to the challenge of signing ebooks. You just send Paul your ebook in epub format and pay a small fee to register it. Then you purchase blocks of signatures from him so that you can use the app.

In the app, you select the ebook you want to send out, then enter the name and email address of the person you want to send it to. The app then gives you a blank page on which you can draw or write anything you like. I used a stylus and wrote a short thank-you note and signed it with my notoriously illegible signature. Once you’re done, you tap a button, and you’re done.

Paul’s servers then generate a unique copy of the ebook in both epub (iBooks, Nook, Kobo, etc.) and mobi (Amazon) formats, with the personalized sheet as the last page in the ebook. If the files are under 1 MB, the servers send the files straight out. Otherwise, it sends links that the reader can download the files through instead.

Because I’m handling my 12 for ’12 books as an indie publisher, Paul offered to cut me a break on the pricing. It wound up costing me less than 20¢ in total for each signature. Given the amount of time it saved me, it was well worth it.

Despite that, it still took me hours to get through it all. Even if I spent only two minutes on each note, it was bound to take me nearly seven hours to finish, after all. When I started out, each one took me more than that, but as I smoothed out the workflow of copying the necessary data out of Kickstarter (bluetooth keyboard really helped), that average time went way down.

MyWrite helped make it as painless as possible, and I think it was well worth the effort to sign all those books. I hope my backers agree.

Two New Covers

 Magic: The Gathering, Professional  No Responses »
Apr 052012
 
Magic: The Gathering

I have a pair of beautiful but very different covers to show to you today. The first is for Don’t Read This Book, a new anthology of short stories based upon Fred Hicks’s Don’t Rest Your Head RPG. Chuck Wendig put the whole thing together, and he lined up some fantastic talent to bring it to life, including Stephen Blackmoore, Harry Connolly, Rich Dansky, Laura Anne Gilman, Will Hindmarch, Mur Lafferty, Robin D. Laws, Ryan Macklin, C. E. Murphy, Josh Roby, Greg Stolze, and Monica Valentinelli, as well as me.

My story for this one’s a bit of a departure for me. I usually like to write about heroes, people who suck it up and do what they have to, despite the odds stacked against them. The main character in this tale’s a bit weaker than that, and because of that the ending sucker punched me good. Here’s hoping it does the same to you.

The second cover is for Magic: The Gathering: The Spell Thief #2. This features the main villain from the first miniseries, Sifa Grent. Artist Dan Scott does a great job with Martin Cóccolo’s design, making her look both sinister and powerful.

This tale continues our hero Dack Fayden’s hunt for Sifa. It takes him through many planes and reveals a good deal of the history behind both him and Sifa and what’s drawn them together into their fatal dance.

I can’t wait for you to read both stories, as different as they are.

Carpathia Review and Kindle Sale

 Carpathia  2 Responses »
Apr 042012
 
Carpathia

Over at Wired’s Geek Dad blog (for which I sometimes chip in a bit or two), James Floyd Kelly gave Carpathia a wonderful review:

Yes, Matt Forbeck went there. He took those poor souls that survived the Titanic‘s sinking and decided to make their lives a little more terrifying. He mixed history with horror, and probably did it with a sly grin on his face as he typed up Carpathia.

Very dark. Seriously twisted.

I enjoyed every bit of it.

The Salted Peanut agrees, saying:

What happens when you take the most famous shipwreck of all time and toss in some gothic horror?  You get Carpathia, a winning mix of historical drama and vampire lore.

Coincidentally, Amazon has the Kindle edition of Carpathia on sale right now for only $3.03. They also have Amortals out for only $2.99, making both books fantastic deals. I don’t have any idea how long this might last, so grab them for cheap while you can!

 Older Entries  Newer Entries
  • RSS
  • Newsletter
  • Twitter
  • Google Plus
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn