Bad Times Out to Backers

Bad-Times-Cover-Standard-600While I’m getting the Kickstarter editions of Bad Times in Dragon City out to my backers, I’m also prepping the files for the release of the standard edition of the book. At the moment, that’s scheduled for March 5, and I hope to have print-on-demand options ready by then too. To whet your appetite, here’s a look at the book’s cover, along with the back cover text.

If It Wasn’t for Bad Times…

Ex-adventurer Max Gibson wouldn’t have any times at all. Saddled with babysitting the heir to the Dragon Empire, a deadly dragonet with a mind all its own, Max wishes he could hunker down in his bar and shut out the rest of Dragon City, but it seems everyone wants a piece of him.

If the scum down in Goblintown aren’t trying to throw him to the zombies on the other side of the Great Circle, it’s the Imperial Dragon’s Guard trying to haul him into protective custody. Or the Wizards Council hoping for a closer look at the dragonet.

All that goes out the window, though, when Belle Sanguigno – a heartbreaker of an elf who’s shattered Max more than once – turns to him for help. She needs to find the body of her sister, who Max and the dragonet killed last week, or pay the ultimate penalty for her loss.

And the bad times keep getting worse.

Bad Times in Dragon City is the second novel in the Shotguns & Sorcery setting.

Gambling with Alas Vegas

My pal James Wallis is a tabletop gaming legend. Among many other things, he co-created the wonderful Once Upon a Time card game; he wrote and published one of the first story-driven roleplaying games, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen; and he launched the much-loved Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming. He’s been off doing other things for a while, but he’s returning to tabletop games with a new game called Alas Vegas, and he’s funding it via Kickstarter.

Alas Vegas is, as James describes it, “an RPG miniseries about amnesia, sin, horror and gambling… The player characters begin the game by digging themselves out of a shallow grave in the desert, at midnight. They are naked, and they have no memory of who they are or how they got where they are. On the horizon is a scar of neon. There will be answers there. And trouble.”

I don’t know about you, but that hooked me good.

James’s backers smashed through the funding goal in under eight hours, and he’s lined up a number of excellent stretch goals. These include new campaigns by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and Allen Varney, cocktail recipes by John Tynes, a guide for using Tarot cards in other games by Robin Laws, and even an Alas Vegas novel by James himself.

I’m also chipping in a chapter on how to handle Vegas-style gambling in games that are already card and dice driven. As a game designer, that’s a fun challenge, and as you might imagine, I studied a lot about Vegas gambling to prepare for writing Vegas Knights. That kicks in if/when Alas Vegas reaches £13k. Since the drive’s already up past £8k and has 18 days left, I’m betting it can make that.

Go check it out. If you like it, deal yourself in.

Don’t Buy Hard Times – Yet

Hard-Times-book-graphicSetting a firm release date for an ebook is a big challenge with today’s tools. I can submit files and details to the various ebook retailers, but it can take anywhere from hours to days or longer for the files to be posted and actually ready for sale.

I’m in the process of releasing Hard Times in Dragon City – the first novel for my Shotguns & Sorcery setting – so that it’s available soon. You can already buy it here on my site, for instance, and on Smashwords, and it should be up on Amazon and Barnes & Noble’s site soonish. But you should hold on to your cash for just a little bit longer.

Hard Times in Dragon City is slated to be part of a sweet bundle of ebooks that should be announced any day now. They’re going to make for a fantastic deal, and I’d hate for you to feel like you should have waited for it, especially since the bundle is so close to being here.

At the same time, there’s a chance that people would rather buy the book than the bundle, and I don’t want those readers to have to sit on the sidelines until the bundle’s sale period is over either. That’s why I’m getting the process for releasing the book rolling now rather than waiting any longer.

Speaking of which, I’ve sent the files for the print-on-demand edition off to my friends at DriveThruFiction.com. Once those are all approved and I’ve checked off on the proof, I’ll have the hardcopy version ready for sale too, both in paperback and hardcover.

So, if you just have to have the ebook right now, go ahead and grab it. I’ll make a few more dollars from that sale than I will through the bundle. If you like yourself a fantastic bargain, though, hold onto your wallet for a few days longer. You’ll thank me for it.

Please Don’t Pirate My Books (Unless)

BNW-Omnibus-BookOver at his website, Chuck Wendig’s been writing a lot about the pirating of ebooks, and he declared today to be Please Don’t Pirate My Book Day, asking authors to pitch in a post about the subject. So here’s mine.

I don’t worry about piracy all that much. I want people to pay for my work, but I don’t tear out my hair worrying that people might be shoplifting my books from stores or borrowing them from a friend or a library. If they read it for free, then dammit, I hope they at least enjoy it.

If you experience some kind of art and love it – book, film, music, painting, and so on – you should figure out some way to thank the creator in a meaningful way that you can afford. It’s the right thing to do, and it helps make sure that the creator doesn’t have to go back to driving pizza and selling plasma instead of making more things for you to enjoy. (Chuck writes eloquently about this today.)

But there are cases in which I don’t mind if my work is pirated. For instance, I’ve written six Dungeons & Dragons novels and four Blood Bowl novels. They’re all out of print, and the publishers haven’t shown much interest in releasing them as ebooks. Those were written as work-for-hire, so the rights will never revert to me. The publishers clearly have better things to do with their limited time, and while I may question their judgment, that’s their right.

Despite that, pirates have scanned them and put them out there on the internet for people to read. So, if you want to go grab those books off a pirate server and read them, more power to you. Other than stumbling over a used copy on eBay or Amazon or in a local store, you don’t have many other choices. And you know how much the publisher and I see from those used book sales anyhow? Not a penny.

If you enjoy those books (and I hope you do), then pony up some of your hard-earned cash for the books my publishers and I do keep in print and available to you. Go grab my books from Angry Robot. Snag my Leverage novel. Buy the BNW Omnibus I have on sale on this very site right now. (All the money from that, barring PayPal’s cut, goes straight into my pocket and from there into my children’s mouths.)

So, enjoy as you like, pay what you can, and keep those wheels spinning. I’ll do my best to keep up my end of that bargain too.

BNW Omnibus at DriveThruFiction Too

BNW-Omnibus-BookI 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

BNW-Omnibus-BookI 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

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Revelation

Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World: Resolution

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!

BNW-Omnibus-Standard-CoverI’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?

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Leverage: The Con Job Is on Sale Now

ConJobCoverMy 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.

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