My HuffPost Live Premiere

Last night, I had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on HuffPost Live for the first time with host Jacob Soboroff, along with Bill Clerico (of WePay), Eric Mack (of Crowdsourcing.org), and film editor and Kickstarter user Jon Mercer. We had a great discussion centering mostly on how people view and use Kickstarter and whether or not there are going to be problems with backers being frustrated by troubles with creators. You can watch the whole thing on the HuffPost Live site or check it out below.

My Books on Drive Thru Fiction’s Bestsellers List

I’m happy to report that the three books in the Matt Forbeck’s Brave New World trilogy are all in the Top 10 Products on Drive Thru Fiction and have been for a while. At the moment, they occupy the #5, #7, and #10 spots. On top of that, I have stories in Don’t Read This Book and Tales of the Far West, which sit at #2 and #9.

That makes me doubly pleased to announce that my Star Wars vs. Star Trek is also available through Drive Thru Fiction now too. Best of all, it’s only $8.99, so head on over and download it at your pleasure.

12 for ’12 for Sale at Robot Trading Company

Part of my plan for 12 for ’12 isn’t just to write a dozen books in a year. It’s to be able to produce and sell them forever after that. As the first step in that, I’ve gotten the Brave New World trilogy out the door and placed it with as many different decent online retailers as will have it. You can now buy the ebooks from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Drive Thru Fiction, iBooks (except for Revolution for some reason – I’m checking on that), Smashwords, and the Sony Bookstore, and you can grab printed editions through Drive Thru Fiction and Amazon too.

I also placed the books with the Robot Trading Company, the retail sales division of Angry Robot, the company that publishes my Amortals, Vegas Knights, and Carpathia, among many other excellent titles. This is a special set-up for me, as I enjoy working with the Angry Robot crew, and I’m happy to be able to do so again, even with books that I’m publishing myself.

They announced the deal on their site, and they also posted an article I wrote for them, introducing myself as a publisher and explaining what I’m doing. Many thanks to Darren Turpin, who helped with the legwork to set all this up, and to Marc Gascoigne and Lee Harris and the rest of the Angry Robot crew for continuing to be some of the greatest partners in publishing.

The Monster Academy Kickstarter Is OVER!

Wow. I didn’t know if it would happen, but we had a great surge of backers and bumpers at the end of the Monster Academy Kickstarter, and we knocked it clear past all of the stretch goals I set up. This means:

  • Every backer at $50+ gets the BNW ebooks for free.
  • Every backer at $75+ gets the Shotguns & Sorcery ebooks for free.
  • Every backer at $100+ gets the Dangerous Games ebooks for free.
  • Every backer getting a printed book gets the Monster Academy ruler/bookmark and the 12 for ’12 bookmark for free.
  • Plus every backer will get the 12 for ’12 ebook for free too.

We’re also going to be able to ship out a number of truly cool slipcases for people who lined up the full collection.

It’s trite to say that I don’t have the words to express my gratitude to you all for every bit of the wonderful and fantastic support you offered throughout the drives, both with your generous pledges and with tirelessly helping spread the word. Instead, I’d like to say I have about 600,000 words to offer you in thanks, in the form of the books you backed. Starting tomorrow morning, I’m returning to my keyboard to work on them, rededicated to delivering them to you as fast and in the finest shape I can manage.

Thanks so much.

Five Hours Left! Stretch Goals Lowered!

It struck me that every time I’ve run one of the 12 for ’12 Kickstarters, I’ve lowered the stretch goals on the last day. Although we seem like we’re cooking along here with the Monster Academy drive, I’d like to maintain that tradition.

I’m pretty sure we’ll hit the $15k stretch goal, as we’re less than $100 $30(!) away from that now. That will unlock free Monster Academy rulers/bookmarks for all backers getting a printed Monster Academy book.

I’m going to lower the threshold for the free 12 for ’12 bookmarks to 365 backers. That’s one backer for every day of the year, which somehow seems fitting. That’s only 23 22 more backers than we have now, which I think we can break.

I’m also going to lower the threshold for the free copy of the ebook edition of the book I plan to write about 12 for ’12, which I’ll start writing after I finish all those novels. This will go out to all Monster Academy backers. The new level for that is $15,922. 

Why that odd number? Because that would bring the grand total of the 12 for ’12 Kickstarters to $60k. When I launched this plan back in November of last year, that’s the number I’d hoped to hit for all 12 books, and now that it’s within reach, I want to do everything I can to see it actually happen. And if we can manage that, I’ll toss in that 13th book to make it a full baker’s dozen for you.

We have just over five hours to go. Spread the word for this final push! And thanks so much for all your support!

Last Day!

Last night, just before I went to bed, the Monster Academy Kickstarter drive cracked the $14k barrier. This unlocked Stretch Goal #2, which means that all backers at $75 or more now get a total of nine ebooks (the Brave New World trilogy, the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy, and signed copies of the Monster Academy trilogy), plus a softcover copy of the Monster Academy omnibus. That’s a pretty stunning deal. Thanks to all of you who helped make that happen!

At the moment, we’re gunning hard for Stretch Goal #3 at $15k. Once we hit that, everyone getting a printed Monster Academy book ($35+ levels) gets a free Monster Academy ruler/bookmark stuffed into their book. Just beyond that, at $16k, we unlock Stretch Goal #4, which gives $100+ backers all 12 ebooks of the 12 for ’12 novels.

There’s more beyond that, of course, but I’ll be thrilled if we get that far. At the moment, Monster Academy has moved up the ranks of the best-funded 12 for ’12 drives to take the #2 spot. The #1 spot still goes to Dangerous Games, which hit $18,002. Topping that is a tall order, but we still have 11 hours left, so let’s push hard and see what happens.

A quick round-up of some of the press from this week:

Probably the favorite thing I’ve done for all of this, though, is an essay I wrote for Jennifer Brozek’s blog about what I love about Monster Academy. It helped crystallize the story in my head and realize what the story’s really all about. Here’s the money quote:

It’s not a story of a chosen child who fulfills his destiny. It’s the tale of a bunch of kids who were supposed to grow up to be the bad guys teaming up to do the right thing in the end, despite all the odds arrayed against them.

That speaks to me. None of us are chosen ones, especially when we’re kids. We’re not fated to succeed. We have to work for it, often against people who don’t like us for reasons beyond our control.

To me, that’s a story worth telling. I hope you find it to be a story worth reading too. 

Thanks for all your phenomenal and fantastic support. Here’s to a big finish!

Unlocking Stretch Goals = Great Deals

The Monster Academy drive is cooking along at a good speed. We smashed through the $12k stretch goal yesterday, and there’s an excellent chance we’ll unlock the $14k stretch goal soon. This makes the higher-level pledges look even more attractive. It works like this.

Right now (since we unlocked the 1st stretch goal), if you pledge $50, you get a hardcover copy of the first Monster Academy book, plus six ebooks (the Monster Academy trilogy, signed, and the Brave New World trilogy).

Once we crack $14k, if you pledge $75, you get a softcover copy of the Monster Academy omnibus and nine ebooks (the Monster Academy trilogy, signed, the Brave New World trilogy, and the Shotguns & Sorcery trilogy).

If we hit $15k, everyone at $35+ gets a Monster Academy ruler/bookmark too.

If we make it to $16k, a $100 pledge grabs a hardcover copy of the Monster Academyomnibus, plus a full dozen ebooks – every one of the 12 for ’12 novels. I hope you’ll agree that’s an amazing deal.

I’m pushing hard to make all this happen, but I could use your help. Spread the word far and wide in what little time we have left. At midnight tomorrow, the clock runs out.

Thanks for your support!

12 for ’12: Kickstarting Advances

Since we’re just about to wrap up the last 12 for ’12 drive this Sunday, I thought it would be a good idea to explain some of my thinking behind it when I started out, and why I wound up using Kickstarter for it.

Last year, I had this insane idea to write a dozen novels this year, a plan I called 12 for ’12. I’d had fifteen novels released by major publishers at the time, but I wanted to self-publish these books for a couple of reasons.

First, the chances of finding a publisher interested in taking a dozen novels a year from anyone but James Patterson is nearly nil. Most of them just aren’t willing to swallow that kind of volume.

Second, I saw a number of my author friends making decent money by self-publishing their backlists as ebooks. That seemed like a wonderful thing to me, but since I’d started writing novels more recently – and had written many of my books as tie-in novels for games like Dungeons & Dragons and Guild Wars – I didn’t have a backlog of out-of-print books that would ever revert to me. Writing a dozen novels fast promised to provide me with the necessary critical mass of books to sell.

I’m a fast enough writer to pull such a feat off (or so I hope – I’m still in the middle of it), but I couldn’t just drop everything I was doing and take a year off to write, so I looked for ways to hedge my bets. I made the novels 50,000 words each, as opposed to the standard 80,000 most books clock in at nowadays (or up to twice that for second-world fantasy doorstops). This is still a novel-length work, as defined by most literary awards, but it’s a bit more manageable. It’s also, not coincidentally, the target that those who participate in National Novel Writing Month shoot for too.

The real trick, though, was figuring out how I could possibly afford to spend a year writing novels. When you write novels for a publisher, the contract usually comes with a lump-sum advance against the royalties they expect to have to pay you. Self-publishing doesn’t come with a dime, and the only thing you get in advance are aspirations you hope won’t get crushed straight out the gate.

With five school-age kids to help feed – a set of ten-year-old quadruplets and a fast-growing thirteen-year-old – I couldn’t just forgo a year’s worth of income. Starving puts a real crimp in your writing speed.

But then Kickstarter came along.

Kickstarter is the most popular example around of a crowdfunding platform. You come up with an idea for a creative project, what you think it will cost, and a deadline for your crowdfunding drive. Then you post your plan on a page on the Kickstarter website, along with a schedule of rewards for those brave souls willing to step up and declare their belief in your idea with pledges of financial backing. If you hit your goal before the deadline, everyone’s credit card gets charged, and you’re off and running. If you fail, no one’s out a dime.

This, I realized, was the missing piece of the 12 for ’12 plan. With Kickstarter, I could replace the advance for me, guaranteeing me a certain level of financial support for the project before I even started writing. And if it turned out to be a bad idea – one that not enough people believed in to make it worthwhile – I could walk away having lost only a bit of my time.

So I gave it a shot. I decided to break the dozen novels up into trilogies and run a separate Kickstarter for each of them. The first one launched in November of 2011, and it brought in over $13,000, which put it in Kickstarter’s top ten fiction drives ever at the time. I considered it a huge success and set to work.

The second drive brought in just a little under that, which worried me for a bit. I decided to put everything I had into the third drive, and that gathered over $18,000, which set my head spinning.

So far, I’ve written and published four of the dozen novels, and I’m hard at work on the rest. I try to give each book the time it needs for revisions and edits – over and above the allotted month of writing the first draft – and I’m happy to report they’ve all gotten excellent reviews so far.

I’m reaching the end of the fourth Kickstarter now, for a trilogy of young adult fantasy novels called Monster Academy. These are set in a nation in which the good king decides that killing young monsters who haven’t hurt anyone — yet — is wrong, so he sets up a reform school for them instead. We hit the minimum funding goal of $10,000 early Saturday morning, and we’re in the final push until the deadline this Sunday, September 16.

While I’m grateful to Kickstarter for being there to help make that happen, the real credit goes not to the platform or even to me. It belongs to the people willing to step up and take a chance on this crazy plan of mine, not just with words of support but the dollars to make it happen. Thanks to all of them for being so brave.

After this final 12 for ’12 Kickstarter ends, it’s nothing but writing until the end of the year for me, racing against the calendar and the clock to deliver fun and fast-paced stories to the people who believe not only in them but me as well. And for a working writer, what could be better than that?

56 Hours to Go!

Earlier today, the Monster Academy Kickstarter cracked through the first stretch goal at $12,000! Thanks to Kent Wayson for knocking it over. We also broke 300 backers!

The drive comes to an end at midnight Eastern time on Sunday, September 16. As I write this, that means we only have 56 hours to go, maybe less by the time you read this. We’re heading into the final push.

That leaves us two remaining Respect the Streak stretch goals at $14k and $16k, which bring free ebooks to backers at the higher levels. There’s a good chance we’ll be able to crack those, and to reflect that, I’ve added a $75 level so that people who want to get in on the second stretch goal can bump their orders up to that.

Don’t forget, if you want printed books from the previous trilogies, you can add those onto your pledge now. All those dollars count toward breaking stretch goals here too.

Now hold on to your seats. I have a slew of new announcements for you.

Slipcases!

First up, I have a new add-on that many of my staunchest backers have been requesting: a handmade slipcase designed to hold all four 12 for ’12 omnibuses! Since they’re being fashioned individually, they can be made to fit the hardcovers or the softcovers as a set.

I’m working with brilliant bookhacker Sara Hindmarch (wife of my pal Will Hindmarch and a wonderful creator in her own right) to get these done. At the moment, I’m thinking of having them covered in black cloth with the 12 for ’12 logo splashed on the sides. If you have other suggestions, I’m open to them though.

Because these are handmade in a small lot, they are not cheap. The add-on cost is $75 for US orders. Add $10 for shipments to Canada and Mexico, or $15 for orders outside the US. That covers the slipcase, shipping, and the cut that Kickstarter takes, but not much more. Depending on how it shakes out, I might make or lose $5 per slipcase. This is not a profit center for me but a way to say thanks to my most loyal backers. I don’t expect to sell a lot of these treasures, but I know they’ll be given excellent homes.

Bookmarks!

Now, for stretch goals! If we hit $15k, I’ll produce a Monster Academy bookmark made to resemble a six-inch ruler from the Royal Academy of Habilitation. That will go out to all backers who order a printed Monster Academy book, and I’ll slip it in with your book when I send it to you.

If we crack 400 backers, I’ll produce a 12 for ’12 bookmark with the covers for all 12 books on it too. Again, this will go out all backers who order a printed Monster Academy book.

Plus a New Book!

Now for the big one. As well as the 12 for ’12 plan has gone, I just have to sit down and write about it, if only so that I have a place to point people who ask me about it. I plan on running a separate Kickstarter for it next year, after I’ve completed the 12 for ’12 project. However, if we hit $20k with this drive, I’ll send the ebook edition out to every backer for free as soon as it’s ready.

As part of this, I’ll list everyone who’s backed all four drives – a.k.a. the 12 for ’12 Hall of Fame – in the back of that book too.

Now, $20k is a looong way from where we stand now. I don’t know if we can hit it or not. If we do, I’ll be dancing-at-my-desk thrilled, and we’ll have ebooks for everyone. If not, well, you’ll all have a chance to get it next year instead. Sound good?

Once again, my deepest gratitude goes out to you all for your support. I could never have done any of this without your help, and I truly appreciate it. We still have 58 hours to go, so keep spreading the word, and don’t hesitate to get your pledge in – or up it if you like the new goals and add-ons.

Thanks!