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.)

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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?

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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.

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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.

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