Gen Con Industry Guests Announced

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!

3 for 3 (for ’12) So Far!

On Saturday night, I wrapped up the first draft of the third book of the 12 for ’12 project: Brave New World: Resolution. That makes three novels written for three months in a row, which makes me happier than I can probably say. First drafts have already gone out to early readers and high-level Kickstarter backers, and I’m now returning to Book 1 to revise it and get it ready to go out the door.

To highlight this, I wrote a guest post for Suvudu on Saturday morning. It’s a primer for those who don’t know much about the project yet, of course.

While I get Book 1 out the door, I’m also outlining Books 4, 5, and 6. Since I have to start writing Book 4 straight away, these things can’t wait. In ways, this is a murderous schedule, but it also keeps me on track to get things done, and I like that. Once you read the books, I hope you will too.

Magic #3 Out Today!

Issue number 3 of the Magic: The Gathering comic I write for IDW hits stands today. See below for a free preview, then head out to your friendly local comic shop for a hard copy (complete with playable game card) or click over to Comixology to grab the electronic version. (Bargain hunters: note that downloads of issues #1 and #2 have now dropped to half price.)

I’m having a great time working on this series with editor Carlos Guzman and our Wizards compatriot Brady Dommermuth. Much of that’s down to seeing the artwork Martin Cóccolo and colorist J. Edwin Stevens turn in every month. Having another snazzy cover by Christopher Moeller always helps too.

Hope you enjoy it!