In my quest for gathering blurbs, I turned to Mike Stackpole too. I’ve known Mike for maybe 20 years, and when I was fresh out of college, Mike was already chasing down the kind of career I wanted for myself. He’d started out as a crackerjack game designer, both for tabletop and video games, and he parlayed that into a stellar run as a New York Times bestselling novelist. He started with the first Battletech novels and later moved on to writing some of the early Star Wars novels and from there into his own original material.

As I followed in Mike’s wake, I often cornered him at conventions and drilled him with all sorts of questions. This was long before he set himself up as a writing teacher with his author’s newsletter, The Secrets, but even back then he was always happy to share everything he’d learned along the way. The summer my first mass-market novel – Secret of the Spiritkeeper – came out, I had the honor of being on a panel at Gen Con with Mike and another bestselling gaming author, Tracy Hickman. One of the reasons I do so many panels myself at shows is because Mike long ago showed me how important it is to share what you know with others – if only so that they don’t make the same mistakes as you.

In his continuing efforts to lend me a hand, Mike gave me a fantastic blurb:

In Amortals, Matt Forbeck does what all great science fiction authors do: weave thought-provoking concepts through a cracking good story. The morality of immortality is a fascinating idea with which Matt Forbeck deals deftly. If you are looking for a great story with action, politics, great characters and an eye toward what might well be our future, Matt Forbeck’s Amortals is not to be missed!

– Mike Stackpole

With the blurb from Dan Abnett in hand – which Marc Gascoigne of Angry Robot had lined up for me – I set off to scare up some blurbs on my own. Asking someone for a blurb is the literary equivalent of asking them to help you move. You only ask it of people you know well enough to hope that they won’t fake an excuse to get out of it. I came up with a short list of the people I knew that were both well-known (famous, even) and influential within their circle. Then I sent off an e-mail to each of them and waited.

The first blurb that sailed back into my e-mail inbox came from Billy Campbell. He read the book fast and came back with not just one but two quotes for me to use:

“Matt Forbeck, you just made my week and ruined my life. I finished Amortals with what I might describe as great fervor, only to realize – rather anti-climactically – that I’d never write anything a fraction as original, or nearly as well. Write something else quick goddamn you, before I off myself. Bullets are cheap indeed!”

– Billy Campbell

And:

“Amortals (to paraphrase another sci-fi writer who, in my opinion, has nothing on Matt Forbeck) blew down the walls of my imagination. It then stepped over the smoking rubble, seized me by the throat and kicked my ass. Was this your first novel, you bastard? Holy crap!”

– Billy Campbell

As you might imagine, I blushed.

If you think you don’t know Billy, you’re wrong. He’s been a top film and television actor for over 25 years, playing vital roles in everything from Crime Story to The 4400 to The O.C. Most of the geek tribe probably remembers his first big film role as the star of The Rocketeer, but the rest of the world likely knows him as the male lead opposite Sela Ward in the huge hit show Once and Again.

Besides acting, Billy has two other passions: sailing and games. In 2005—6, he joined the training crew of the barque Picton Castle to sail around the world as a working deckhand. That’s right. It wasn’t a pleasure cruise. He cooked, cleaned, painted, piloted, worked high in the riggings, and more, right alongside all the other trainees for over a year on a trip that took him to some of the most amazing places in the world. That’s living the dream.

I first talked with him right after he got back, when I interviewed him for the now-defunct Games Quarterly Magazine, as part of my “Celebrity Gamers” series. Billy grew up Charlottesville, Virginia, and he used to play Rolemaster and sometimes stopped by the Iron Crown Enterprises offices to visit. He’s kept up with gaming ever since, and some evenings he even breaks out game designs of his own to play with friends. Someday I hope to see some of them in print.

Honestly, I figured Billy would just be too busy to read my book – and that would have been fine. He stunned me by not only agreeing to give me a blurb but turning it around faster than anyone else and packing in more praise than I could have wished for. He truly is one of the greats.

I’ve had a dozen novels published to date, but everyone of them has been a tie-in. That means that the marketing for them has mostly on the strength of the brand to which the novel is tied. With my upcoming Guild Wars 2: Ghosts of Ascalon novel, for instance, Simon & Shuster is betting that the players who have ponied up for six million copies of the original game and its expansions are going to be interested in the book.

Original novels like Amortals and Vegas Knights, though, stand on their own and instead rely on the quality of the writing and the good buzz it can generate. One of the classic ways to prime that word-of-mouth pump is to send a book out to some notable people and ask them to supply kind quotes – known as blurbs – about it. A few months back, Angry Robot asked me to do this for Amortals. Unlike some publishers, who only try to cage blurbs from bestselling authors, Angry Robot suggested I hit up any famous folks I might know and beg, bluster, or blackmail exuberant praise from them.

I felt a little uncomfortable about this – it feels like carpet-bombing for compliments – but I want to give the books every chance they can have to succeed. So I did it. I’m blessed to have met a lot of amazing people over the years, and I made a short and random list of the most famous and influential of them and then sent them each an e-mail.

Honestly, I was surprised how many of them said yes. They’re all busy people, and it can be hard to carve out enough time to read a novel. And then they had to find something great to say about it. Hopefully that was the easy part, but that’s the trick about being asked for a blurb. It’s often easier to beg off than to risk that you’ll hate the book and would rather not be associated with it. Nearly everyone stepped up and went far beyond what I could have hoped for though. You can read most of the blurbs on my Amortals page, and I’ll add more as I get them.

To thank my friends who leaped into that breach, I’m going to run a series of posts that highlights each of them and lets you know why I valued their opinions – and hope that you will too.