Gathering Blurbs

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.

Spiffed-Up Site

Amortals is due out in the UK on April 1, 2010, not even two weeks away. With that and Vegas Knights and Guild Wars 2: Ghosts of Ascalon coming down the pike this summer, I thought it was time to give the website a new look with a bit more spit and polish. I don’t normally pimp things too hard here, but I think it’s time to step that up for a little while.

Check out the sidebars. If you click on a sidebar’s header, it collapses. Also, you can drag and drop the bits in each sidebar to rearrange them as you like. Pretty slick stuff, all part of the Suffusion theme I’m using.

What do you think? Do you like the tabbed sidebar with all the images in it, or do you prefer the long sidebars I had before? And does the revolving featured-pages bit work for you, or is it too distracting. As with every good website, Forbeck.com is a constantly evolving work in progress.

Tools I Use: Scrivener

One of my favorite programs over the past few years is the Mac-only writing program Scrivener. If you’re doing any kind of creative writing, give it a try. I raved about it on my Twitter feed a couple weeks back, and David Johnson – the sales and marketing man and chief tea-maker for the program’s publisher, Literature & Latte – asked if I’d be willing to provide a testimonial for it. Once I finished up Vegas Knights, I did just that, joining a host of authors including Lou Anders, Tobias Buckell, Maureen Johnson, Antony Johnston, and Charles Stross on Scrivener’s testimonials page.

Here’s what I had to say:

Scrivener is brilliant, one of the best reasons to own a Mac. I’ve written comic books, screenplays, and novels in it, and it’s been invaluable in each format. The corkboard display makes breaking down a plot a breeze, and it helps keep me on track throughout the entire project.

Scrivener is that perfect sort of program. It’s intuitive enough that you can just jump in and use it, but it’s also wildly versatile and features plenty of power under the hood should you care to tinker with it. I wrote thirteen published novels in Word, and after writing my latest two in Scrivener, there’s no way I’m going back!

Gary Con 2 This Weekend

My son Marty and I will be heading up to Lake Geneva for Gary Con 2 this weekend. The current plan is to spend Saturday afternoon and evening there. If you’re in the area and up for some old-school type gaming, come on out and join us!

Family Games: Writers and Games Announced

Family Games: The 100 Best – the sequel to the award-winning Hobby Games: The 100 Best – should be in stores sometime next week. If you can’t find it at your friendly local gaming store, you can pre-order it through Green Ronin‘s site, and they’ll offer you their Walk the Plank game for only $5 (about $10 off).

Editor Jim Lowder did a great job with lining up some serious talent for this tome, and the writers chose some excellent games to discuss. It’s also bookended by two of my favorite folks. Mike Gray leads off with the introduction, and Wil Wheaton cleans up with the afterword. For my part, I wrote about the Pokémon Trading Card Game, possibly the most popular tabletop game of all time.

There’s a full list of the writers and their games after the break. For Internet-meme fun, I bolded the ones I’ve played. I’m batting .500, which isn’t bad, but it leaves me lots of great games yet to play.

Read More

The Leverage RPG

If you’ve been reading my Twitter feed, you probably know that I’m a huge fan of the TV show Leverage. The acting is sharp, the stories are great, and it looks fantastic. I’ve known the series’ co-creator, John Rogers, for a few years, and the love he has for Leverage shows through in every episode. My son Marty has started watching the show with me this year, and we’re having a ball with it.

When I spotted that Margaret Weis Productions has a Leverage RPG in the works, I shot them a note about how much I loved the idea. They kindly offered me the chance to lend a hand with it, and I graciously accepted.

(This is the first meta-con involved with the game. Call it “The Writing Job.” Imagine Nate Ford saying, “Let’s go steal us an RPG.” The game is due out this summer, which means scrambling to fit it in, but that fits perfectly with the nature of the show, so I’m game – so to speak.)

Vegas Knights Away!

Late last Thursday night/Friday morning, I finished the Vegas Knights death march and submitted the manuscript to my publisher, Angry Robot. The book is slated to appear in the UK this June, and in the US in July, so I cut it awfully short. I’m pretty happy with the book though. It combines many of my favorite topics: gambling, Las Vegas, magicians, and more. I’ll be sure to tell you much more about it soon.

Next up, I’m working on a new draft of the Brave New World screenplay for Reactor 88 Studios. While time is tight on that, I’m going to be ramping up the PR machine for Amortals and Vegas Knights soon, so expect to see me spending more time updating things around here and getting the place spiffed up.

Amortals Cover and First Review

The fine folks at Angry Robot are gearing up their diesel-powered PR machine for the impending debut of Amortals. Check out the snazzy action-movie-style cover on the left for a good gander at their graphic-design chops. I’m in total love with it and have been staring at it as my computer’s desktop background for months.

I have a lot more to say about the book and to help promote it myself, but I’m still blazing away at Vegas Knights, my next novel after that. Just brace yourself for loads of information about the book and why you’re going to want to grab copies for yourself and all your friends.

While I’m chained to my keyboard, though, the Robots are still hard at work. They recently released e-book ARCs (advanced reader copies) of Amortals to their Robot Army. If you’re a blogger or reviewer with a penchant for great genre fiction, you can volunteer for the Robot Army and get early access to Amortals and all sorts of other excellent books too.

They must have some fast readers in the Robot Army because one of them has already posted Amortal‘s first review, and it’s a good one. (Whew!) As Lisa Farrell writes, “I really enjoyed this novel. It’s gripping, exciting, imaginative.” My favorite part of the review, of course, is its complaint: “My only gripe is, this novel is really American. I mean really American.”

Guilty as charged. I can’t wait for the rest of you to read it.