Category: Books

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Yesterday was my 43rd birthday. Five and half years beyond kicking cancer, eleven years past the first birthday where I first “felt old.” (Funny story: when I was 12-15 and playing tabletop RPGs, I’d always make my characters 32 years old. My suave spies, my superheroes, my space captains… all 32, because 32 was Adult with a Capital A. Turning 30 didn’t bother me. Turning 32 did.)

We did it low-key this year — not entirely intentionally, to be honest. I’ve been so busy recently (behind schedule on pretty much every project, traveling 5,000 miles in the space of a week from my oldest daughter’s college graduation in Massachusetts to a series of meetings in Los Angeles) that my birthday pretty much snuck up on me. So we just did a last-minute invite for folks to join us at India Palace here in Lawrence for dinner, followed by some drinks at the Red Lyon (my local pub, which I’ve been visiting since World Cup 94). A quality meal, some social time, and back home before midnight (shaddap, whippersnappers. I gotta get my REST.).

A very Far West birthday, gift-wise. The picture above features one of the gifts from my lovely wife Laura — which accompanied the complete series of Kung Fu on DVD.

Also of interest to Far West afficianados – a couple of great books.

The first, The Ultimate Guide to Martial Arts Films of the 1970s, is an encyclopedia of the chop-socky flicks of that decade, assembling data and stills from 500 films. Information on variant titles, total number and running time of training and fight sequences, cast and crew lists, points of interest, etc. I cannot rave about this one enough.

The second, Any Gun Can Play: The Essential Guide to Euro-Westerns, is a great addition to my research library — the coolest thing about it is that it focuses on all European-produced Westerns, rather than only covering the Italian work.

I also picked up some vintage paperbacks which might be of interest: a series of original novels featuring the adventures of The Man With No Name, published in the late 60s and early 70s. A Coffin Full of Dollars by Joe Millard, A Dollar to Die For by Brian Fox, and The Devil’s Dollar Sign, The Million-Dollar Bloodhunt and Blood For a Dirty Dollar by Joe Millard. I’ve read the first two so far — they’re typical pulp paperbacks of the time: short (maybe 60K in length), disposable, but undeniably fun. Not “great literature” by any means, but enjoyable — which is the purpose. Once I get some of my delayed projects out the door, I’m considering adding a regular feature to this blog, where I review various vintage paperbacks. If so, these will definitely be featured.

Speaking of delayed projects, I need to get back to work. Thanks to everyone who sent birthday wishes!

 
 
 

If any of you are interested in picking up the stuff I mentioned:


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Kickstarter-Palooza

It should come as no shock to any regular readers of this blog that Kickstarter (which I profiled in my Insurgent Creative series of articles back in early December) is absolutely revolutionizing creative work. The record-breaking success of the Double Fine Adventure (earning a million dollars in a single day) has opened the flood gates — and the great thing is, as Kickstarter recently shared on their blog, almost a quarter of the first-time backers that Double Fine brought to the site have stuck around, pledging over $875,000 to over 1200 other projects so far. The rising tide truly lifts all boats.

Of course, the increased use of Kickstarter has lead to a small problem: too much awesome. In the past few weeks, a number of really great projects have launched. I figured I’d take this opportunity to spread the signal a bit.

First off, my friend Tim Byrd is using Kickstarter to relaunch his pulp-inspired all-ages novel series, Doc Wilde, the first book of which was originally published by Penguin/Putnam. Here’s the video:

 

[iframe src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1310269043/the-astonishing-adventures-of-doc-wilde/widget/video.html” width=”100%” ]

Second, the folks over at Evil Hat are producing a series of novels related to their Spirit of the Century neo-pulp property. They’ve got a Kickstarter up for the Dinopocalypse Trilogy, which is going gangbusters — so much so that they’ve “unlocked” additional books beyond the trilogy, featuring other heroes from the setting. Authors include Chuck Wendig, Brian Clevinger, C.E. Murphy, Harry Connoly and Stephen Blackmoore. The video:

[iframe src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/spirit-of-the-century-presents-the-dinocalypse-tri/widget/video.html” width=”100%” ]

Thirdly (see? I told ya — too much awesome), Academic super-researcher Jess Nevins (author of The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana and the forthcoming Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes) is fundraising for a third volume, The Encyclopedia of Golden Age Superheroes. The video for his project:

[iframe src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1651697370/the-encyclopedia-of-golden-age-superheroes/widget/video.html” width=”100%” ]

And (you knew it was coming) fourthly, Darren Watts (formerly of HERO games and IPR) has a new company, Silverback Press, which is specifically dedicated to releasing games via Kickstarter. First up from him is Champions Live Action, a superhero LARP based on the much-beloved Champions RPG. The video:

[iframe src=”http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1832603818/champions-live-action/widget/video.html” width=”100%” ]

…and there’s more coming every week. A revolution is occurring — one creating a world where creators go directly to their audiences to fund projects, gathering enthusiastic fans into an unstoppable force. It shows no signs of slowing. Kickstarter themselves are making more effort to reach out to the creative community: they’re doing an entire slate of events at PAX East this weekend, featuring demos from Kickstarter creators, panel discussions and more. Here’s hoping they decide to do the same at GenCon this August.

Lastly — I’ll take this opportunity to reward those of you who have read this entry all the way to the bottom to publicly announce that yes, Adamant will be launching another Kickstarter soon: More fiction, as part of our continuing FAR WEST property. Keep your eyes peeled for the official launch.

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ePublishing 101, Tales of the Far West & Sundry Updates

Back in 2006, Phil Reed (then the man behind Ronin Arts, and now Chief Operating Officer and Managing Editor of Steve Jackson Games) and I collaborated on a subscription-based series called ePublishing 101, a tutorial on every aspect of doing business as a PDF publisher in the hobby games industry, covering topics from planning and production to release and marketing, and everything in between. The hobby games industry was an early adopter of the digital publishing model, and Phil and I had been among the spearhead of that movement. In 2007, we assembled the various articles into a book, which we published in PDF and via Print-on-Demand on Lulu.

Of course, in the five years since we released the book version, things have changed. Considerably.

Since 2007, digital publishing has gone from a niche-market oddity to a revolution in the traditional publishing industry, up-ending entire business models and creating a viable alternative for independent creators. It has disrupted the entire industry, created new business models, and new success stories… in short, everything that it did in the hobby games industry, writ on a larger scale.

The early adopters have valuable lessons that we learned along the way — solutions to problems which the larger digital publishing world are only just encountering. In addition, the tools and methods available to digital publishers have changed (several times over) in the past five years. So, I’m pleased to announce that this Summer, I’ll be releasing a 2nd edition of ePublishing 101, expanded and revised to focus on more than just the hobby games niche. The still-applicable original materials from Phil and I will be annotated to reflect changes in technology and markets, and joined by tons of new material on every aspect of today’s digital publishing frontier.

Keep an eye out for further announcements.

In other news, TALES OF THE FAR WEST has been out now for about a week and a half. How is it doing? Well, setting aside the 700+ copies that went out to our Kickstarter backers, it’s selling really well for a first release from an independent. As of today, our numbers look like this:

Amazon Kindle: 83 copies
Amazon Print: 28 copies
Barnes & Noble Nook: 12 copies
DriveThruFiction: 71 copies
Far West webstore (digital): 6 copies
Far West webstore (print): 2 copies

And again, that’s not counting the 700+ Kickstarter backers. Not bad for less than 2 weeks. I am especially impressed by the performance of DriveThru (although, given the tie-in to the Adventure Game, I suppose I should’ve expected that). Overall, I’m very pleased.

One last thing: As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s blog post, where I mentioned the continued success of Kickstarter, citing Order of Stick’s half-million: How about a MILLION in a day? That appears to be where Double Fine Adventure is headed. The point-and-click adventure game launched yesterday, made it’s 400K goal in 8 hours, and is currently approaching 900K…. more than on-pace to hit one million dollars in its first day of funding. It still has over a month to go.

Today, Kickstarter congratulated the Elevation Dock as its first one-million-dollar project… and it’s looking like they’ll have TWO such projects before the day is out… and Double Fine will have only taken a day to reach that goal.

Somehow, the word “Amazing” doesn’t seem to do this justice.

So this is future. Pretty cool, all in all.

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