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.

What’s Up, Gareth?

Seriously need to kick myself into regular updates of this thing. Easier, I think, once I finish the redesign.

So what’s been going on in my world recently? First of all, The Far West Kickstarter proceeds apace. We’re about 30 minutes shy of our first full week, and we’re over 200% funded. $10.3K, with another 5 weeks to go. We’ve passed our second goal (10K), which means that all backers are now getting the LEGENDS OF THE FAR WEST supplement (which will be exclusive to the Kickstarter — never to appear for sale in any other venue).

We’ve also set the next goal ($13.5K), and if we hit that, all backers will receive the first in the FAR WEST fiction line as an ebook, Kindle edition, or PDF. The line will launch in December with TALES OF THE FAR WEST, an anthology featuring folks like Tessa Gratton, Aaron Rosenberg, Chuck Wendig, Will Hindmarch, Dave Gross, and more. If you’re a writer, and I know you or your work, feel free to drop me a line — we’re always looking for a good penslinger.

Made the big announcement over at the Adamant site just now: We’re doing the Buckaroo Banzai Adventure Game, coming in Spring of 2012. Another one of my dream projects, crossed off the list. 15-year-old me is ecstatic. If I can eventually work on JAMES BOND or STAR WARS, I’ll have no worlds left to conquer.

We’ve got a gorgeous cover by the massively brilliant sci-fi/fantasy illustrator Dave Dorman, which you can see in its mock-up form over there at the right.

Semi-related (at least in the sense of late-period pulp), I stumbled across a gem during a visit to Half Price books this weekend. Dovetails with last year’s post that I did on ePulp — my idea that the adventure “trash paperback” could make a comeback in ebooks — something I plan to move towards once Adamant gets its Kindle legs under it a bit more firmly. Sure enough, I found one of the books whose image appeared as an example in that story (reproduced at left): BLACK SAMURAI #6: THE WARLOCK!

Seriously, folks — this thing is like a Greatest Hits package of early-to-mid-70s pop cultural crazes: Blaxploitaton, Martial Arts and Satanic Horror. Listen to the back-cover copy:

EXORCISM: SAMURAI STYLE
The Warlock ruled an occult empire that stretched around the world. This evil genius giant of a man with his slavelike army of hideous killer dwarfs, gorgeous women, sadistic perverts, and all the other devotees of his devil-worshipping religion now reached out to grasp ultimate power over all the nations of the earth. Satan was in the saddle and was riding mankind to doom — and only Robert Sand, Black Samurai, could hope to exorcise this monstrous threat, or else himself be thrown screaming into the bottomless put of soul-destroying pain and body-mangling death….

The Black Samurai tangles with a human Satan in a hellish den of torrid sex and deadly violence!

HOLY CRAP. How could I not get it?

Plus, it’s got that disintegrating-pulp-paper smell, which is like crack to me. Sweet, sweet crack.

So that’s what’s going on my world. I live an interesting life.

Fastest Gun In the FAR WEST

Wow, do I feel sheepish.

The Kickstarter for FAR WEST went live yesterday, and I completely forgot to mention it here… and reached it’s minimum funding goal in only fifteen hours!

As with usual for Kickstarters, of course, it stays open and accepts further bids above that total — so the push now is to try to see how much we can raise. The more we raise, the more we can do…. I would love if we come anywhere near the 25K-ish figure that Daniel Solis and Co. managed with Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I try to be a curmudgeonly cynic — but a small part of my brain is now whispering to me that it might be possible.
 
 
Check out the promotional video (and feel free to spread it around — I’m really quite proud of it):

 
 
You can visit the Kickstarter by clicking on the link below the video, or by following this link.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here — hitting “refresh” on my browser and trying desperately to wrap my brain around just how drastically business models have now changed for creatives. I was intellectually aware of it before, but I’ve gotta tell ya: Actually doing it, and seeing the result? Mind-blowing.