• Rite Publishing’s Lords of Gossamer and Shadow
• Caias Ward’s Trigger Happy
• Paradigm Concept’s Witch Hunter
• Robin Laws’s Hillfolk
• James Wallis’s Alas Vegas
• John Wick’s Wicked Fantasy
• Savage Mojo’s Dungeonlands
• Christian and Jody Lindke’s Cthulhu Claus Greeting Cards
• Gareth Michael-Skarka’s Far West
• Stone Skin Press’s Fiction Anthologies
• Zombie Orpheus’s The Gamers: Hands of Fate
• Reaper’s Bones

I’m also involved with a few Kickstarters still in the works:

• Larry Elmore’s Sovereign Stone RPG (cracked my stretch goal and still has 4 days to go!)
• Spectrum Games’ Cartoon Action Hour (about $1,750 short of my stretch goal with 11 days to go!)
• Hal Greenberg & Neal Levin’s The Awakened (about $8,350 short of my stretch goal with 18 days to go!)
• The Onyx Path’s Exalted (about $45,000 short of my stretch goal with 17 days to go!)

On top of all this, I’ve consulted on a number of drives behind the scenes, helping my friends build proper drives and execute them well. Note that not every stretch goal my work has been put up for has been reached, although the successes vastly outnumber the failures. In all cases, I’m sure the basic drive contributed a lot more to the successes of those Kickstarters than my offerings, but I’m always thrilled to be a part of so much fun. If you supported any of these Kickstarters — or my own 12 for ’12 drives — thanks for giving me the chance to do that.

The post Kickstarter Tally appeared first on Forbeck.com.

So far, they only have a few worlds available — Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, all from Warner Bros. — but let’s assume they have more in the wings. Also, if any of this takes off, we can expect a deluge of such licenses.

As a writer, I can write whatever I want in these worlds, within certain limits: no pornography (no Fifty Shades of Gossip!), no excessive violence (interesting to see vampires get around that), no crossovers (Patton Oswalt won’t get his Avengers/Star Wars/X-Men crossover this way — yet), etc. For longer works (10,000 words or more), I get 35%, half what Amazon normally pays for books priced between $2.99 and $9.99. For short stories (which will be priced under $1), I get 20%, which is more than half of the standard 35%. The licensor (owner of the original world) gets the rest of the royalty — whatever that is. Amazon doesn’t say.

As a writer, it feels like splitting the royalty on the book with the owners, which seems fair. Standard royalties on work-for-hire tie-in novels range from 8% all the way down to nada. Of course, those contracts come with an advance, which Kindle Worlds (like all self-published Kindle books) doesn’t offer.

There are some catches:

• The books are exclusive to Amazon, which owns all publishing rights. Seems like a fair tradeoff for getting the licenses set up. When you write official tie-in books, the owners of the world get those rights anyhow, and that’s probably what Amazon is sealing up here. 
• Royalties are based on what Amazon gets for the books, which is standard for self-publishing but not traditional books. Fine.
• Other writers can build on your material just as much as on the original material. That’s fair.

The real kickers:

• “We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.” Which means you give up all future rights to your work. If you come up with the basis of the next film set in that world, thanks. Hope your book sells a lot more because of it. Still, this is the same arrangement as with traditional tie-in work.
• “Amazon Publishing will set the price for Kindle Worlds stories. Most will be priced from $0.99 through $3.99.” This takes a bit of the control out of the writer’s hands. You can’t charge a premium, and you might wind up getting paid a quarter of what you’re hoping for.
• They can also nix books for things like copyright or trademark violations, excessive use of brands (which they likely mean from outside the world in question), and “poor customer experience” (which means badly made ebooks, but could be broadly interpreted).

So what’s all that mean? To me at the moment, nothing. I don’t have any interest in writing for the worlds they’ve lined up so far. They’ve promised a lot more of them to come, but we’ll have to see who signs up for such things. At the moment, it looks like they’ve convinced Warner Bros. to dip their toe into the pool, but it may be that other creators/owners will want to wait to see what happens before they jump in too.

For the publishing industry, it could mean a lot of things.

Is it the death of tie-in novels? Maybe. For owners interested in conscientious and purposeful brand extensions (like Blizzard is with the StarCraft story I wrote), I don’t see them wanting to dive into this. Developing the official version of their universe is far too important to them for them to leave it to writers given (mostly) free reign.

However, for owners of worlds that lay fallow, this could make a lot of sense. One of the biggest reasons that companies don’t hand out licenses for fiction is that it takes too much time to hassle with approvals. Someone has to actually read the stories, make sure they fit the brand, don’t offend anyone involved, and so on. With Kindle Worlds, none of the stories would be official canon for the worlds, and Amazon will do all the heavy lifting for approvals. All the owner has to do is collect the checks and be happy that the fans are out there continuing to have fun with the world in question.

In the long run, we could see some interesting developments. What if one of the stories takes off and becomes the next (non-pornographic) Fifty Shades of Gray (which famously began its life as Twilight fan-fic)? I suspect Amazon will put out a dead-tree version of it through a new publishing imprint — or through the most appropriate of their already existing imprints. They might even have the owner give the book the official stamp of approval and enter such a bestseller into canon.

In this sense, Kindle Worlds could allow owners of popular fictional brands to crowdsource content. If the experiment succeeds, they can skim the cream off the top — as defined by the sales numbers Amazon can give them — and proclaim it as their own, which it is in every legal sense. If it fails, they’ve put enough space between themselves and the Kindle Worlds material that they can deny every bit of it as non-canon fluff.

The real winners then are:

• Amazon (who makes money off every sale either way)
• The owners of those worlds (who make money too, and may wind up with some real prizes)
• Fan-fic writers (who have been writing this material anyway and may now find both money and recognition for their work)

Who loses? Potentially professional tie-in writers, who may find that no one wants to pay them to do this kind of work when others will do it for free. On the other hand, There’s nothing to stop such people from diving into Kindle Worlds hard. They give up advances, sure, but they stand to make a lot more on royalties — if their stories take off.

Honestly, the advances for most tie-in novels are lousy. It’s one reason I don’t write many of them any more. (I sometimes make exceptions for friends, properties I love, and publishers with large checks. If all three come together, it’s nerd-vana.) If writers have to forgo a $5,000 advance to gain a 3500% increase in royalties, it might well be worth it.

Movie novelizations will survive, I think, if only because they require advance access to the script and timing that allows them to come out at the same time the film’s released.

The other potential loser? Traditional publishers who bring standard tie-ins to market might have a hard time of it, especially if their books aren’t considered to be part of the world’s canon. Why should a reader care about one of those books more than a Kindle Worlds book? Sure, professional writers and editors may usually do a better job of it than gifted amateurs, but what happens when those same pros dive into the Kindle Worlds market?

I might do so myself, if and when Kindle Worlds lines up the right property. Hell, I might be able to run a Kickstarter to get the advance lined up for me, deliver the book through Amazon, and then rake in 35% royalties for my trouble. That’s a tempting deal.

So that’s the kicker right now. If Amazon can persuade enough other owners to sign on, this will be more than a bold new experiment. It’ll redefine tie-ins from square one.

The post Kindle Worlds = Worlds Burning? appeared first on Forbeck.com.

They’ve blown the doors off this one. At the moment, they’ve raised almost $440,000, and they still have 17 days to go. With any luck at all, this should shatter the Kickstarter record for tabletop RPGs that Monte Cook’s Numenera set at $517,255 last summer. As you might imagine, they’ve been adding lots of great stretch goals as they go, and their latest one involves me.

If and when the Exalted Kickstarter reaches $485,000, I’ll write a story for the already unlocked Exalted fiction anthology, and then I’ll write an Exalted novel to go with it. I’ll be following in the footsteps of my friends Richard Dansky, Jess Hartley, Tim Waggoner, and Aaron Rosenberg, all of whom have written Exalted novels in the past.

I’ve been planning to run another Kickstarter for a novel of my own, but I’ve didn’t want to do that before I got all the 12 for ’12 books into my backers’ hands. If this Exalted novel goes through (as I think it will), I’ll have plenty of writing work to keep me busy and my family fed until well past when the last 12 for ’12 book is out, and then I can jump into my own Kickstarter sometime this fall.

So: WOOT!

The post New Novel on Kickstarter: Exalted! appeared first on Forbeck.com.

• Thursday, 5 PM: Reading: Matt Forbeck & Howard Andrew Jones
• Thursday, 6 PM: Matt Forbeck’s Dangerous Games Trilogy 
• Friday, Noon: Business of Writing: Career Building
• Friday, 1 PM: Business of Writing: Networking, Not Name-Dropping
• Friday, 2 PM: Worldbuilding: Intelligent Design or Evolution?
• Saturday, 1 PM: Writer’s Craft: Stunning Action Teams
• Saturday, 2 PM: Signing in Author’s Alley

Either way, I hope to see you at Gen Con!

The post My Gen Con Events — So Far appeared first on Forbeck.com.

Yesterday, Blizzard posted a story I wrote for them for StarCraft II, the latest installment of the best-selling real-time strategy (RTS) of all time. It’s called “Lost Vikings,” and its about a unit of terran pilots who try to save their adopted planet by fighting off an alien (zerg) invasion, hoping to delay the attackers long enough for their friends and family to escape. They fly convertible starcraft called Vikings, which can serve double duty as both aerial fighters and ground-combat troops.

Sharp-eyed readers with long memories may recognize that The Lost Vikings was also the title of one of Blizzard’s first video games, a side-scroller that came out for the Super Nintendo (SNES) back in 1992. The story features a number of callbacks to that piece of gaming history. Even so, I’m not the first person working with StarCraft to do something like this. If you wander into the cantina of Jim Raynor’s ship Hyperion in StarCraft II, you can even find a standup arcade console in which you can play a video game called The Lost Viking.

I had a great time with the story, even though it involved one of the most rigorous editorial processes I’ve ever had my work run through. The Blizzard folks — especially James Waugh, Cameron Dayton, and Cate Gary — know their craft and their audience, and I appreciated every bit of the help. When millions of eyes may read a story like this, it pays to be both thorough and patient.

You can read the story for free on the StarCraft II website, along with other great tales by James and Cameron and Micky Neilson, plus SF luminaries like David Gerrold, Antony Johnston, and Alex Irvine. From the story’s page, you can also download a free, 32-page PDF of the tale and even a set of wallpapers featuring the story’s cover illustration.

It’s a great package for a fun tale, and I hope you enjoy it.

The post My StarCraft II Story appeared first on Forbeck.com.

Leo debuted in The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising as the owner of the gaming store at which the friends in the film play their games. He also appears in the upcoming sequel The Gamers 3: Hands of Fate. Scott C Brown does a fantastic job of playing both Leo and his alter-ego in the crew’s roleplaying game, an ill-fated bard known as Flynn the Fine. Scott also plays the orc professor Strong Like Bull in Zombie Orpheus’s web series, JourneyQuest.

When Matt and Ben were working up their Kickstarter for Hands of Fate, they approached me with a wild idea. They had a spot in the film during which Leo was slated to meander off and not come back for a while. They wondered, since the film was set at Gen Con, if he might be able to wander into one of the Dangerous Games books.

Having loved both The Gamers and The Gamers 2 — and having known Matt and Ben for years through Cindi Rice, former Dungeons & Dragons guru and an executive producer on both films — I jumped at the chance.

When you watch the film, you’ll see Leo stroll into the dealer’s hall at Gen Con. Later he comes out shocked and disturbed, but with little explanation as to why. If you read Dangerous Games: How to Play, you’ll learn exactly what happened to him.

The post The Gamers & Dangerous Games appeared first on Forbeck.com.

This piece appears in the back of 

In case it doesn’t glow right through the pages of this book, let me make one thing clear. I love Gen Con. I’ve been going to the convention every summer since 1985, when my dad packed me and my friends into a van — a 1976 Dodge extended conversion rig we called the Magic Bus — and drove us over to the University of Wisconsin—Parkside campus, set in the middle of nowhere between Racine and Kenosha.

It hooked me good. As I write this in early 2013, I’ve attended 31 Gen Cons in a row, not to mention dozens of other gaming conventions. I’ve been a guest of honor at the show every year since 2003. Back when I started, the convention brought in something like four or five thousand guests. Today it’s grown to ten times that size and shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, it’s accelerating.

Gen Con is my favorite time of year. It’s like a family reunion, summer camp, and Christmas all rolled up into one. I see all sorts of old friends, make lots of new ones, and talk about books and play games with them all.

These days, I bring my entire family to the show, and I get to watch the whole event through my kids’ fresh and astonished eyes. It’s a whole four-day weekend based on having fun: a magical time in a magical place. And once it’s over, it disappears overnight like some geeky Brigadoon you can only pine for until its time comes around again.

Gen Con’s been through a lot of changes of its own over the years. I could write a book about its history, but fortunately Robin Laws already has in his 40 Years of Gen Con. One of the best changes, though, was the fact that it wound up in the hands of Peter Adkison. I’ve known Peter since before he published Magic: The Gathering, the bestselling collectible card game of all time, and you’re never going to find anyone who loves games more. He founded Wizards of the Coast, built it into a monstrous powerhouse that picked up Gen Con when it purchased its longtime owner, TSR (which created Dungeons & Dragons, of course). And he sold the entire company to Hasbro for more money than I could dream.

Then, when Peter had the chance, he bought Gen Con back from Hasbro so he could run it himself. Honestly, it’s like Santa owning Christmas. You just can’t see it being in better hands.

I started out as a regular player at Gen Con myself, but that didn’t last long. I soon started to run my own games and volunteered to help companies like TSR run theirs. Some years I ran around forty hours of games in those four days and loved every last minute.

When I was 16 years old, I even had my own booth at Gen Con, at which I tried to sell my gaming fanzine called The Quill & Scroll. I sank every dime I had at the time — about a thousand dollars — into that venture, and it lasted a whole two issues before it had to fold. While it may have failed, I still consider that the cheapest education I ever paid for. I learned more about gaming and publishing and business that year than I could ever have picked up in any classroom.

As I was leaving for college Troy Denning — formerly of TSR and now best known for his Star Wars novels — introduced me to Will Niebling. Will was the first sales manager TSR ever had, and he’d become the gaming industry’s most successful independent sales rep. He took me under his wing and brought me to all sorts of shows, including Gen Con. That meant I got to help demonstrate and sell games for Mayfair Games, Grenadier Models, Iron Crown Enterprises, and Koplow Games, among others. Soon, I even started designing games of my own as a freelancer and getting them published. And I had a ball doing it.

In 1996, I co-founded my own gaming company with my pal Shane Hensley: Pinnacle Entertainment Group. We had a series of hits, starting with Shane’s weird western horror roleplaying game, Deadlands. We built a reputation for doing outrageous stunts during Gen Con, like staging an execution of a superhero — Patriot, played by the excellent David Ross — on the exhibit hall floor for the debut of my Brave New World superhero RPG.

I left Pinnacle at the end of 1999 and returned to freelancing. For a couple years after the quadruplets were born (still a whole ’nother story), I worked for Human Head Studios, heading up their tabletop games division and hosting their booth at Gen Con. I left them in 2004, and I’ve been on my own ever since.

Like most folks, I’ve had things change in my life, but Gen Con has been a constant for me, that guiding star by which I can navigate my year. It’s a touchstone and a celebration and a mind-boggling extravaganza of fun all rolled into one. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to keep going there every year until I can no longer pick up my dice, hopefully at a ripe, old age.

Join me if you can, and if you do, be sure to say hi. We — all of us — can always use more games, more fun, and more friends.

The post Gen Con and Me appeared first on Forbeck.com.

Woot! Dangerous Games: How to Play launches as an ebook today. If you backed the Dangerous Games Kickstarter drive, you should already have a copy, of course, but if you weren’t one of those lucky people — or if you know someone else who might like the book — here’s your chance to grab a copy for only $4.99.

Dangerous Games: How to Play is the first in my trilogy of thrillers set at Gen Con, the largest tabletop gaming convention in America. I’ve been going to Gen Con for more than thirty years and have been a guest of honor there for the last ten years running. I know and love it like no other event in my year.

In the book, aspiring young game designer Liam Parker leaves the Diana Jones Award party with gaming legend Ken Hite and stumbles across the body of world-famous game designer Allen Varney (who volunteered for the role!). Shocked at the tragedy and hired by Gen Con as its liaison with the Indianapolis police, Liam makes it his mission to figure out who killed Allen and why. His investigations drag him deep into the world of tabletop games and thrust him into the center of a mystery he must solve fast — or become the latest victim in this dangerous game.

I had a fantastic time writing this story, and I think it shows. Early reviews have been glowing, and if you enjoy games and stories as much as me, I think you’ll love it too.

As of today, the ebook is available at:

• Amazon
• Barnes & Noble
• DriveThruFiction
• Forbeck.com

I’m mailing out printed copies of the book to my Kickstarter backers this week. The standard print edition should go on sale a few weeks later. If you like ebooks though, there’s no reason to wait. Go grab yours now.

Thanks for your support!

The post Dangerous Games: How to Play Releases Today! appeared first on Forbeck.com.

I’ve been going to Gen Con since I was 13 years old, and it’s been a huge part of my life. I had a wonderful time playing around in (and fictionally destroying) my favorite event of the year. As part of that, I worked a number of gaming industry luminaries into the story.

As I was revising the book, I built a running list of everyone that made it into the book. Now, I hope that everyone who finds themselves in the book will enjoy their appearances — and also that those of my friends who didn’t find their way in won’t be offended. I have two more books in the series after this, and a lot more famous folks make appearances later on.

So, here’s the list of those who wandered into How to Play.

• Aaron Allston
• Adrian Swartout
• Allen Varney
• Bob Carty
• Cam Banks
• Chris Pramas
• D. J. Trindle
• Dan Tibbles
• Doomball
• Eric Lang
• Fred Hicks
• Gareth-Michael Skarka
• Hal Mangold
• James Ernest
• James Wallis
• Jamie Chambers
• Jason Morningstar
• John Nephew
• John Wick
• Jordan Weisman
• Ken Hite
• Lisa Stevens
• Ludema Stone
• Margaret Weis
• Matt Forbeck*
• Michelle Nephew
• Mike Selinker
• Mike Stackpole
• Nicole Lindroos
• Owen Seyler
• Peter Adkison
• Phil Reed
• Richard Garfield
• Rob Stone
• Robin Laws
• Ryan Dancey
• Schaefer Tolliver
• Simon Rogers
• Stephen Blair
• T.S. Luikart
• Tracy Hickman
• Will Hindmarch
• Wolfgang Baur

* Yes, I included myself. I’ll tell you about that another time. It makes sense.

Some of the people here are just referred to and don’t have any lines at all. Others — like Ken Hite and Allen Varney — play a major role in the tale. One of these folks isn’t even named in the book, but sharp-eyed friends of his will spot him there anyhow. (Hint: He’s in a bar. And yes, I know that doesn’t narrow it down much.)

Look for the book starting Tuesday, March 14. Meanwhile, you can whet your appetite by reading the first five chapters for free.

The post The Dangerous Games: How to Play Insider’s List appeared first on Forbeck.com.

• Lords of Gossamer and Shadow: I’m creating a new world setting for this RPG. It smashed through that stretch goal already, and it still has five days left. 
• Sovereign Stone: Pathfinder Edition: I’m writing a short story for this RPG based on a world Larry Elmore created. It smashed that goal long ago and still has 16 days left.
• Trigger Happy: I’m writing a short story for this RPG. It cracked the goal for that today, and it still has 10 days left.
• Witch Hunter: The Invisible World 2nd Edition: I’ll write a new time setting for this RPG if it reaches a stretch goal that hasn’t been established yet. (They have others to knock down first.) It has eight days to go and is funded, but not for my bit yet. 
  
• Cartoon Action Hour: Season 3: If this RPG hits $13k, I’ll write a new setting for it. At the moment, it’s over $8,500 with 22 days to go.
• The Awakened: I already wrote the foreword for this anthology edited by Hal Greenberg and Neal Levin. If it hits $14k, I’ll write a story for it too.

These are all fun projects I’m proud to be associated with. Do go check them out, especially if you’re a gamer. If you’re more of a reader, be sure to check out The Awakened at least, and come back on Tuesday for the launch of Dangerous Games: How to Play. 

The post Kickstarter Stretch Goals Update appeared first on Forbeck.com.