Writing

Worked on the starship compendium last night for about seven hours straight.  Made good headway.  Finished my ideas for the layout.  Plugged in some of the finished artwork.

 About five hours and two cups of coffee in I made the decision to include some short sections fleshing out a goodly portion of the Rocketship Empires behind the scenes rubber science.

 What jump space really is.  How it works.  What the Hegemony represents as a territory.  The nature of space travel in Rocketship Empires.  How the nature of reality hooks into psionics and how psi functions.

 Stuff that I like to ponder as I write but which I usually parse out in sound bites.  Crazy talk about the nature of space time and space travel is best farmed out in small acres.  Again none of this has anything to do with reality but it is fun rubbish science to build the world around.

 I was so jazzed by how the book is beginning to shape up and the artwork of some of the starships going into it that I will likely stay up a few more hours sneaking in a little more here and there.

 Maybe by Sunday night I’ll have the draft finished to send around to volunteers who have offered to look things over.

 Ed

We’re a Copper Popular Pick!

Today Rocketship Empires 1936 achieved Copper Popular Pick status on RPGnow.  I finally noticed this while seated at my big old roll top desk (what can I say I like retro stuff).  I think the “holy Cr*p! how cool is that!” was heard about a block away.

 Our official launch date was right around February 1st.  Maybe a few days before as I managed to get some thing together a little early.  So we made this milestone during our first month after launch and within two weeks of getting live on RPGnow.

Yes yes.  I know.  Tooting our own horn here but the art guys worked very, very hard on this.  They deserve a big standing ovation for their hard work.

 We are teeny tiny smidgens from hitting 100 members on our forum.  Four weeks ago I was seriously concerned that we’d sell two books and have myself, my wife, my cat and maybe four friends at the end of our first month and I’d still be working hard on books.  I spend my hours writing this stuff and doodling it anyway.  My wife is just pleased that I am finally listening to her and doing something with it besides hiding it away on my own bookshelf.

 Tonight and tomorrow night are big pushes forward on the ship compendium and first module.  I have plenty of notes on both from over the years but that does not a finished book make.  It does help.  By the weekend I should have the compendium layout pretty much in the can and a good portion of the text in a draft worth sending around to my small legion of extra eyes and editors.  It is nice to have the help and is most welcome.

 more to come…

Be the ball…

Looking at Rocketship Empires (the core rule book and not so much the rest) I realize just how huge of a rookie I am in this whole publishing game.

 These are mistakes that would cause me to bang my own head against my keyboard as a reader and here I am making them.

 I’ve been new to things before.  It is never a fun experience.  I remember as a kid the first year I played little league and whiffing the bat at the air more often than I connected and how that felt.  I remember being a rookie cop and how insanely difficult that experience turned out to be. 

I guess what I have learned so far and what I am learning again here is that no one enters a new thing with the savy of an old hand.  GMing for 30 years does not a seasoned RPG publisher make.

Still.  I survived my other rookie experiences and I will survive and even thrive after this one I suspect.  I am working hard to address the eratta and get it all turned around before the end of the month.  Maybe I can make up for my gaffs by having a winning edge of “turn it around and making it work” and quickly for my customers.

Also the RPG community by and large has been awesome.  Letting me take my first wild swings at bat like my own home team in that little league dug out, cheering me on instead of jeering at me.

We are all on the same team here after all.

 Every one of us.

Everyone who dreams and rolls dice, loves to imagine and play and make and build instead of investing time in the power games, wars and suffering abroad in the larger world…I’d say all of us in this hobby are bound together by a certain bond that transcends our differences.

At least I believe that and always will.

I am also pleased as heck that all of my next books are beyond the realm of trying to figure out how to do ship conversions and plug ins and just focus on the campaign.  That is after all what I’ve always been best at.

Plus all of the remaining books in 2008 are shorter.  40 to 60 pages and in varying states of outline or finished product.

Finally.  Sticking your hand in the fire is a really good way to learn what not to do the next time.

Still a rookie but not for long.

When the Tigers broke free…

I first heard this song off of Pink Floyd’s album “The Final Cut” when I was eighteen.  I was hanging out with Paul who both played D&D and DM’d for our little cadre of high school gamers.

 Today I was reminded of that track and it still amazes me.  It also makes for fantastic music for thinking up material while writing.

This is an off topic blog as it contains my personal opinions about various things.  Some related to working as a new writer and some just general experience observations and frustrations from 30 years of life and gaming.

 Reviewer dings and praise

Most of the reviews on the books have been solid.  Both on the RPGnow website and on our own.  Lulu.com has several good reviews as well.  The dings received from more critical reviewers was solid feedback to help me improve as a writer.

 What is amusing is the feedback that “you guys” need to improve in such and such an area.  Well, in a month or two that might be more accurate once the writers coming on board have their excellent material out as well.  (Although I now have three editors to help with various pieces of books and the spelling and layout complaints should end…or at the very least any layout gripes more of an opinion thing.)

Getting back to the point I was trying to make.  “You guys” is me.  On the art side of the world we have our act together.  Clearly.  Even my maps received some praise over on the Cartographer’s Guild website.  On the writing side I am all alone out here on a limb on these first books.  There is no writing team, two line editors, layout guy, group of guys over here working on Rocketship Empires 1936 like you have on almost every other RPG book on RPGnow.

That is not to say that I haven’t tried in the past to get editing help.  Well meaning friends have done some spot work here and there and that has been appreciated but the time it takes to get anything back has been grim.  A few professionals I tried never even got back to me and I only sent them a chapter or a few pages just to see if they would even get that far.

So now I feel confident that we have three people I can parse out short ten page or twenty page sections to and finally, finally have some real support on that score.

The addition of a couple of excellent writers I will get up and rolling by the end of February will get other input into these books as well.  A mix of voices is a good thing.  I certainly lay no claim to being anything beyond a very hard working, new author. 

Love of History

     Its a curious part of the community that compares personal experience as a measuring stick to the loves of others.  Meaning this.  If someone says they love pizza  you immediately chart and measure their love of pizza against your own and if through the ven diagram of your own personal ego you find your knowledge of Pizza Hut exceeds theirs then -clearly they are a clueless noob whose peasant lack of pizza knowledge requires that they be shunned or be kicked onto the playground pavement for a round of laughter and finger pointing.

     I have no doubt that there are hundreds and thousands of people in the world with a more massive knowledge of history than I…but I ask you this…are they applying it -as they should, to write about Nazi space zombies?  GRIN

    So a blog is a good way  to get stuff off your chest, which I have.

 It should probably be noted that a round of text editing has been updated on all of our books, within 24 hours of reading the critique about the spelling.  The layout stuff is more of a challenge.  I think I will leave that where it stands and focus more on learning how to improve on new material.  When we do the compilation book at the end of the year I’ll break out all the old material and see about applying what I’ve learned after a year on making a better layout.

Monday Night…

     Tonight feels a little like Monday Night Football, except that we are the team getting ready to go out onto the field rather than someone sitting at home watching with their remote.  I have a pile of work to finish today.  Tonight I need to post In Fury Triumphant up on lulu.com and RPGnow / Drive THRU and update the website to include both the new book release and the cover for the next “coming soon” book.  I need to do a print run for enough hard copy books that I can just ship already printed books the moment an order rolls in.  This will save me time and significant messing about on nights when work has both a large amount of mundane print jobs to knock out and my own work to do.

     I also need to print some copies to do a test run of the binding process.  Just a couple but yes it is one more thing to get out of the way and makes an already busy night extremely busy. 

     This week I need to send demo copies of books to several wholesale shops and to a few retail stores.  I need to ponder the layout for a RE 1936 promotional poster that i can print up and include with demo books for putting up in a store. I need to finish up a short story for submission to a magazine anthology and get rolling on putting together the next RE 1936 book…the Ship Supplement No. 1.

     Finally I need to make some decisions about whether I want to do deck plans in Illustrator and Photoshop or pick up a mapping / cartography tool to make it easier.  I may go with the former rather than the later.  I also need to draw a couple of ships.  Along with the others already illustrated I want to include a few of my own illustrations for some ships I want to see in the next book.

     For now I am just tryng to get some rest.  Yes at least for now we are pegged in the #1 and #2 slots in the top 100 list.  We keep selling books although Monday was a slower day as one might imagine.  I plan to boost sales by putting out a new banner advertisement at one or two of the other big RPG sites with the release of In Fury.  Maybe I can get the new banner ads up by Wednesday.

    So pushing hard through the end of February.  The good news is that after the first ship book I will no longer be flying solo on the writing front.  Even with ten or twelve out of forty pages contributed by various writers that will reduce my personal work load by almost twenty five percent on the writing end.  It will give me a little more time for handling administrative matters that need to be handled before the end of March and April.  (Like getting a retail and wholesaler shopping cart for both e-books and hard copies up on the website along with links to things like t-shirts and merchandise we currently have up on cafepress but no links to.)

     Cafe press needs a major facelift and the website needs its next expansion.  I still need to do the youtube introduction to rocketship.  The major issue holding that up is a search for a decent video camera that I can borrow.  I am still looking around.  If none appear by mid-May our quarterly dinero from one of our publishers may be used to pick one up as a business expense.  We’ll need one for covering our both at Gen Con Indie this year and for monthly webcasts anyway so picking up a basic one does not seem frivilous.

    So quite a lot to do.  I am not just going to sit back on my laurels and roll the dice on how long RE can float on the top spot.  The only way to keep in the ring on that level is to keep putting out the excellent books we have planned through the remainder of 2008 and into 2009.  Customers want well supported material along the lines of the Rocketship universe and the artists and I are more than happy to share the campaign setting with them.

      We may well have anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred Rocketship Empires players and GMs come greet us at Gen Con this year and I want to be ready to meet them.  With some top secret kick butt projects for release at the convention, the most awesome t-shirts, mugs and such for purchase and lots of other cool doo-dads like starship miniatures and packages of cardboard cut out character and starship and terrain chits.  We will try hard to have a few of our RE 1936 artists present at the table to meet people as well.  People with a little extra cash looking to have a character portrait or ship image done up might be lucky enough to convince one of the art guys to do something along those lines.

     So lots to do both in the short and the long term. 

     more to come…

Ed

Rocketship Empires – Top 20’s seller at RPGnow « Rocketship Empires HQ

Rocketship Empires – Top 20’s seller at RPGnow « Rocketship Empires HQ

Rocketship Empires – Top 20’s seller at RPGnow

With little promotion and the word traveling through the RPG community largely by word of mouth and a few banner ads so far, Rocketship Empires 1936 and the Gunslinger Betty posted squarely in the top 20 range for sellers at RPGnow during their first 24 hours on the market.

“Holy crap, honey come look at this.”  Was rumored to be overheard at Rocketship HQ in a conversation between Ed and his wife Valerie.

It was an exciting first 24 hours.  We saw more books picked up and purchased by customers in that time period than half of our total sales in our first two and a half weeks on our own website.

Reader comments have been largely very positive.  A few people have been kind enough to point out a few things to polish here and there and we plan to get on that as soon as our next fantastic book hits the .pdf shelf.

So a great day for the HQ with (I’m sure) many more great and exciting days to come.  As things progress it looks likely that Rocketship Empires 1936 will gain its 100th customer by the end of February.  Four months ahead of our goal.

Will Rocketship Empires 1936 be the next sci-fi setting to come on the scene with a major presence out of nowhere in 2008 and 2009?  It is far to early to say, yet.  While that would be exciting it is not changing our vision of creating the kinds of books we as gamers want to see on our own gaming table whether they sell 1000 copies or 100 or 10.

We -are- (the art team and myself) extremely pleased to see the campaign books absolutely take off right from the start.

This story has wings all its own.

Ed

Friday Night Live

Tonight I activated our RPGnow and DriveTHRU accounts.  We are now officially live and headed into the main stream for Indie RPG publishing.

This is a fairly important step in this process as we step up to the plate with scores of other Indie publishers with excellent products and years of experience.  Will Rocketship Empires compete?  Will it shine through the hundreds if not thousands of Indie RPG products thrown into the e-market at the present time?

I think it will.  If the feedback from our readers is any indication Rocketship Empires 1936 is the right RPG setting at the right time with the right audience.  The formula has been fairly simple and (I think) honest.  What is it that I would love to hold in my hands and run for a group of players.  Period.

That attitude has lent itself to the intense work invested in the books, the spirit and creativity of the setting and the fantastic world class artwork illustrating the books from cover to cover.

With In Fury Triumphant waiting in the wings and releasing within the next week and the first ship source book rolling out by the end of the month Rocketship Empires 1936 is going to literally “Rocket” into the heart of the RPG universe.

This has been a great day.

What else awaits us? 

The remainder of February will focus on communicating to our readers via the forums and working on our up and coming books.  Another priority is printing and shipping hard copy books out to customers and we hope to have the shopping cart system for making online credit card purchases of hard copy books up and functioning like clockwork by the end of the month.

In March we’ll be setting our sites on at least one if not two more major e-stores, one of which is a major distributor of hard copy game books to retailers and game stores.  We will be putting out our first RE adventure module in March and our second starship feature book.  If all goes well that will bring us to six titles in our line up of books for RE by the end of the first quarter.  Not at all shabby for our start-up quarter.  We will also begin sending out promotional packages and books to specific retailers who have contacted us directly regarding our books.

Conventions

In other news I had my days off for the Lake Geneva convention in June and Gen Con Indie approved by the boss at the ole day job.  There is something especially kickin about having paid time off to attend a convention.  I have not been able to attend a con in years and I always seem to feel rushed at them.  This will probably be the first time ever i will have the luxury of arriving a day early, enjoying a very nice room at a hotel at the convention center and taking part in the entire convention.  I will be running some demo games of RE 1936 at both conventions.

I will start looking towards attending a game convention in the winter and spring as well.  Rolling us into four conventions a year leading into 2009.  In 2009 I will likely add a UK Gen Con or Convention of some sort.  My first trip ever outside of North America.  Attending a large convention in Texas is likely as well as a convention in New York City and Chicago.

back to writing for me.

more to come…

Two steps forward

Last night I spent a considerable amount of time working on putting together signatures for the books for binding.  While this sounds like it should be a really easy thing to do how simple it is largely depends upon…

1.  What software you used to layout the book in the first place.

2.  Whether or not you knew you  were going to use signatures going into your book layout and page counts at the start of the project or not.

If you approach the project like I did, looking primarily at .pdf publishing and perfect binding through a POD provider or saddle stapling from the start then you probably came up with a page count that does not divide exactly right for signatures.  For some programs this is no problem at all.  The clunky old Microsoft Project program I have but no longer use for anything related to publishing has the option of easily breaking projects into printable page counts with complete flexability for signature size.

Indesign.  Not so much so.  While I can control some aspects of the process others are hardwired in templates of 4, 8, 12, 16 signatures which makes it a real hair pulling contest if your page count does not fit into these most common signature patterns.

This is not a major deal but it requires going back and looking at the book layout from step one, shifting things so that they layout well in the signature format and either adding or removing a bit of page count..or shifting the entire thing into microsoft publisher to reach the final end point.

 more soon

In Binding Triumphant

I’ve been lucky enough to bump into just the right people during the course of this Rocketship Empires journey.  One such person is a local fellow who happens to be into book bindery as a hobby.  After coming by the print shop last night and showing me what he can accomplish the right cover stock and pages done in signatures I’m sold on him handling our bindery.

 What is so serendipitous about this meeting is that he’s wanted all along to take a look at producing inexpensive books to contribute to the RPG community.  Sort of an old school RPG revolutionary.

 I suspect a few of our orders will arrive tomorrow in the post which will be just about perfect timing for this turn of events.  He’ll be swinging by to pick up the printed signatures and covers and bind them up.  His bindings are very durable and wear well.  They are flexible soft cover bindings so you can open it over and over and us the heck out of it, which is the whole idea.

 The really kickin news?  This will -not- change the final price of these books one penny.  The size of the books will still be a smaller booklet size but I like that.  You can pop them into a backpack and haul them around without them weighting a hundred pounds.

40 to 60 page game books with a color cover / black and white interior and perfect bound…for our current cover price.

Someone up there is looking out for me.  Thank you.

 A good day all around.