The latest skinny…

Spent this week with two sick boys.  My wife mostly handled things during the heart of the daytime hours although crying boys with fevers got me out of bed several times to try my best to help out.  Last night I plowed through seven new pages of the adventure book and a few maps.  A great night!  Considering that a book like this is right around 80 pages that is very nearly 10% drafted out in a single night.

 Can we cook or what?  A few things have been put on temporary (2 day) hold while I sort out my kids and their flu bugs.  Sorry to the couple of people left hanging on emails and paperwork.  I will try and get that off to you either late tonight or tomorrow night.  Definately before the end of the week.

 We are plowing right along on artwork for the next two books.  The cover for the adventure book is well under way.  No it is not the currently posted one.  That is just a placeholder.  We have a MUCH cooler cover coming from Mike soon.  You guys will -love- it. 

 I found a decent free source RPG map program.  I am playing around with it for the adventure book.  It has a very old school feel and look to it.  I think I like it.  Not sure if anyone else will get a kick out of it though.

Buried an old and very rusty hatchet with someone.  The dispute goes way, way back.  It seems that we are both long past it.  It always stinks to have a falling out with someone you respect and consider a kindred spirit in many ways.  I think we both thought we were right but we both also could have handled the whole situation a lot better.  We were both a lot younger and a lot less wise.  It is important to me to somehow put to rest those sorts of things from life. 

 We are all, after all, blood brothers under the bright stars.  Every last one of us.

Fwaa…Gen Con

Gen Con is expensive.  Crazy, crazy expensive.  Hopefully it will be crazy, crazy good exposure for us and we can make more than enough sales to pay ourselves back for going.

$1,600.00 just to get the basic, no frills booth. 

 Sixteen HUNDRED dollars people!  If we divide this cost up between three months of sales from our books it becomes semi-affordable.  Still.  That is a WHOLE lot of artwork and writing for game books being tossed into the booth.  Probably two entire books worth…no make that more like three.

Yes, there is a cheapy booth where you sign up for “maybe” getting one at a cut rate depending on if Gen Con decides to give it to you or not.  I am not a big fan of the “maybe” scenerio no matter how cheap it is.

 Returning vendors also get a deal.  Only $1300 for them.  With the price this high it makes me wonder just how many of the other small vendors and Indie people we will see at Gen Con.  Hopefully a bunch. 

 Ed

The other guys stuff…

Very occasionally I will get a question about whether I have read this or that book or game book about something related to Rocketship Empires.  To be honest, outside of diving into a few very specific types of books, World War II and 1930’s era history books and such, I have not had any time over the last three or four years to indulge myself.

 Why?  Twins.  Imagine the upheaval having a single baby causes in your life.  No times that by two…except that they do not sleep at the same time for the first year.  So basically you, as a parent, always have at least one infant awake and ready to rumble almost twenty four hours a day and seven days a week.  I think the first year there were entire weeks when I could count my -total- hours of sleep during the week on two hands.  There are entire months that are nothing but a big empty space  as I no longer have any memory of them.

 Not to say having twins is bad.  I love it.  They are awesome.  Still.  Good friends ask my wife Val and I if we have seen this or that movie or read this or that book and all we can do is laugh.  Only in the last year have we really had a chance to start to get out occasionally to see a movie.  We used to go every other week.  Now we are lucky to go once or twice every six months.

 I used to be an avid reader of fiction of all sorts years ago.  I am starting to dive back into that, which is nice.  Still, I am just getting caught up on my old favorites I have missed these last years.  I am re-reading everything I can find by Phillip K Dick.  For an unrelated writing project I decided to read some of the Conan books.  The older stuff is good.  The later stuff, eh.  Too predictable for my taste.  I really think the sword and sorcery stuff has been done so many times it really takes a creative writer to come up with something fresh.  I can’t say I am very excited about writing a story about yet another brooding misunderstood barbarian.  Having to think about how I want to approach the subject from an entirely different frame of mind.

 I am not too concerned about what the other guy is doing out there.  His projects are his own business.  I make it a point not to compete with anyone else.  I only compete with myself and try to improve with each new book.  If another writer got jazzed about pulp stuff and wrote some books about it.  Cool!  It would be awesome to meet them.  We would probably get along great.  My buddy Mike has been into pulp forever.  I imagine it takes a certain quirky individual to love that stuff like we do.

Silver and Coppers

 Rocketship Empires 1936 is a silver medal seller now and so are all our other books, including the Ship compendium that just went out last weekend.  Pretty good stuff for a couple of rookies.  Not bad at all.  Still we have a long way to go.  No time to pat ourselves on the back until we emerge on the far side of Gen Con this year and take stock of how things went.

Gen Con will be a big milestone for us, as I expect it is for many Indee publishers.

…more to come. 

Modem Explosion

Spending most of Monday and Tuesday catching up after my modem went down for the count.  Investing quite a bit of time this week into the newsletter (the free newsletter) which should be up in a few short days.  I have some great submission material from several of the outstanding (and incredibly experienced) GM’s who have picked up Rocketship to run.

So this first part of the week is devoted to catching up on emails, getting our business plan sorted and project plans a bit more under way.  I have a long list of -must do- items including getting back with our new art team members, organizing two writers on their projects, responding to those not chosen in this round of the art draft, getting the website updated again…gotta do that every time a new book releases…etc…etc…

So lots and lots to do this week.

The Next Book…

On the horizon are “The Madrid Run”, the first major adventure for Rocketship Empires 1936.  Working on this so it is not a line adventure.  More of an environment with several dungeon type areas and many smaller plots to run down.  Basically a location where directors can cut loose their players have let them have at it.  The Madrid Run sets the stage for a more complex / political intrigue adventure in For King and Country.  All three of the first adventure modules will hook into one another for directors who want to use them to further unfold their own campaigns.

At the end of module three the characters may very well have their own star system to base their adventures out of and be tied deeply into the politics unfolding in the setting.  At the end of the modules the characters are set up to be key movers and shakers in any unfolding drama in space leaving it up to the director to decide which direction to take things from there.  Future modules will present possible mini threads.  There will be a mini thread exploring the psi war.  A mini thread exploring the hegemony war..  etc…  The modules can either be used directly or as additional source material for a director keen to build their own adventures but wanting to spin things in their own direction.

 Beyond that we have the Starship Feature Book for Tramp Freighters rolling up towards the end of April.  So those two books are a priority.

 Editing

Finally we have a back log of editing to do.  I am organizing the effort this week to get all of our previous material scrubbed and looking perfect / reading perfect between now and some time early in April.  The goal is that by the end of April everything new we release reads well and has no major editing issues and everything we have already produced has been edited and improved.

As perfect as we can make it within three months of launch and then solid from there forward while maintaining our heavy duty pace of releasing cool books for the Rocketship Empires Universe.

I believe we are scheduled to put out somewhere between ten and twelve books for Rocketship Empires before Gen Con this year.  That should make for a pretty darn exciting Gen Con booth experience meeting current readers and directors and showing off our line to new people who have never seen any of it before.

Book Binding

 Got back the first full size soft cover book binds today and they look great!  The cost per bind is excellent and the quality is outstanding.  Good old American ingenuity and hard work is back at it again, trying to put out better books for lower cost.  I think we will revisit the price scheme and lower the price even further for the main book.  Probably only by a dollar or two but still…ultimately the cover price before shipping costs on the core books even with a nice soft cover binding job will run below twenty bucks a book.

less than twenty bucks for a 160+ page soft cover book guys!

We totally rock.

More on that between now and then end of the week as i get our paypal purchase carts set up and everything ready to rock and roll.

Ed

Starship Compendium No. 1

This was a cool project to work on.  Not only did Mike and Chris deliver some astounding artwork for the book, I just got a huge kick out of working on it.

Probably the most fun (for me) was putting down on paper the “top secret” game master notes I had hidden up my sleeve regarding some bits and pieces of the Rocketship Empires universe…the things my own player group has never-ever seen.

Little details like…Hegemony jump drives traveling through the z-axis of probability space and being a multi-dimensional VAST empire.  This information is completely unknown to the Humans and is one reason why I heavily stress players only playing human characters.  The rubber science and sudo physics of the Rocketship Empire world brings home just how far advanced the Martians and their Empire is over the technology level they have shared with Mankind.   Details like the Hegemony Abyssal drive is shared…-the notion of Martians having long, long ago traced the “thread” connections between the gravity wells -not only between all of the star systems in this neck of the galaxy but hundreds of alternate galaxies as well.

 The rubber science also explains why so many habitable planets are available in the setting.  The reason being (of course) that the Hegemony has selected the most viable alternate world across multiple dimensions for building their standard trade lanes.  Humans are justly clueless monkey men when it comes to how absolutely far flung and into what alien alternate dimension they have gotten themselves by merrily following the routes spelled out for them by their Martian keepers.

Of course all this is going to grate heavily on the players (even in my game) and I can already hear the calls of “Viva La Revolution!” and the grumbling and lighting of torches as readers everywhere get ready to give the Martian’s their just rewards.

How this all ties into Psi abilities is fun as well.  It creates an amazing world where Psi = Space Travel only on a personal and very limited level.  Shifting into a very slightly alternate probability.  It also reveals just how massive the potential for use and abuse is for individuals able to wield the massive cosmic energy pushing all of creation forward through the geography of time and space.

 not to mention that the write ups for the ships were fun.

 Battleships…

 I made the decision to staff the Battleship example purposely very, very low in crew.  The Battleship I have in mind is almost an over size version of the Jules Verne Nautilus.  What I envisioned here is the possibility that a group of player characters and oh…maybe only twenty or thirty mercenaries could actually stage an assault against a Battleship and take control.  So bringing everything down suddenly takes a ship which would otherwise be far beyond the realm of player involvement into something the characters could actually meddle with…and meddling characters usually have a lot of fun.

Short Story

My first attempt at showing one of my story ideas.  Could it be better?  Well.  Probably. Like anything you can always rework it another ten times after the first ten.  After a certain point I feel its time to start putting the work out there, get feedback and learn to improve.  Having it sitting gathering dust in my desk is certainly doing no one any good.

Plus it really makes for nice campaign fodder.  It also definately fleshes out life on New Kansas which just happens to be a colony world a few hops removed from Spain..right on the main campaign map.

…more to come

Ed

New Milestone – Fan Hate Mail

Somewhere after crossing the line into reaching a certain number of customers, having enough reviews out there I suddenly entered this surreal world where I now rate wacky hate mail.

 I know.  Its a roleplaying game.  Hate mail over a roleplaying game?

Don’t get me wrong.  This is like two out of probably five hundred positive, hey good job, keep up the good work, maybe fix this or that issue emails.  I remember some other publishers and writers discussing this sort of thing before and it always boggled my mind.

I mean.  Hate mail over a game?

It boggles the mind.  There are some wacky, wacky people out there.

Ed

Back at number five…

We are back at number five on RPGnow with the core book.  The Betty and in Fury are back to climbing up to charts towards the top 20 on the day after the big GM’s day sale event.

 If all is quiet at work tonight (keep fingers crossed) then the Starship book will roll out tonight or early tomorrow morning.  If you are reading this I would recommend just hanging tight until you wake up tomorrow.

 I work graveyard shift at the print shop, so posting in the morning might mean 5:00 am or 6:00 am my time towards the end of my shift.

Yes, I have a day (or rather night) job.  What newbie RPG writer does not?  Yes my boss knows I write at work.  When the press is slow it is perfectly ok with him that I sit down and crunch out a little editing or writing while I keep an eye on the machines.

Besides.  Working at a print shop certainly helps support me on the creation of printed copies of the books.  I make them with my own two hands.

It all feels sort of old world craftsman…if such a thing even exists any longer.  Anyway I get a kick out of making them.  I have a friend named Pat who is a wizard at binding.  He handles the tricky binding bit.  (Thank you Pat oh elder god of the book bindings.)

That is it for now.  Tonight promises to be busy busy busy.

 Ed

Next week…project management 101

Here’s the lastest news from StoryART

We are closing in on 400 books sold.  We just finished our sixth week in business and our third week on RPGnow.

We are also closing in on 125 members / fans on the rocketshipempires website.  Today is March 09th.  We did our kick off around February 1st.  Originally I had thought we might have fifty or sixty members by this time so we are doing quite a bit better than I had planned.  Book sales continue to jog along.

Our rank.  We continue to float around the top ten mark at RPGnow.  Right now number seven.  The big GM’s day sale was tough on us as far as rankings go.  Several big companies rolled out major products during that period.  The rankings must be very close as only twenty book sales separates the number seven book from the number twenty something book.  We are selling more of the GM’s bundles.  Hopefully over the remainder of this month we will see all of our books start to climb again.

 As far as sales figures go we are holding pretty steady at where we began.

 Branching Out

 Applied to another e-store.  After the ship book is posted Monday night I plan to send print demo’s to two hard copy e-stores to generate orders.  I would like to see us get on one more PDF selling e-store as well this month.

Project Management

Next week I will spend two days working out more detailed project outlines for the next five book projects.  I will assign a writer to each project and an additional support artist or two.  Probably two.  This will take some of the heat off our small art team and give a few other people an opportunity.

 Video

Worked on a video.  Looks good.  Have to work on the music side of it.  We need to be licensed for our soundtrack.  I have several I would like to use but no real idea where to begin on getting the license secured.  Nothing is ever simple.  I may look into some other options and get creative on the music end of things.

Going to see about getting some photos of players, playing the game to include in the video.

 Newsletter

Newsletter is next week.  I have a few articles submitted and some nice art bits and pieces.  I’ll put it together and post it asap. 

Adventure

Most of the rest of this month will be focused on getting the module done.  I am rather excited to get rolling on this one full out.  Finishing the adventure book is a bit like crossing the big finish line for our startup.  It was the last missing piece we wanted to produce all along and really rounds out the products.  It is also the last of the five books we wanted to see delivered during the first quarter.  We may very well get it in under the wire.

Editing

Got some edits back from some folks.  Huzzah.  Sent some material out to some others and have not heard anything back.  Not so huzzah.  I am sure some of it will come in tonight.  Others.  Probably not.   

 Busy busy busy.  Back to writing for me.

..more to come! (that’s the understatement of the century)

The Big Push…

Crunch time again. 

 Were we not here just two or three weekends ago?  Starting tonight through Sunday night is the big damn push to finish the Starship Compendium.  Also launching a major marketing push.  We earned a LOT of ppp points on RPGnow from last months sales and intend to expend all of them on banner ads, page views and all kinds of other promotional goodies.

Going to try a variety of different bundles as well. Should greatly expand our offering and hopefully kick up our sales another notch.

Applied to YourGamesNow.com.  A great group.  Here is hoping we get a shot and they let us on board.  That should boost our customer exposure and sales a good deal.

 Been meaning to get some pictures of the books up (hard copy) but technical snafus keep getting in the way.  Also time is tough.  When I balance finishing the next book versus some of these other things the book usually wins.

 Pushing out a book is a major big deal guys.  The last three to five days I usually sink another 40 to 50 hours into it.  Usually late at night burning all nighters.

 Just wanted to post a quickie update.  Oh the cover for the Ship book is spectacular.  The best cover we have so far.

 Thank you Mike Doscher. 

more to come…

Freezer time revisited

     Did you know that licensed psi must either be rated to travel safely in jump space or must submit to travel restricted to a freezer birth?

     Why is that I wonder? 

      Kidding.  The answer rests somewhere within the mystery of why some phantoms and nightmares in the dark between the stars remain merely phantoms and why some become very, terrifyingly, horrifyingly real.

      Clearly the Ministry of Parapsyche under the general offices of the Order of the Golden Dawn has some clue or they would not know what to test for and who to order into an ice box for the duration of the trip through space.  Quite a few Captains won’t tolerate a Witch or a Warlock aboard their vessel and who can blame them.  Dealing with the aliens is darned peculiar enough without having a member of your space station’s officer staff able to intuit where you’ll be or what you are thinking.  Handy that he knows when the enemy is laying an ambush but damn skin crawling to have him “just happen” to show up at the level two service corridor during your morning jog, because he had a question for you.

Oh some of the psi are not too bad.  The inactive ones are almost human.  Almost.

 The more active they become, the greater the aura that something is not at all right about them dogs their heels like a cloud. 

 *Working on ideas for the Psi book.  Can you tell?  In a few minutes going to hop back into the ship book and stat out some more starships.  By tonight I should be down to five or six ships remaining. 

 All is going reasonably well. 

 Wish someone at RPGnow had informed me about this GM’s day sale thing.  I am sure it was something announced months ago.  Far too early for me to sign up.  I learned about it when I logged on.  It will be ok.  I will make it up to the guys by offering the new book solo and also as a bundled book with the In Fury book and Gunslinger Betty at a discount.

When the adventure rolls out maybe we’ll figure out another bundled set of options.

 more to come..