Do It Now, Not Later (I Am A Dandelion)

I have to get used to blogging on the run. That's what the title's all about. That and wanting the title to sound like a track listing from a 70s prog rock opus. :)

I just thought I'd drop off a link to some advice for self publishers from Neil Gaiman via Forbes.

Nice article, if the prospect of reading the whole thing is still tl, so you are tempted to, er, nr, here's a precis:

1. Be nice: As it says
2. Readers discover authors they love, they don’t buy them: Linked to Guy Kawasaki's 'Cover The Earth'. People find stuff they like and then they spend money, it is never the other way round. Same for music, same for anything really. I have one CD I bought on sight with no other info. I have over 500 CDs. All the rest came from music conversations, music sharing, memories, emotional attachment. If you're not out there people cannot become emotionally attached to stuff you do. So get people engaged with your stuff, then ask for money.
3. What is valuable is what is unique: Short version make your product, or versions of your product, special somehow. Innovate.
4. Make yourself heard: As it says.
5. Be lucky, be a dandelion, try stuff: Disclosure time, the thing I have learned about Chicago Shadows is that, presently, it is hard for me to get the books out there particularly with respect to item 4. I wouldn't class the current volumes as a failure but my current projects are easier to get out in front of the world, so they are going to take priority.

The Modern Reader

With hindsight it is easy to see that the last thing to change in the e-publishing revolution would be the readers. Any lack of clarity in the chain of distribution between author and reader will lead to the reader finding a clearer channel of communication.

For this reason in the hotbed of new developments for indie authors the customer has stuck to the old channels of communication and continued to purchase traditional product in the traditional way. For most people this is not a problem and probably will not change substantially as time marches on. What's important though is that the lack of change will be perceptual, not actual. The reason that the average book punter will not perceive the change is because the change happens, if you like, "upstream" of where they are standing.

There's a scene in the movie (and possibly in the book that I have not read) The Devil Wears Prada in which the bitchy boss deconstructs the protagonist's blue sweater. In this example the protagonist of TDWP is the average book punter, any well-known author is played by the blue sweater and the world of publishing is played by the world of fashion.

Let me see if I can get a quote... ah here:

"...that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise. It's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. And you're ... blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... who showed cerulean military jackets... And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it ... filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room..."

Possibly you are already pointing to the work of folks like JK Rowling or Stephen King as examples to the contrary of 'being selected for success'. This is because those authors who are best known in the modern world are the breakaway surprise best sellers. They play by their own rules, so I will not be considering them here.

I'm not entirely sure that fashion has an equivalent for the breakaway surprise bestseller (which is any best seller by an author no one was previously aware existed) as I do not follow fashion. Unfortunately the breakaway bestseller model is how most people think of the whole of the world of publishing. This is not the case.

Many authors that people know of, I'm thinking of someone like Michael Connelly or Robert Crais here, got to their current position by the sweat of their brow and by finding out a particular group of readers. These readers, the equivalent of people who take a keen interest in not only items of fashion but also the workings of the fashion industry, are people who hunt out the new thing, who wish to proudly proclaim that they were into x way before everyone else even knew x was a thing.

Segue into the music industry. Our early adopter reader also has a little in common with the people who hang out in grungy clubs listening to a bunch of appalling noise in the hope of glimpsing the birth of the next rock god. At the moment the overlap is very slight. It's going to grow and grow in days to come.

There's a key difference between fashion and music. New designers quickly become 'legitimate' when they start to make a noise. The gap between being nobody and being a 'face' in fashion is infinitesimal. This is exactly equivalent to the paradigm of traditional publishing. Either you are published by one of the big houses or you are not. If you are not, in this paradigm, you are no one at all.

In music you may not be 'signed' to a major label but that does not mean that you are nobody. Indeed, in the world of music being 'indie' can be a badge of honour. Every so often a small indie fish gains traction and enjoys some success. There's a whole mess of stuff attached to success in music to do with 'selling out' or 'becoming commercial' possibly this will not infect the world of publishing... possibly it already has.

That's the delightful thing. Publishing is not music and publishing is not fashion. This group of hardcore indie readers will behave in their own way, possibly influenced by, but not exactly identical to, the way in which the dedicated followers of fashion or music behave.

The uncertainty in how they actually will behave arises from the fact that, at this stage, we just don't know. I am one of a small band of pioneers, I hunt for novels with no reviews, written by someone no one's ever heard of and I want to say 'I read so-and-so before they broke big'. That concept excites me, and I know I'm not alone.

The problem I face in this crazy world of indie authored ebooks in which we find ourselves is that finding 'the good stuff' is a bit of a challenge. Every book I have read recently has been "a little bit indier" than the one before it. In my quest I do feel somewhat alone, there are no book groups to visit, there is no channel to receive information that is on a level beyond the broadcast of indie-marketing blurb. I am sensing a lack of organised community. Indie writers are all telling each other about their work but I have not encountered many indie-only book enthusiasts; all that I have are lone rangers, blazing their own lonely trail into the world of indie-book culture.

This is a brave new world and all it really needs is some coherent notion of who should inhabit it. I look forward, eagerly, to discovering my fellow inhabitants of this indie-lit Arcadia.

Chance Would Be A Fine Thing

Visited London at the weekend to stay with gamer Mike. I got the double pleasure of playing his Tron lightcycle tabletop game, which is a real toy experience, and running a PULP game for Mike, Nick, Rob and Vicky.

They opted for Western style and we produced a slice of fairly moody frontier drama. The characters created weren't high toned enough for spaghetti Western, or silly enough for heroic Western, although Nick's Riverboat gambler did seem to fit into any of the above.

We elected, due to time restraints, to generate characters on the fly and that worked out very well indeed. I'm really happy with the fact that PULP is becoming the most invisible of all of our systems in terms of the dichotomy between support and absence.

On the way home with Justin had a big discussion about the way that No Dice is going and what we might like to do to plan for the future. I'm surprised to find that I am having difficulty viewing any level of corporate involvement as any kind of help at this stage. One day I would love to use what I've learned to design a game with a "proper" games company but I'm not sure that any of our current projects would benefit from the involvement of the wise and wonderful in the world of RP. After all we still have acres of niche to exploit getting PULP RP and the Core System into the homes of gamers everywhere mostly down to the failure of everyone else in the world to really fill the narrative void. This is down in no small part to a corporate model which believes such things to be, at best, too risky to be viable.

I'm also enjoying the Robin Hood act, being generous, being crazy, trying to claim the market with kindness. I'd say it hasn't paid off, except it's starting to. That's what's enormously encouraging. People are coming forth and saying that No Dice is "a good thing". I wouldn't want anything to interfere with that currently.

On Walkabout...

I think I need to work out what to put in this blog a bit more carefully. I find that the topics I have covered recently tend to just reflect information I have given elsewhere more succinctly (or more thoroughly, whichever is appropriate).

The good thing about a blog should be the "random noodley" aspect and I think I've been altogether too organised about this. Also I have written enthusiastically and communicating ireful passion on things that, in reality were no more than minor irritations. (See D&D, Cards vs. Dice etc.)

I think when I can decide what needs to go here it will be a lot gentler than it has been.

I am also not committing to being "back" from walkabout in any significant way. Let's just see how many posts are forthcoming before we commit to that.

To be honest, I feel in the world of blogs I am a constant participant who is mostly ignored anyway. So I feel it makes very little difference whether I blog or not.

I only blog when it makes a difference to me. I would like my blog to be interactive and a forum for lively debate. Maybe I have been too definite in my opinions for that. Wishy washiness is something that blogs seem to be built for so commenters can be seen to be swaying the blogger one way or another.

Anyway, that's all there is for now.

Missing By A Mile

Recovering from a system bork I found this in my unpublished drafts. It's an article by a much more old-skool games designer than anyone I hang out with.

What I found amusing was the referencing of games designers pandering to rules lawyers. It has to be said that hitherto most successful games companies have made money by doing precisely this. It makes me wonder if we're going about this the right way or if we should be producing another 200 page rules supplement every week like some other games companies.

Oh well, guess we'll never be rich and we'll be considered wrong and foolish; at least we're happy not wasting our lives looking for a definitive decision on that rules quibble.

Connection Issues

There comes a time when staring at the same old blog interface becomes... well, a little staid, tiresome, tedious.

It doesn't mean you love the blog any less, oh no, not at all. Just a blogger craves a bit of variety.

I know, I know a blog is for life not just for christmas but still, the tumblr interface promised something blogger seemed a little hesitant to deliver. Interconnectivity. The way I understand it I should be able to publish here, it will appear on my tumblr dashboard and I will be able to then reblog it there with an option to send a summary to Twitter.

The disadvantage of this is that I have less idea how many people are lurking on any of my blogs. The upside is that a blog is supposed to attract comments and as I hardly ever get comments lurkers are unimportant. It's not really how many people you have no idea are reading your stuff that's important, it's the people you do know are reading and commenting on what you write that's important.

I've been blogging somewhere since about 2004, my proper blog first blossomed into existence in 2006. Four years on and I have no idea how to garner comments from the wider world. I sometimes throw a sideways glance at more able blogger's like Coding Horror's Jeff Atwood and wipe away a tear of frustration. I think it's a holy grail to turn a blog into a discussion and I've never known anyone actually be able to bottle that particular species of lightning.

Anyway. I live in hopes that one day I will attract commentators to my blog and I think being more connected is definitely a step in the right direction. Although, obviously, nothing can be proven on this score.

2010: The Year We Got Busy

I wish that the amusing implication of the post title was anywhere near accurate. No, a more literate version of the semantics is to be inferred.

The plans are afoot for a calendar littered knee deep with exciting and rewarding events. The problem is that none of them are planned. Unplanned events are the absolute worst kind. You know they are going to resolve into the flesh but until you have a time, or a place, or both they torture you with vagueness.

Among the highlights of a full summer programme are: New No Dice events at Nottingham's new game and comic shop where Justin and I are also almost certain to organise a bit of Heroscape. Especially seeing as WotC seem to have released the Scape freeze to produce a D&D themed Underdark expansion set, which looks pretty yummy.

We'll also be wanting to get out and about in the summer time as outdoor No Diceing last summer was a brilliant success. In addition we want to hit three conventions, our friends at Beer and Pretzels, IndieCon (our non-attendance at which was an epic fail for us last year) and GenCon (if there is one). It doesn't stop there: we want to organise our own massive shindig to tie in with the release of Levercastle.

Finally, myself and the Mrs want to slope off for a couple of holidays in amongst all that. And there's the ever present joy of the Belper games weekends!

2010 will be eventful for sure. But will I survive it?

P.S. Check out our new slimline podcast available from the link top right.

Britain Thinks: Wisdom of Crowds or Mob Rules?

Have just decided to show some practical support for new internet site Britain Thinks which looks like it could be jolly good fun. At the moment the interface is a bit sparse, I imagine it's intended to be a sort of social networking site with an agenda of debate. Well, we have loads of social networking opportunities, but debates not so much. So they've opened the site with a number of debating tools.

Basically you can go to a topic, there's voting buttons and a neat flashy type widget that plays videos. Obviously the videos are all, or mostly, the starting content, mostly minute long soundbites, but I saw one sort of documentary style piece as well. Inevitably there's a comment box and lots of rating facilities and so on and so forth.

So you watch the videos, you read the comments, you vote on the voting panels and you do so having signed up for an account.

Initial thoughts?

Well, I'm a bit disturbed that for a substantial site, or at least a site that purports to be all about the substance of debate about everyday issues, it seems quite bitty. In my cursory inspection it seemed quite difficult to flit from clip to clip, the tumult of opinion seemed quite random. As someone who likes a good organised debate I was quite dismayed that there was nothing there to get your teeth into.

I have to say the site was only launched on Monday, as such it's probably a more technical achievement at present than an instant classic of web design. Things I would hope to see in the future:

• I am a user, but I have no acces to edit my account profile! Oh noes!
• There are other users but they have no visible public profiles.
• The debate pages are designed cleanly from a graphic design POV but this masks an underlying incoherence in conceptual structure. Is this op ed Twitter where statements of length are to be frowned upon?
• I think I would like to be able to aggregate debates and even run them from within the personal profile I don't yet have. This would help enormously with, my final point...
• The content is grouped by topic and videos are star-rated but the arguments are not streamed like an essay, you just get assaulted by a little bit about this and then a little bit about that. The topics are huge and being banged around in an opinion pinball machine is weird. If topics had administrators who applied some sort of taxonomy to the issues this would help a bunch. For example in a debate about education comments could be labelled "teachers", "exams", "government", "parents", "students", "curriculum" so that you could watch streams of comments about one sub-topic.

Having said all that I think the idea of using the web as a speaker's corner is a great idea. Usually the forum for issues are controlled by government or some half-baked subset of functionality offered by a social networking site built, primarily, for other purposes.

I would love to see Britainthinks become something that gets referenced on the news when emotive news stories arise, I'd love to see its clips being used in Question Time and things like that. If the man on the street can vent a sophisticated opinion at home and be watched by people who are going to entertain his ideas seriously and respond in kind that's a great leap forward in net based political interaction.

I imagine it will also be a home for people to vent shocking stupidity and vile hate speech, but that's as important.

If you are reading this, and you're British I urge you to support this initiative, I think it's a winner. DISCLAIMER: In 2006 someone sent me an invite to link to their profile on something called "Facebook". I looked at the site, decided it was rubbish, it would never work, so I never accepted the invitation. My powers of prediction should be measured by that opinion...

Yikes!

So RoboJoe stole the show... *sigh* worst X Factor winner Evar! (relatively speaking, Leon Jackson was a massive anti-climax but he wasn't up against talent like Olly, Danyl and Stacey, he also wasn't following talent like Alexandra and JLS).

I've been creating a wiki for No Dice. This will replace the soon to be extinct No Dice Forums. Have a look around. There's already a bunch of stuff in System Hacks.

Also Random Encounters is out! The ideal Chrimbo gift! Buy one now! ;)

Have a good Monday!

Tweeting The Second Time Around

I have to ask myself the question: Am I just not getting it or is Twitter, in fact, rubbish?

The first time round I didn't give the world of Tweeting a chance; so I'm back on with a Twitter feed that is on the public timeline and trying to get my head round all this "Trending Topics" nonsense. I even looked on here for a widget to put in the sidebar which would allow people to see my Tweets but there doesn't appear to be an "official" one so that quest came to a hasty end, in the first instance.

Still, I am determined not to be one of these people who showers scorn on something just because he doesn't really get it. I want to get it before I shower scorn on it because for the life of me I don't know why all these celebrities and whatnot think it's so amazing. I had a quick look at Charlie Brooker's feed and the massively tiled background photo, preponderance of profanity and surreal disconnection of an unnetworked feed sent me away underwhelemed.

Perhaps I will warm to it...

I think I'm "searchable" so why not look for me. After all that's the idea of this stuff, surely.

In other news: they're making a film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice & Zombies cue mind-boggling at the intertextuality.

An underwhelming set of duets is planned for the X Factor Final. In the office the prevailing attitude is that nobody should win because they're all rubbish. As long as Robojoe fails to win I really don't mind. I think it may well be Olly, if it's not Robojoe. If it is Robojoe I predict a christmas number one and then almost certain obscurity as people fail to care. An unfortunate wastage of the X Factor prize fund. Who knows if he wins I may try to push "Killing In The Name Of" to number one for Christmas as the Facebook group wishes.

The only thing that's news-y about the revelation that most people won't pay extra for TV in HD is that the BBC thinks this is news. I remember watching  the clarity and beauty of the clear digital image slack jawed when DVD was released. But HD only improves on DVD a tiny little bit, and is monstrously more pricey. Whoever thought people would pay premium for that is stupid and greedy. Like I said, big news, not.

It appears that now people can see how whichever government is in power at the time is apparently squandering taxpayer money at Where Does My Money Go dot org. 53bn on General Public Services, eh? That'll buy a lot of second homes and duck houses... Pardon my cynicism. How long before someone registers wheredoesmymoneyreallygo.org? I can picture a wonderful parody with coloured circles representing "Down the back of the sofa", "Government 'Sharp Exit In Case Of Coup' Fund" and so on and so forth. It's all very well being able to see how the government our wasting the sweat of our collective brows but if we don't like the size or number of coloured circles in a particular category what, exactly, are we supposed to do? Ask for a refund?

Meanwhile, the taxman is complaining that his old computers are stopping him pwning us for all the money we might possibly owe. So let's get this straight, shall we? The government wants to plunge us back into misery and gloom in 2010 by charging us more tax for everything and the taxman is moaning because he can't screw us for an even greater amount... It seems as if we never needed a website to answer the question about where our money went. The answer is quite obvious.

Well, as always it's up to the personal world to rescue me from such gloomy thoughts. There's bacon, sausage, Dreamtime Stories and a generally sociable weekend in my immediate future. It seems all my money goes on buying cuts of dead pig... yum.

Relentlessly Upbeat Friday Post

As promised today I will be relentlessly upbeat, despite the fact that there's really not all that much to be relentlessly upbeat about in the outside world at large. I think that's the way of the world. Everything in the wider world looks grim but personally people might be having quite a nice time.

For example, tonight I have pizza for tea and a small Montecristo cigarello to enjoy. Tomorrow is Monster Magnet at Rock City. Christmas is three weeks today.

Not everybody likes Christmas, the Mrs claims to hate it for example, but I always find it to be a pleasing punctuation mark on the year. Maybe I won't be so delighted by the festive season this year as I've decided to forego the usual extra long holiday from Christmas Eve through to the dawn of the New Year but as someone who likes the quiet I think it'll all be okay...

Maybe I'm just a hopeless optimist.

Of course one of the small pleasures of the weekend is The X Factor, which I refuse to term a guilty pleasure. It just is what it is. Also it's nice that of the final four there are no donkeys.

If I was going to be having a punt at who thegeneralpublic will be voting out this week I'd have to say I reckon it'll be Mr. Murs, or possibly, if travesty after travesty continues to occur on the weirdest X Factor I've ever seen then it might be Daniel.

Suffice to say I think that Stacey (Penguin Girl) and Oliver (That chap from South Shields who's so boring I can't even remember his name) are safe this week but if there was any justice in the world we would be saying goodbye to Oliver, he's the most tedious entrant this year by far. What makes the whole thing extra sad is that he seems not to have been to stage school but you wouldn't know it from the way he mugs through every song like he's about to hit the jazz hands with a side of spirit fingers for all it's worth.

Well, time, and Sunday evening shall tell.

Have a good weekend all!

The Glorious British Summer

Well, after a week off resting it's taken me about two days back in the cut and thrust of every day life to feel like I need another holiday. The silly season is well underway now, dead buses in the morning and a general apathy in just about everyone.

Ironically we have been doing quite a bit of role playing at this time. Polishing off one off play testing, exploring a hack or two. Yup, no slackness here on that front. I'm starting to think that the time to compile all of our endeavours is not long off...

I can't help but notice the insistent rain. I wonder if this will drive people back to their PCs and hopefully help revive the forum.

Modern Storytelling

I remember once Mike made a comparison between roleplaying and the ancient art of storytelling. He wasn't wrong either. Sure, the details have changed but a lot of what goes on (at least round our way) under the guise of role playing is actually group storytelling. What struck me at the time was that before the widespread adoption of the printing press, before radio, before television, these activities must have gone on. They must have because we still know ancient myths even though they could not be set down and widely distributed (to most people) until some time in the 19th Century.

Storytelling was, if anything, an orally transmitted and propagated cultural phenomenon in its old form. When you could read from a book, or listen to the radio, when you could go to the movies, watch television or play a computer game it looked like the ancient art of storytelling was redundant. It served no purpose. It was just a phase humanity went through before it got a next gen console.

I can't question what Mr. Gygax was thinking about when he invented D&D. It seems pretty obvious on one level. What he has ended up doing is paving the way for storytelling to come back. This is what I love about role playing books. They're not an attempt to replace a group activity involving people interacting. They're a support to that process. All the stories of the World of Darkness are just prologue to the player campaigns.

A weighty heritage for a hobby that has not thus far managed to cast off its geek-laden roots.

It's come to me recently, over and over, that there must have been a real hunger at some level of society for the return of group storytelling because the original roleplaying set up just doesn't seem like a terribly attractive proposition.

RPGs at their inception were games. You could win and you could lose. The roll of the dice was a core component in "beating" the dungeon adventure. Scores were vital. These trappings, the trappings of the competitive pursuit have proven almost impossible for the hobby to cast off so far. There just hasn't been anyone to reshape any part of it into a discrete entertainment experience.

So Justin and I are writing the manual but make no mistake this is something the people we knew were tending towards anyway. There are a few vital ingredients that we have had to bring in from the cold but the core of No Dice is the making available of a group storytelling experience to a culture that neglected and carelessly forgot how to engage in it. Not that I think modern story based role play is much like a storytelling experience of yore but the parts that are the same are vital, community, communication, sharing time as a group.

We were lucky enough at the weekend to have a complete role-play n00b join us for the preview event. I ran a hitherto notorious zombie romp called "Con of the Dead" which relies a little on the participants having some knowledge of SF television. Until now this has never been a problem in the groups I have encountered. Our n00b however, didn't watch any television particularly and so was in danger of missing many of the in-jokes.

The problem of being the Host is that even if people find their minds numb at the end of the day the tendency is to smile and nod and thank you because people realise how much work you must have done and feel that criticising it would be rude. So I asked our n00b how he liked the session and he said all the right things. After the session I asked Sue whether she got the same vibe.

This is the joy of Sue. People will tell her what they think even if it's that they thought my game sucked. Quite the reverse occurred in this case and we may have one more enthusiastic player to join in the fun of the non-Marauders week game. Justin wryly remarked that we'd have to monitor this "Pied Piper" effect closely. We already split off a monthly group to make a weekly one. Now it looks like we may end up splitting off the weekly one to make, er, two weekly groups if we're not careful.

As Justin rightly pointed out the real answer is to get people skilled up to take the No Dice approach out to the world. Then we don't have to keep catering for fresh addicts who want a gaming fix. Not that I mind trying to fill my life with gaming activities and introducing the hobby to new people but there are so many hours in a day, days in a week and so on and so forth.