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Just wondering .. would anyone be interested in BWG fiction, like novels (printed & electronic)?

Kicking around an idea for a series of BWG "Dime Novels that cost more than a dime" .. softcover books that are maybe 80-100 pages each. 1 for each gang, 1 for each hired gun, and general stories too. Some would be more historical while others would have the weird west stuff. The goal would be 12 books per year, 1 per month, like a subscription. Realistically I'm thinking it would probably be more like bi-monthly.

Already have a reasonable quote from 1 author, but it would probably need a kickstarter to get it going. Don't really know much about kickstarting books though... But I thought it would be fun, and since a lot of those old dime novels were westerns it would be fitting. What do y'all think?

PP appear to be doing a roaring trade with their novella-length ebooks. I think they're currently releasing at the rate of about 1 per month, which seems about right.

As for a Kickstarter, what about making it a stretch goal for the Weird West game? That way you can get it going without having to make a dedicated project, and once it's going it should be easier to keep things rolling.

I think ebooks would be better than actual softcover. Allows you quicker releases and is a lot cheaper to publish!

That being said, I would love some novellas to read.

What about releasing them individually as ebooks, then releasing a themed physical compilation with artwork and the like?

That way you could release stories without having to wait for enough weird west stories to fill a book.

Yeah i think thats a good idea.. copy off PP and do all electronic and then see about doing printed collections later on. Would be a lot cheaper than printing a ton of books that might sit in a warehouse for a long time

I would have zero interest in ebooks. I don't like to do my reading on machines.
I would also not like a subscription deal.

Novella type stories would interest me, if the price was right. What worries me is just that; the price. You might not be commercial enough to support it yet. Either you've got to have a reasonable price with a large audience or a higher price with a smaller audience. Right now, I fear that you're in the latter.

What about running some sort of contest and posting the results on your site?

Eric

That's the thing - if you keep them generic enough, you can sell them as simple old west novellas.

It might be worth talking to someone in the publishing industry and asking them how popular the old west/wild west genre is at the moment.

Yeah I'd love to have each one be a printed book but I do worry that the game isn't really popular enough to support all those printing costs. So I think we would mostly likely have to do it all digital at first if at all... and then get into printed books later on when we know it's something we can afford.

I actually didn't think Game Salute would be into it and was going to fund the first book myself, but they like the idea so we'll have to work out all the details over the next couple of months and see how we want to approach it.

Do you have authors, or will you be writing all of these yourself?

Yep I have an author lined up, we're going to try and put together a deal where he can do X amt of novellas for whatever price and then take it from there. I'm sure we'd be open to other authors too later on if it works out.

I don't want to do the writing, my style is too textbooky. Might be ok for a rulebook but not a story where you need things like dialog and plot.

 Necros wrote:
I don't want to do the writing, my style is too textbooky. Might be ok for a rulebook but not a story where you need things like dialog and plot.

I hear ya >_< Miskatonicalum keeps trying to get me to work on Brushfire and Endless fluff... it always ends badly...

So, we're probably going to start working on the first book soon. I was going to just go down the list and do "gang bio" stories about each gang, but I think to start off with I'd like to have the first book be a story based on the adventure game, all about Skinwalkers and the hunters who hunt them.. to kind of set the theme for the game world.. and then do the gang books afterwards along with other stories.

When we do the kickstarter for the adventure game I'm hoping we'll be able to include the ebook for the first story as one of the extra goodies for the sweet spot pledge, or an add-on item if you wanted a printed version.

Sure Necros won't mind but here's a little tease for what I'm reading and painting as research for the next several months upcoming writing project...

Cheers
JP