News You Can Bruise for 2012 May 29 (entry 0)

(3) Tue May 29 2012 09:46 Constellation Games Author Commentary #27: "Friend Codes": Hey there. Let's talk business!

Back when the serialization launched, people were really curious about our business model, but that curiosity didn't lead to thousands of subscriptions. The stuff I've been working on since--the commentaries, the in-character Twitter feeds--has proven great for engaging with fans but not so great at getting new people interested. This makes me worry that Constellation Games is on track to be the kind of book that has dedicated fans and gets good reviews (here's the latest: "presented so well that it is now quite hard to imagine first contact going any other way."), but never becomes the hit I was hoping for.

That's not too bad for a first novel, but I'd like to do better. There's one more inflection point approaching in the book's life, a point where some marketing could make a big difference. Sometime in early August, once the serialization has finished, the ebook will be released, and unlike the paperback, the ebook will be cheap. Setting the prices is Kate's job and not mine, but I imagine it'll be around $5, the current cost of the base package. My hope is that this will put Constellation Games into impulse-buy territory for when someone hears "hey, there's this novel about alien video games."

I'm bringing this up now because I want your help. We've got some things lined up like a radio guest appearance, some things that might or might not pan out like a bookstore appearance, a whole lot of things we tried to set up but didn't happen for whatever reason. I want your ideas of people I can contact who might be interested in talking with me, not about the book but about related interesting topics.

This is not "like us on Facebook" type crap. I hate that sort of promotion and I don't think it works. I want to set up the situation that makes me want to buy someone's book, where I hear/read them saying interesting things and then, hey, they have a book out. You've seen the sort of stuff I write on this weblog. If you know someone who might like to talk to me on their podcast, or host something I wrote, or a game I made up, or a dynamic dada assemblage, or whatever, let me know and I'll get in touch with them. I don't know if anything will come of it, but it's worth a shot. Let me know in comments or email me at leonardr@segfault.org.

You can suggest conventions or faraway bookstores, but I'm trying to get the word out without travelling a lot or spending a lot of money—likely a futile task, but the one I've chosen. (I also don't like going to conventions.) Also, my experience on both the sending and receiving ends indicates that the vast majority of emails of this kind are simply ignored, so let me know if I can/it'll help to mention your name when I email whoever you're suggesting.

Okay, business is over, time for ars gratia artis. Here's last week's Twitter feed, and here's the latest commentary:

• Everyone hates BEA Agent Fowler. You hate him, Ariel hates him, and Krakowski hates him. So Krakowski did what Ariel would do, if Ariel were a really talented bureaucrat instead of a really talented programmer. He got Fowler transferred to the ass-end of nowhere. You're probably happy about this. I made Fowler a huge jerk specifically so you'd be happy when he got the shaft. But it worked too well!

  You know the bit in The Phantom Menace where the protagonists are being chased by a big fish, who then gets eaten by an even bigger fish? If there's one thing I've learned from writing this novel, it's that if you make that first fish a big enough jerk, it'll take a while for readers to notice what the second fish is doing.

• Tiny detail I'm way too proud of: Krakowski refers to Curic as "he."
• City, In Darkness has a name inspired by (but is otherwise unconnected with) Hunter, In Darkness, Andrew Plotkin's IF remake of Hunt the Wumpus. And the "Stinky Soda Factories" in the Wii version were originally empty lots, just because I couldn't think of anything. SSFs were suggested by Kirk. The game as a whole is a more game-like version of Animal Crossing.
• After selling the book I heavily rewrote the "lying" scene between Ariel and his mom, for a couple reasons. Most importantly, when coming back after some time away from the manuscript, I found myself much more willing to be mean to Ariel.

  And this is an incredibly mean scene. Unfortunately a full grasp of its meanness requires that you come back to it later, when you know what's going through Ariel's head. I generally try to avoid that. It's fun to write, but most people won't go through the book twice, so it's not too effective. But the scene is mean on its own, and its hidden depths will start paying off as early as next week.

• Up to this point, the Constellation equivalent of Star Trek's replicator was called the Repertoire. As of the "lying" scene, it's just the repertoire. It's gone from an amazing new technology (the Web) to something accepted as part of the landscape (the web).
• Tiny notes on the lecture: I like the idea of an actual device called an intuition pump. (In real life it's a type of thought experiment, coined by Daniel Dennett.) And Tetsuo's not very optimistic about the job prospects for the students he's teaching.

Not much commentary this week, but we do have the second of three deleted scenes. This would be a "real life" scene if that distinction existed back in the third draft. As before, first the scene, then the explanation as to why I cut it. The scene opens with Ariel having biked back to Jenny's house from the train station:

September 20, evening

Waiting outside on the stairs outside Jenny's apartment. Working on Sayable Spice: Earth Remix. Back in Austin, Tetsuo back at Bruce's house. Downstairs, the clank of a bike lock. Jenny comes up the stairs and she's real sweaty and happy.

"Hey," I said. "How was your weekend?"

"How long you been here?" she said. "You should have called."

"Eh, forty-five minutes. I'm hacking. It's fine."

"Weekend was great!" said Jenny. She drew keys from her bicycle shorts and unlocked the apartment door. "I took my nephew into space."

"How far out did you go?"

"Well, first we stood in line for eight hours. But surprisingly even that was fun. Eddie and I played drawing games on his smart paper. Then we went up, we did a couple orbits, we buzzed the ISS, came within like ten feet of some other tourists from China, and back down."

I reclaimed Jenny's couch with my ass. "That's not very far," I said.

"Far enough, Ariel! It was the best experience of my life! It was like being in this beautiful glass womb and seeing the whole Earth reborn."

"Oh, wow, maybe I should try it."

"Dude, have a smoke before you go up. The merry-wan-ha. Don't give up on space travel because of nausea."

"It's not just nausea. It's this feeling of emptiness. Like..."

Jenny stood behind the sofa and clapped her hands onto my shoulders. "All right then. What shall we do for dinner?"

about this stuff

"Can we do pork-stuffed lobster with cheese sauce?"

"Sure, I think we got a couple lobsters in the crisper. Right under the filet mignon. What's your problem, Ariel? Your folks don't even keep kosher."

"I'm so much like them that I feel this need to differentiate myself from them. We all do it. You became an artist, Raph became a right-wing asshole..."

"Well, differentiate yourself by chopping some green beans. We'll do stir-fry."

The other two deleted scenes were added in the second draft, but this one was added in the third draft. I like this scene, but there's no reason for it to exist. It doesn't do any worldbuilding or character development that isn't done elsewhere. I originally wrote it to foreshadow developments in chapter 30, but as I suggested when discussing the lying scene, foreshadowing is overrated. It's just an easter egg for people who go back and reread. That's worth a sentence, not a whole scene.

Plus, this easter egg confuses more than it clarifies, and there already are easter eggs for chapter 30, e.g. in chapters 2 and 17. So I cut the scene, but I (tenatively) still consider it canon.

That's it for this week. Don't miss the exciting chapter 28, in which Ariel's descent into madness continues, to the extent that Ashley is forced to say, "I don't wish to mate with you!" [We really need to talk about these misleading previews. -Ed.]

Image credits: NASA, Chris Lott, Flickr user mecookie, NASA.

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Comments:

Posted by Jeanne at Tue May 29 2012 10:47

Detail I really like within this chapter: Tetsuo's email signature with its eerily truncated Debs quote.

Posted by Ben Heaton at Wed May 30 2012 18:09

The previews can't mislead me now that I've read a paper copy of the book. I've foiled your plans by buying your work!

Posted by Leonard at Wed May 30 2012 19:19

I've never been happier to have had my plans foiled.