New Year's Message

Looking back, 2008 was a great year. Since my first book, Riding the Hell-Bound Train, premiered at Worldcon in Denver, I’ve been on a roller-coaster ride of appearances. It’s been great fun to travel, meet all of you, do readings and signings, and participate in lots of panels at SF Conventions.

The coming year looks even better. We have spent most of this week here at the Borgamy talking about new paradigms in publishing and presentation on the Internet and will be implementing some exciting projects and changes for the website starting in the next couple weeks.

First of all, we’re going to put up a story every month for you to read. Some will be ones that were already published in the book; others will be new, exclusive, and set in the Iona universe. I understand that the economy is troubled right now—everyone’s feeling the pinch, and lots of people in the fannish community are out of work. Therefore, we’re not going to charge you one cent to read these stories. Instead, we’re going to have a tip jar attached—after you finish the story, if you like it and want to keep us in business, send us what you can afford using PayPal. Over the next six months, you’ll get the background information for what we’re planning for late 2009:

An Iona Novel

So far, I’ve got three chapters done on a novel featuring Margee and Jerry, Molly, Doctor Mike Stevens, a host of fairies, and some great new characters. As the year progresses, we’ll be putting up short character biographies and Allie’s very excited about doing some sketches of the Dramatis Personae. I’m not sure how we’re going to market the novel—whether to try to sell it to a larger publisher or talk to John and go the small press route using Peregrination Press again. If, and this is a big if, the contributions on the short stories are large enough, we may just serialize it on the website for donations and then self-publish hardcopies using lulu.

Next item—we are revamping the entire website purchasing procedure for buying Hell-Bound Train in order to make it as simple and painless as possible. We’ve been told that it’s just too damn hard, so we’re going to fix that. In addition, henceforth, we will eat the sales tax for Illinois residents and pay the shipping charges for everyone, no matter where you live. Hell, I’ll even sign every copy we sell, personally—all for a total price of $24.50. If you still don’t want to buy a copy over the ‘Net, show up at one of my appearances this year—I guarantee you that I’ll have some with me and we can work out a deal.

Finally, and this is still in the very early planning stages, we intend to introduce greater interactivity to our website. Within the next few months, we’ll be putting up a forum and message boards where readers can ask questions, make suggestions, bitch, cheer, swoon, or just hang out. I plan to spend a lot of time on the boards—this promises to be great fun.

So, that’s the news. We’re excited about all the changes. Stay tuned, it’s going to be a great year.