It’s a little strange to realize it’s been almost six years since I last published a book, Sword of My Mouth. It’s something I did pretty regularly for a decade, putting out five books between 2000-2010 — and then I just stopped. A couple of reasons conspired to make this so.
The first one was kind of a heart-breaker. (more…)
Things have changed since I started No Media Kings in the year 2000. Rupert Murdoch, who inspired the name, is less of a threat to media security than the innocuous & pervasive Google and Apple. I’ve gone from writing novels, to writing for games, comics, and movies. I went from being a 20-something bachelor writing about superheroes and rocket ships to a 40-something father making a historical mystery audio drama.
I launched NMK by giving away free ebook versions Angry Young Spaceman. Pre-Kindle and iPhone, people found it baffling. But the gift economy works — it’s come back to me in a lot of ways.
So every month I’m going to be giving one of my six ebooks away!
If you want to find out when the new book’s up follow me on Twitter or even better, subscribe to the blog — so we don’t have to rely on a corporation to keep in touch.
Free in August: Angry Young Spaceman
My book about a guy who goes to another planet to teach English, based loosely on my ESL stint in Korea. Recently the talented Marc Bell drew a few pages adapting the beginning of the story, above is a detail from it.
“It’s a wonderful book. Unquestionably SF, it isn’t written in the usual science fiction voice, and that’s part of its charm. His prose is conversational, his characters and settings of the future Earth and Octavia are fascinating, and the story remains engaging from start to finish.” — Charles de Lint, Fantasy & Science Fiction
Cover art and back cover copy & more blurbs here.
Free in September: Everyone In Silico
Free in October: Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask
Free in November: An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil
Free in December: Therefore Repent! (illustrated by Salgood Sam)
Free in January: Sword of My Mouth (illustrated by Shannon Gerard)
A lot of people find quantifying the creative process to be distasteful somehow, but I dig hour logging — I keep track of how much time I’m spending on most of my projects. It gives me a way to predict timelines for similar projects in the future, and there’s something geekily satisfying about all that addition at the end of a day. It didn’t really work well with the movie project I’m working on, too many people and too many working styles, but it worked well with Shannon and I on the Sword of My Mouth graphic novel.
[Shannon, by the way, is currently on tour on the west coast — she’s doing a book launch at Lucky’s on Aug. 24th in case you live in Vancouver!]
So here’s a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.
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Review wise, we’ve had a pretty nice response from places like Bust, Boing Boing, and the Onion A.V. Club — check out the blurbs here. Also, tor.com has published an excerpt — you can read the first chapter there.
We got a bit of coverage at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival — the guys from Vepo Studios interviewed me for their great piece on self-publishing comics and I rambled on with the guys with RGB Filter as well. (Sadly, Shannon hates being videotaped.)
More recently we drove to Detroit and did a launch at Leopold’s Books, a fantastic new bookstore with an emphasis on comic/zine/visual culture. Greg, the owner, interviewed us on stage. Probably the nicest thing was hearing that he was worried the comic was going to be another exploitive take on Detroit in the “ruin porn” genre but was pleasantly surprised to see it was not.
UPDATE: Quill & Quire gave it a starred review: “Munroe has created another stunning, thought-provoking work that will linger in the reader’s mind.” The Indypendent has an interesting contrasting review of three Detroit books, including ours. Also, Shannon’s touring the west coast in August! Drop her a line if you want her to come to your town.
Hey, we’re putting out a graphic novel treating the Rapture irreverently — we’re damned anyway, might as well get the word out about Sword of My Mouth! First up — science-fiction powerhouse io9.com is running a contest where you can win a copy of the print edition by rewriting my dialogue. It’s had a hundred entries in the first six hours, but there’s 18 hours left!
Secondly — what with the urban farming theme and spring being here and all, we figured it’d be fun to make seed packets marketed for the post-Rapture world — ones that don’t need the light of God to grow. (The first twenty people to buy a copy of Sword of My Mouth at the Toronto launch get one.) So Scott made a nice design and Shannon went to take some pictures “in context” as it were at a garden centre. The photo and the altercation that followed with the manager follows below. (more…)
Issues (or chapters, I guess) #4 and #5 are up on the Sword of My Mouth site for folks who’ve sprung for the $6 digital subscription or the $12 preorder. The final part of the book, #6, will be up a month from now, so subscribers get a sneak peek a month before the book’s debut as a part of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. Plus commentary!
It was a push to get the book ready in time, and tricky to manage as it’s a IDW / NMK single edition co-publishing dealy, but Shannon still took the time to do these hilariously amazing bio illustrations of the two of us, check ’em out after the jump! (more…)
We’ve just launched the mini-site for Sword of My Mouth, making the first two issues (and commentary from me and Shannon) available for subscribers and people who’ve pre-ordered the graphic novel. It’s the first third (48 pages) of the book so far, and we’ll be adding a chapter every other month until we launch the complete graphic novel edition at next year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. UPDATE: The Globe and Mail just ran an article about our publishing experiment.
One of the things we did differently with this book was research, and so I’ll take this opportunity to write a bit about that. (more…)
How does $1 sound?
Sword of My Mouth #1, the first part of the follow-up to my post-Rapture graphic novel Therefore Repent!, is now in stores and this weekend at TCAF. #1 will be the only print edtion — issues #2-6 will be digital only, after which the complete story will be collected together and published as a printed graphic novel. So if you’d like to get them as they’re released bi-monthly through this year, you have two options — you can subscribe to the complete series in a digital format for $6 or pre-order the printed graphic novel for $12 and get a free subscription to the digital issues as well as some other goodies.
In a time when the economy and other forces are making the print pamphlet model unsustainable for many indies, we’re excited to see how this will work. The digital format isn’t going to replace the print book, but it’s an interesting format that allows for cheaper prices and more direct interaction between creators and readers — one we hope to foster by adding commentary.
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Her baby isn’t quite right. But in a post-Rapture Detroit, not much is.
The first 22 pages of the next post-Rapture story after Therefore Repent! will be appearing in comic stores in May, to be eventually collected into a graphic novel called Sword of My Mouth in 2010. Check out Shannon Gerard’s fantastic cover art and the description after the jump, and if it looks good you can preorder at your local comic store — it’s in this month’s Previews (MAR09 4308, pg. 266). Update: I just saw it’s a Staff Pick at Previews!
(What’s that, you say? You’re behind and haven’t read the critically acclaimed Therefore Repent! yet? Well, lucky thing I’m releasing the full graphic novel as a free download today, isn’t it?)
I’m 2/3rds (AKA 66.6%) of the way through writing the graphic novel follow-up to Therefore Repent!, so I thought I’d post some of the amazing sample pages by the new artist, Shannon Gerard.
I don’t want to give away too many details, but it’s set in Detroit, involves one of the Four Horsemen, and the first 22 pages should be debuting at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May 2009.
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