Category: Novels

  • Raccoons In the Wild

    Thanks to the many super awesome people who sent in #RaccoonsInTheWild pictures of themselves with their covers. While the unique hardcover edition of We Are Raccoons are all sold out, it’s available as a pay-what-you-want ebook now!

    Since the novel is about international game pals (like the ones pictured above!) I’m having an ebook launch for it as a part of Toronto Games Week, a series of events I’m helping organize.

    There’s over a dozen events between June 1-7th, kicking off with a Dirty Rectangles party, but here’s some highlights below!

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  • Raccoons Released

    My first full length prose novel in almost two decades is available now as a uniquely published hardcover.

    We Are Raccoons is about six game designer friends who get a non-player character to work in each of their very different games—and accidentally create the first superintelligence in the process.

    Since it’s about AI, I used the Midjourney AI to generate art from quotes in the novel so each of the 165 copies has a one-of-a-kind cover, never to be repeated.

    Find out about how to get it in time for the holidays, pick your own cover, and more! I also reflect a little about AI art generation as it relates to my practice, below.

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  • Moustaches of the Hipster Hellspawn

    Illyana from the New Mutants, the first comic series I loved

    Continuing the 15th anniversary giveaway: my free ebook this month is An Opening Act of Unspeakable Evil. My original title for this was Hipster Hellspawn — in fact I think the title might have come first. I was convinced by one of my early readers that this was a bad title, that the H-word alienates everyone — one of the most pronounced aspects of hipsterism is that it disavows itself. I have a theory that this discomfort in its own skin is the way that it evades being co-opted — or at least gives its skin a slipperyness that makes it difficult to bottle and sell. Maybe that’s why in the over 10 years since I wrote the book the term hipster hasn’t been totally replaced. (I vote for “coolster”.)

    And apparently these hipster-adjacent ideas have followed me into middle-age as in the last month or so I have been toying with the idea of a comedy webseries named Moustache Shoppe. It’d never be entirely clear what happens in the Shoppe — grooming? consultation? trims? — but if you have to ask, you probably don’t belong there. Comics who particularly enjoyed Movember should drop me a line! (And yes, I know: there’s lots of signs Peak Moustache has already occurred. But a small, carefully coiffed fringe of hair above a man’s lip is still very delightful.)

    Read on to grab the free ebook!

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  • Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Long-Arm Stapler

    sidzine-web

    My eight-year-old Sidney tabled her first zine fair on Saturday. Of her three scary stories my favourite was from a weird dream she had called The Woman With Three Boobs, but I also liked Fonster: The Fish Monster and The Ghost Who Sang a Song. The last one was actually what started it all — I’d taken her to another zine fair and she’d gotten a blank notebook with a cartoon of a ghost with a microphone on the cover. One day, fairly uncharacteristically, she holed herself up in her room and wrote a story in the notebook inspired by the cover. I suggested we could make a few stories like these and sell them at the next zine fair, and she liked that idea. So we did the whole thing — rough draft, good draft, colour copy, collation, stapling, folding — as well as discussed the cost of the table and printing etc. We made 25 of each and decided to sell them at $2 each or $5 for 3. We also had a discussion about how catchy titles and covers were important, and I broke out my first novel Flyboy as an example.

    And actually, I’ll interrupt my story to continue the 15th anniversary giveaway, as my free ebook this month is Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask…

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  • No Media Kings Launched 15 Years Ago

    marcbelldoesays

    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.

    Download 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)

  • E-Book FAQ

    How much do you charge for digital products? For a decade my answer to that was “nothing!” It was freeing to be able to give away stuff, unhampered by material costs of production. I’ve been giving away e-books since 2000, and I’ve benefited from this in a number of ways.

    However — in case you missed it — things have changed in the last decade. The print book market has been becoming less viable, and the digital becoming more so. Also the e-book reading experience is becoming more and more comparable to the print one. At a personal level, I’m reading as much on my phone as I am on the page.

    So: I’ve decided to charge something for them now. But how much?

    That’s up to you. Whatever you think is fair and whatever you’re happy to pay. If you’re looking for examples, read on.

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  • Roundsdoctors and Hexslingers

    Two recent book trades that I felt I got the better deal of — A Dream on Two Wheels and A Book of Tongues.

    Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

    Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Miéville’s, and the cowboy sex smells of Jean Genet’s forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.

  • The New Post-Rapture Graphic Novel

    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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  • Will Wright References My Trip To Liberty City

    libertyskin.jpgPretty nuts: that goofy Grand Theft Auto 3 video I made five years ago for my zine has been watched by the guy who designed SimCity, the Sims and the upcoming Spore. He actually mentioned it last week in a rather brilliant-sounding videogames-as-art speech.

    That video (part of my Pleasure Circuit Overload series of vids about videogames) has gotten a ridonkulous amount of attention for what it is and it seems to keeps bumbling into places it doesn’t belong. (CTheory? The New York Times? Whaa…?)

    But just so my head doesn’t inflate too much — I didn’t win the Shuster award for best comics writing I was nominated for last week. My new pal Cecil Castellucci won it for her excellent P.L.A.I.N. Janes graphic novel about a clique of nerdy girls transforming their town with art-terrorism.

    Undeterred, I’m diving into researching and writing a new comics project, Time Management for Anarchists: The Comic. Which is gonna be drawn by Marc Ngui, the genius behind the My Trip avatar skins (pictured below).

    It seems random, but everything in my life connects if you have enough time and graph paper to map it out. (more…)

  • Selling Your Wares: 16 Tabling Tips

    emilyandlisa-thumb.jpgLocus is a collaboration between two small independent publishers in Melbourne, aduki independent press and Vignette Press, run by Emily and Lisa. They got together to run market stalls (and now also a blog) because they knew doing it with a friend would be more enjoyable than going it alone. They were kind enough to share their advice on selling indie books and zines.

    Doing market stalls probably won’t make you rich or sell a truckload of books. Our best market day ever made about $750, mostly we make a lot less than that. Beer money, really. But even if you don’t sell a lot you’re still spreading the word and marketing your product, which is important in the long run. We learned what kind of markets work for our particular books and what sorts of places just don’t. The only way you can figure this out for yourself is by getting out there and trying different markets. Here’s some tips for running a successful market stall. (more…)

  • What Pulitzer Prize Winners are Reading

    tcafstrip-thumb.jpgMy comic, it appears.

    2008’s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Junot Díaz, was asked what he was reading for pleasure and he named my and Salgood’s graphic novel Therefore Repent! “It’s completely nuts,” he said, which is pretty close to what the Quill and Quire guy said (“unhinged”). Seems there’s a literary consensus on that. When my reader poll came out in favour of Lilith being actually daemonic and not just crazy, I committed to doing something over-the-top fantastical in contrast to my more muted stuff — nice to hear it’s working for people. Junot sounds like my kinda booknerd!

    In other flattering news, I’ve been nominated for the Joe Shuster Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer award. Unlike some of the other talent there with a dozen or so comics to their name, I have only TR! and one other strip that appeared in the Beguiling-produced Comic Festival. You can read it on Salgood’s site.

    Also: Chicago launch of Therefore Repent! next month!

  • Signs of the Apocalypse

    they’re always getting defaced… drawn by salgood samBoth critical raves and good sales? Eerie.

    Therefore Repent! got a starred review in last month’s issue of Quill and Quire, made the Best of 2007 list in this month’s issue, and actually squeaked into the bestseller list for Canadian graphic novels last week.

    Salgood Sam has booked the Montreal TR! launch at the newly opened Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore (211 Bernard Ouest) on Saturday, December 8, 7-9pm. As I’ve been in the baby zone, he’s been taking point lately with an audio ad and tabling at Expozine.

    All this and it hasn’t even come out in the US yet! It’s due to hit the stores down south in January via Diamond (# NOV073660) and the US publisher IDW has printed up a great looking 30 page sampler to promote it: drop a line if you want some for your store or your pals. UPDATE: Salgood has a nice interview here, and the Montreal Mirror did an article as well.