I am agog; I am aghast. Is our sweet Kickstarter funded at last?
Yes, that’s right: the Asunder Kickstarter reached its initial funding goal in less than 24 hours! That is, in my humble opinion, frickin’ awesome. And since my novel A Gathering of Chaos goes out to all backers, that means I moved ~350 copies of my novel on day one. Not bad for a first-timer!
It remains to be seen what the future of Gathering will be beyond Kickstarter. The Asunder IP owners are hoping there will be sufficient hype/number of backers once the campaign is done to interest a traditional publisher to take the book on for the long term. I don’t know enough about the business end to accurately assess that likelihood, but I’m assuming it’s a long shot. The more likely outcome is that the Asunder folks will put it up on Amazon as a self-pub novel once the physical copies printed for the campaign are sold and gone. I’d be okay with that outcome too; even though part of me still yearns for the professional validation of a traditionally published novel, I’ve seen too many examples of successful self-pubbers to dismiss that road as inferior.
In the meantime, the Kickstarter is open for another 34 days! If you happen to be reading this before December 23, 2020, go check it out. (And if so, how did you find this post? I am literally yelling into the metaphorical void right now.) I cannot praise ASUNDER highly enough. It’s an inventive role-playing game in a truly unique world with deeply thought-out game mechanics that make it feel quite different from D&D or some of the other biggies.
And if you’re not a table-topper and just want to know about my book, then bless you, sweet child. You can download the first chapter here, and the second chapter is available on my website if you go to Sample Chapters. That will let you meet Nira, who sails into port on a plague ship, and Kest, the Beast Rider who isn’t nearly the golden child he thought he was.
If you want to get my book from the Kickstarter but don’t want to spring for the Asunder RPG source books, you can always back the campaign for $1 by choosing the “Pledge without a reward” option, putting a “1” in the pledge field, and then, when the campaign ends, BackerKit will send you an email that will allow you to up your pledge to include “add-on items,” of which my book is one. I don’t know exactly what the pricing will be, but I imagine it will be in the range of $5-10 for the e-book version of Gathering and $10-15 for the trade-size paperback (the nice big kind, not those teeny mass-market ones whose glued spines I always broke as a teenager). If you like the first two chapters, give it a shot! You won’t be sorry.*
That’s it for now! Check back soon for more news!
* You may actually be sorry. I have no idea. I mean, I’m pretty sure the book won’t poke you in the eye or anything, but beyond that I probably shouldn’t make promises of satisfaction.
CAMERON HOPKIN 