(Part 2) Best products from r/sciencefiction

Thank you for that. Let me go into some deeper background so I can try to explain our business model.

I first started writing this game back in January of 2010. I was doing that because I couldn't find the game I wanted to play, so I decided to write it (pro tip: your first game shouldn't be an MMORPG. I was sooooo naïve).

A few months later, I moved to a new country, had a new job, a new baby, a new book contract, and I shelved the game due to lack of time. A few years ago I made a post about the game to an obscure blog and due to some private reactions I received, I decided to resume working on it.

Later, our company, a consulting firm specializing in "hard" projects (mostly dealing with the Perl programming language), decided to make it an official company project because we thought it had real potential and it was fun to work on.

The thing to keep in mind in all of this is that at no point did we have any experience creating games. This is our first and only game and me, not realizing what was really involved, figured it couldn't be that hard. After all, I'm used to working on huge projects for the BBC, the world's largest broadcaster, on their central metadata repository. I worked on searching and filtering for booking.com, one of the world's largest e-commerce companies. I figured that with my background working on large scale, high-traffic systems, that I could do an MMORPG.

At this point, any experienced game developers are laughing themselves silly.

I've learned a lot about the game industry over the past few years, but I don't claim to be a gaming development expert, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. What I'm about to describe explains why the free to play business model is so popular.

In 2016, the game industry was worth about a tenth of a trillion dollars, dwarfing the movie industry. However, there's a problem with this. There's a significant barrier to entry to the movie market, but there's virtually no barrier to entry to the games market. This causes a huge problem. Case in point: Hearthstone and Clash Royale, both highly successful card battlers, were making tons of money. Naturally, everybody and their dog decided that they needed to make card battlers, even though they had no idea of how those two games were actually performing internally. So by 2016, Teut Weidemann, one of the world's top free to play experts, reported that 90% of his clients were working on card battlers. The market might bear a few card battlers, but not the thousands that exist today.

Thus, if you want to build a game on a subscription model, you're virtually guaranteed to get ignored, have a handful of players, and if you're remotely successful, you're likely to be crushed under the weight of the competition. Most games that you've heard of are the exceptions to the rule.

Thus, the free to play industry found that be releasing their games for free, they had a way to attract far more players than a subscription model could. Instead of charging up front, you could try the game for free and pay as you go, if you liked it. Unfortunately, this model was so successful that it brought in a lot of unscrupulous companies (Hello, Zynga!). Many companies entering this space had dubious business models and really abused their players. They did things like:

• Level caps. Want to progress? You have to pay.
  
• Pay to win. Make some problems so insanely hard that you have to pay to pass them.
  
• Renting items. Give the player something really powerful and then take it away unless they pay.
  
  However, that led to the "ethical free to play" model and that's what we subscribe to.
  
  We have no level caps. There is no "pay to win". We don't take things away from players. Everything in the game is available via time, skill, or money. If you work 60 hours a week and have a family, you can't take the time to keep up with your friends who have more free time. Thus, you can buy a "VIP Pack" which gives you 50% higher experience rewards and 50% faster stat regeneration (amongst other benefits). If you don't have the time to earn "bonds" in the game, you can choose to buy them. Those bonds will speed up some activities and let you buy premium items, but you can get them in game if you spend the time.
  
  So that's the market today. It's a mess, everybody is copying everyone else, and unethical free to play games have given the ethical ones a bad name. We strive hard to make our game available for free to everyone (we even cater to blind players using screen readers). We think this is important. But we also have to earn money to pay for the game.

I'm currently reading "Nexus" by Ramez Naam, and it takes a look at the potential positives of augmentation and also the downsides. I'm only about halfway through it, but so far it has been an absolutely great read. I highly recommend, and it's free if you are on Kindle Unlimited. The book has won the NPR best book of the year award, the Prometheus Award, and the Endeavor Award, according to its blurb. (I don't know a thing about any of these awards but mentioned them to show it's not just me that likes them, though I guess it could just mean Naam has a good publicist.)

I am not in any way affiliated with Ramez Naam, I don't know him from Adam, but man, when you read something really GOOD from a new writer, you want to get the word out.

Thanks Jagabond, really appreciate that. I’m relatively new to hosting the show, having taken over in June, around episode 209. Shaun Farrell created the show and deserves all the credit. I was a huge fan and when I saw the distance between episodes spreading out, I offered to help provide interviews. Shortly after he offered me the job. I’ve tried to keep it close to the original feel.

That’s not your question though. As for the most important factor, I guess I’d say that while the industry is shifting, you never know if you’ll be successful until you try, and one of the most favorable factors to this industry is the abundance of resources to help you get started. Finishing a book should be your first goal, because that already puts you into the minority.

When you say “shifting industry” I assume you mean the effect of ebooks on pricing, revenues and whether we should self-publish or traditional publish. The good news—depending on how you look at it—is that none of this matters to someone getting started writing, because all you need to worry about is how to tell a good story, and that advice doesn’t change. Are you referring to getting started writing or getting started selling?

For someone getting started writing, a very important factor to be aware of is that you probably have a story worth telling. Writing resources can show you how to start a story. As much as I try, I’m an organic writer, so I don’t use any systems any more except for a notepad and pen and just start asking myself questions about the characters I want to be in the story, what kind of conflict they’ll encounter, how this conflict will cause them to grow or fail. If it’s science fiction, I start researching main technologies to the plot, far enough to make sure the concept is plausible. If it is Fantasy, I essentially just talk to myself about the magic system, how it started, what powers it has, what limitations (costs) using the magic has, etc.

Here are some resources I’ve enjoyed:



The Craft of Writing Science Fiction That Sells by Ben Bova – I loved how well this taught character arc. (Character arc is the emotional progress/failure that your character goes through from start to finish.) In the brainstorming stage, he says to find a character that has to choose between two emotions, such as love vs. hate. He gives a very helpful list of questions to ask yourself that essentially brainstormed my novel for me.

Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card – great breakdown of the types of story (M.I.C.E.) and I believe has a section on how to ask yourself questions to make the story unique from genre tropes (The One finds The Sword to save The Girl).

How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card is also very helpful. I like how he says that you don’t have a story until you have at least two separate ideas, maybe three, and then you try to combine them.

Lane Diamond offers paid coaching. He’s the head guy at Evolved Publishing, which puts out some very well written books, no doubt a credit to his editing skills. He also edited the first 5k of my novel, so I know from experience he’s good.

Another couple editors I’ve worked with are C.L. Dyck and Joshua Essoe, if you’re at the stage of finding an editor. This could bring up the topic of when to search for beta readers (readers who read your story after you’ve cleaned it up) and when to hire an editor. My novel had such complicated technology weaving through the plot, that I didn’t know how to clean it up enough to give it to beta readers, so that’s why I hired C.L., and she helped me break down how the technology worked and where it didn’t. I suppose a good beta reader could do that, but I’ve not been fortunate enough to find ones that will stick around (i.e. finish reading and give me feedback).

Free resources:

The Snowflake Method by Randy Ingermanson – I’ve started this, but never finished. I’m just not an outliner. Plot evolves out of each progressing scene as I write them. He has a lot of writing tips on his site beyond just the Snowflake.

StoryFix by Larry Brooks – never used this, but hear great things about it.

And of course, podcasts. I love hearing authors tell us their story of how they got started and found success. Their advice never gets old, and often I hear just what I need. For example, I have an upcoming interview with Ronald Malfi, where he says: "The characters and their problems come first. If you've got really good characters and really good problems with those characters from the get-go then the stories build themselves around them."

Did by “getting started,” you mean being at a point where you have a story ready to sell? I’ll answer that when I get back in a few hours, if that was your question.

I recommend Dune, as it's similar to ASOIAF as far as political machinations go to some degree, also epic story lines.

You might also like Hyperion by Dan Simmons, I read the first two books, they're kind of freaky.

I also liked Eon by Greg Bear, which is interesting as it shows a look at a future where a big asteroid appears above earth and it has an object on it that the joint Russian/U.S spaceforce goes to investigate, if you're interested in futuristic politics as evidenced by your love for the Bean series, then I'd say this one is for you. Although it's not quite similar to that in the blatancy of its political machinations, it does show an interesting look at this culture and that is in the background.

He also did a couple of good books like Darwins Radio and Darwins Children. I actually started out with Darwin's Children even though it's a sequel. I really liked it. Think Escape to witch mountain.

Earth by David Brin : Experiments with a black hole on the earth's surface goes horribly wrong, near future society where privacy has become a thing of the past

If you're looking for a good post-apocalyptic romp I'd suggest Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. She also did a great series called the Patternist series. This covers several generations. She also did something widely praised called the Kindred though I have yet to read it. Also Lilith's Brood was cool.

You might also like the Stardoc novels. It's a little bit smaller scale in terms of focus but follow large events.

Also one of my favorite all time books is Mainline. It's about an assassin who can slip through parralel time streams to make a hit. It's pretty awesome.

Ok good luck!

And read Lost World Jurassic Park.

This is a really big topic, and I won't be able to list everything, but I'll try to hit the highlights.

• I do the best I can to be professional. I write the best book I can, and hire editors to help me make it as good as possible. This also involves pushing myself to be the best writer I can, and to be ambitious about the topics I address.
  
• I do the best I can to appear professional. I invest time and money in cover design, book formatting, and website design and content, so that it looks good to other people.
  
• My core audience are people who are intimately involved in technology and the future of technology: programmers, CTOs, venture capitalists. So instead of sending my book out to science fiction book reviewers, who are probably inundated with books to review, I send out review copies to programmers, tech startups, CTOs, etc. For The Last Firewall, I used Tech Crunch to find 50 fast-growing startups, and sent a physical copy of my book to each of their CTOs.
  
• Early on, when I didn't have any audience, I used Facebook ads, and carefully targeted people who were fans of particular books that had a lot of overlap with my book. I had a $5 daily budget, and ran the ad for about three months. This helped me get the first few hundred readers, and eventually word of mouth started to take over.
  
  I've also written a book about the topic: http://www.amazon.com/Indie-Small-Press-Book-Marketing-ebook/dp/B00AOOXZ9K
  
  I've seen a lot of authors do it a lot of different ways, and there's no one path that's right. It's just what works for you. Conduct lots of little experiments, and see what works.
  
  

Don't know how much this'll be your taste


http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BOZ8MYG/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpageo06?ie=UTF8&psc=1

The story taking place in a military spaceship scrapyard.

I've found it entertaining, though in the way as you do with a popcorn movie, when you know exactly what you're in for even before you're settled in your seat.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Afaris-Shadows-Tudor-George-Ciubotaru-ebook/dp/B072HNKSGP/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1539636120&sr=8-1&keywords=afaris

Hope this helps.

I know he is not popular in some circles, but I have found How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card to be extremely helpful not only with practical advice, but with avoiding common tropes, or putting my own spin on them.