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At about 7.30PM yesterday evening UK time, we finally pulled ahead of Keith Richards and became the #1 best-selling book on Amazon.com. Then we stayed there for twenty four hours. Sales were up 685,800%. We beat Glenn Beck’s new book on its launch day. Apparently: “It was mentioned as number one on the Glenn Beck radio program this morning as an example of America’s preoccupation with death.” It was “a plea to his listeners to buy his book and not let us death-peddlers win.” Thank you so, so much to anyone who bought it, and thanks to anyone who told other people about it. Not many people actually read the Machine of Death blog on a regular basis – not much has happened there for three years. So all this happened by people telling other people. When the editors suggested a big push on the 26th, I thought it’d be cool, but we’d be gaming the system a bit. But really, we were just giving ourselves a launch day. We didn’t know when it would go up on Amazon.com, so we had to wait until it had before we could start organising any kind of campaign. Other books get to dictate a release date and plan around that – we did the same, we just had to rely on a little good will from people to delay until a launch day we could organise for.
Malki now has e-mails from four bookstores interested in stocking it, including Barnes & Noble, and one from the New York friggin Times. He and Ryan did a funny sort of mini-podcast to say thanks and stretch more sports metaphors. A lot of people are asking how many copies we actually sold – I don’t have any insider info on that, but if Amazon’s percentage increase figures are right- wait, they’re not. See comments. There’s lots more info on the PDF, audiobook, Kindle and Vulcan mindmeld editions on the official site, which’ll also have more info on if and when it’ll come to Amazon.co.uk and the like. Thanks again everyone, particularly those in the UK who braved the shipping costs to support it. You have accomplished something amazing, annoyed Glenn Beck, and made me and a bunch of webcomic dudes very happy.
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What is it? A collection of short stories all based around the idea of a machine that can tell you how you will die. The book contains 34 stories by 33 different writers, and 35 illustrations by 35 different artists. My story is about the accidental inventors of the machine, and is illustrated by Jesse Reklaw of Slow Wave, a great comic incorporating reader-submitted dreams. Headliners include Randall Munroe (XKCD), Yahtzee Croshaw (Zero Punctuation), Ryan North (Dinosaur Comics), John Allison (Scary Go Round), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), Aaron Diaz (Dresden Codak), Dorothy Gambell (Cat And Girl), and Christopher Hastings (Dr McNinja). Here’s the full contents of stories and illustrators:
What’s the best way to get it? 1. Buy it on Amazon.com now. This is the best way to support the book, and the only place it’s currently available. It’s $17 in the US, or £11 plus £7 postage if you’re in the UK. Sorry it’s a bit pricier than we’re used to in the UK – North America just generally charges more for books, and you could go for the cheapest postage option but it takes 18-32 business days. I’m not sure we have that many left on this Earth. You do get a lot of stories by cool people who aren’t me, though. No progress yet on getting it into the UK Amazon or anywhere outside the US and Canada, so that won’t happen in the foreseeable future I’m afraid. That’s why we want to get a chart position on Amazon.com we can brag about. If you know me in real life and live in Bath, let me know today if you want to buy a copy: it may make sense to order together this afternoon to save a little on postage. 2. From early November, I’ll be able to buy some copies wholesale and have them sent to people. This will not be significantly cheaper – about £15 with postage. But once that warehouse has them in, it’ll be quicker to send from there than from Amazon. Since that option is at least a week off, right now it’s not quicker to wait for this than to buy from Amazon, and it doesn’t support the project, so I don’t recommend it. 3. It will eventually be available as a free PDF. You won’t get the handsome physical object, but you will get to read the stories. 4. They’re working on a Kindle version too, which won’t be free. It’s not ready yet, but if you’d like to support day one sales, you can just buy the actual book on Amazon today, and forward the editors your receipt e-mail for a free Kindle version once it’s out. 5. Finally, we’ll be releasing a free audiobook of Machine of Death episodically – one story at a time as an ongoing podcast. “Our (free) audiobook will include the voice talents of many of the authors, plus Jesse Thorn, MC Frontalot, Zach Weiner, Lore Sjöberg, Dave Kellett, Kris Straub, Colleen AF Venable, Joel Watson, and one other secret person we’re waiting to confirm. Yahtzee Croshaw reads his own story.”
If you’d prefer one of the free methods but still want to support the project, you can still buy it on Amazon to support day-one sales, and have it shipped to Machine of Death headquarters to save on postage. Your copy will be donated to schools, libraries or showing the book off to people – equally worthy causes. Wondermark Enterprises I demand a free sample Of course. Here are the first 40 pages as a PDF:
My story is still online for free. And here is the story HIV INFECTION FROM MACHINE OF DEATH NEEDLE, by Brian Quinlan, in its entirety: I have now bought the book Woo! Thanks! I’m actually pretty optimistic about our day one sales. I don’t get any money from the book doing well, but all proceeds go towards promoting it further, and I’d love to see it be more widely available. If you do get it, let me know in the comments. I imagine we’ll get some idea of how well it sells in general, but I’d love to hear if any came from here. I also want to say “Thanks!” a lot. I can’t wait to read it myself – I’ve only read my own story and the one above, so I’ll be using some (most) of my contributor’s fee to buy a copy today. Randall Munroe’s – called ? – is about “what happens when physical science rejects the idea of precognition”. I am excited about this.
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superslug: my copy arrived today. I have been itching to leave work and read it ever since
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So, the short story collection I’m featured in will be out on Amazon.com in the US shortly. Woo! No confirmed UK release, but postage is about £5 for us Brits. We would particularly love for you to buy it on October 26th – next Tuesday. Here’s a truncated explanation of why, and why it’s taken so long, from editor David Malki:
We talked with six different agents who fell in love with this book; one even fell deeply in love and tried her hardest to sell it to anybody who would listen. One editor at a publishing house told us “Let me be blunt: I love this premise; I love this project; I want to read this book [...] the sample stories included in the proposal are really very strong, and if they’re all that good, then this is a genre anthology of high literary quality.”
But it was 2008, 2009. “The economy,” we were told. “And it’s an anthology.” And we live on the internet enough that we knew we could sell this book. On October 26, we want to send a message that a little project dragged kicking and screaming from “crazy idea” past “it’ll never work” all the way to “By God, they actually did it” can make a big splash. We’re internet people; you are too. We want to prove to all the people who said “this will never sell” that that’s all that matters. Did you know that on any given day, an Amazon.com bestseller only sells a few hundred copies? Sure, they sell a hundred copies a day for weeks and months on end, but what we’ve learned is that it only takes a few hundred sales on a single day to become an Amazon.com bestseller. We want Machine of Death to become a Number One bestseller for exactly one day. October 26. It would be awesome if you could spread around this link, that date, and click Attend on Facebook so we can see how many people are planning to buy. I’ll post again on the day to remind people and say ‘Woo!’ again. Thanks!
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Pentadact: I'm afraid you do - it's technically out now, so ordering it before then won't be a Tuesday sale. Feel free to ignore the whole plan if you prefer though.
EGTF: Jesse Reklaw, of Slow Wave - http://www.slowwave.... ...e=10-10-02 | ||||
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That short story collection I wrote for, Machine of Death, is actually getting published. It’s out in October, in big floppy paperback, and it’s going to be illustrated. It includes stories by:
Illustrated by people including:
I have no idea who’s illustrating mine yet, but you can’t really lose with this list. The final lineup very charitably calls my story ‘brutal, desperate and real’, so it’d be kind of hilarious to see Kate Beaton do it. I have a flight to catch and a lot to do before and on it, so hasn’t totally sunk in yet. Here’s my story, and here’s the comic that inspired the collection. Oh yeah, and here’s the awesome cover:
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Pentadact: Thanks! No, I didn't have any contact with Malki & co before submitting, except to ask a question about the rules. After submitting I figured the inventor idea was way too obvious and they'd have a hundred better takes on it.
The story I've submitted to Machine of Death 2 is intentionally a bit more niche in terms of subject matter, because most of my favourite stories in the original collection ended up being the unusual ones. | ||||
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The winners have been announced for that short story competition I entered a while back, for a collection of stories based around the idea of a machine that can tell you how you’re going to die. They all sound extraordinary. When the winner-notification date came and went without e-mail, I tried and failed to imagine what the winning stories were like, and the selections really show how small-minded I was being. One of these is about paramedics in the future. One’s about a magician. There are stories about class, revolution, family, the third world, and one that’s just a series of personal ads. And one, inexplicably, is mine. They told me two or three days after I was entirely sure it had been rejected, which I can now confirm is the best way to win something.  The editors – Ryan North of Dinosaur Comics, David Malki of Wondermark and Matthew Bennardo of the world – had planned to self-publish the collection, but have apparently had some interest from actual publishing houses since. So I imagine they’re going to shop the manuscript around for a while and see if someone who could get it out to more than just Amazon.com will snap it up. Either way the text will be free online, and eventually as an audiobook – sorry, podiobook (spit!). On my contract I waived the right to insist on reading it myself, because I couldn’t decide whether it would be more exciting to be on an audiobook in person, or to have someone good reading my thing. Instead I’m going to audition to read my own, and let them decide. If my voice really is as grave and dull as it sounds to me, hopefully they’ll tell me so and get someone else to do it. I’ve shot myself resoundingly in the foot, of course, by implying my narrator is North American. What I didn’t know until that announcement post was that all three editors of the collection are including a story of their own. Since Ryan North basically invented a new grammatical logic for the English language in Dinosaur Comics, this is rather exciting. Inevitably his story has the best title of the lot – MURDER AND SUICIDE, RESPECTIVELY – and an immediately enticing concept: two scientists realize that the Machine may allow them to send messages backwards through time. These three are in addition to the 29 chosen submissions, from 681 entries, so the final book with be 32 stories of something like 4,000 words each. Mine is one of the longer ones, at 6,600, and earned me the king’s ransom of $45, so I’ll be quitting my day job shortly and vacationing on the moon. That fee is only for the First English Anthology rights, so I can still keep it online here, and will do so until the book itself is out and the whole text of that is online – when I’ll probably link to that instead. I’m imagining it’ll be something like a year before that actually happens, which sucks because I badly want to read almost all of these.
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Pentadact: Hey, one of these is by Randall Munroe, the XKCD guy!
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“Fuck!” This is the first few chunks of my short story for the Machine of Death challenge, which was great fun to write. I gave it a go because I thought it would be a good test of whether I can enjoy writing to someone else’s spec, and it turns out I much prefer it to writing my own ideas. There was something breezy about this whole process – it’s a short piece to begin with, but also not having the burden of responsibility for the concept makes it even easier to jump in.
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Jonn: I just thought of something; what if some guy fell asleep on his friend's couch or something, and his friend runs him through the machine, as a joke. When he wakes up, his friend half-jokes about telling him, whereupon our protagonist kills him to keep from knowing. As someone walks in on the grisly scene, he accidentally looks at the scrap of paper on which his fate is written; "ELECTROCUTION".
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Tom, your story is one of the best in there. I've been getting friends interested in it by having them read a story or two, and Exploded is one of the ones I recommend.