Matt Forbeck’s Crazy Idea: A Dozen Novels in a Year

Back in November, I launched a Kickstarter drive for the first phase of this crazy idea I had in which I planned to write a dozen short novels in the space of a year, about one per month. I called it 12 for ’12.

I’d come up with the idea earlier in the year and bandied it about with friends and family, hoping that someone could find a way to talk me out of it. Instead, I got lots of encouragement, mostly of the kind that Sallah gave Indy in Raiders of the Lost Ark: “Looks dangerous. You go first.”

To keep the goal a bit more reasonable, I decided that I’d write books that were 50,000 words long. That’s roughly 250 pages, which is a bit thin by today’s standards but was common for novels as late as the 1970s. With the advent of ebooks, writing books that can double as doorstops isn’t as important as it once was though. In fact, I prefer reading shorter ebooks: sharp, focused stories that move fast and leave you breathless at the end. So that’s what I set out to write.

After gathering a lot of advice from people who’d done wildly successful Kickstarter drives before — like Gareth-Michael Skarka’s Far West and Jeremy Keller’s Technoir — I took the leap. I set a goal of $3,000 for the first book, and laid out plans for the first trilogy of books, which are based on the Brave New World superhero roleplaying game I created back in 1999.

By the time the drive ended on December 4, I wound up with $13,276 worth of pledges, which unlocked all three books in the trilogy and sent me on my way. I started work on the first book on January 1.

Well, actually I’d started work on the book years before when I first came up with the setting and many of the characters for the roleplaying game. And then a few years ago when I worked up a treatment for an independent film based on the game, and that served as my basic outline for the book. But I didn’t write a lick of the novel until January 1.

Unfortunately, I had a few other obligations I’d hoped to have taken care of by that time that still need some love. That included 25,000 words for a world-building project for a client, plus the script for the next issue of the Magic: The Gathering comic book series I’m writing for IDW Publishing. This meant that I didn’t get started on the book until January 16, which only gave me sixteen days to write the whole thing.

Some quick math told me that meant I needed to write 3,125 words per day. I got off to a slow start, and by the last week, that ballooned to a requirement for 6,000 words per day. Despite that, I was determined to get it done.

And I did. I wrote “The End” on January 31 at 10:45 PM.

I still have a lot of work to do on the book. That was just the first draft, so it needs to be edited and revised. I need to design the cover, and I have to lay it out for the print-on-demand customers and generate the files for the various ebook formats. But the biggest part of that job is over.

Of course, it’s now February, which means I’m already working on Book 2 — and it’s the shortest month of the year.

While it’s too late to back the Kickstarter for this first set of novels, once the Kickstarter backers get their books, I’m going to publish them for the general public too. Also, I plan to run others this year to get the rest of the books funded. The next one should go live toward the end of this month, so stay tuned for that.

It’s going to be a wild year, but we’re off to a great start.




Matt Forbeck has been a full-time creator of award-winning games and fiction since 1989. He has designed collectible card games, roleplaying games, miniatures games, board games, and toys, and has written novels, short fiction, comic books, motion comics, nonfiction, essays, and computer game scripts and stories. He has fifteen novels published to date, including the award-nominated Guild Wars: Ghosts of Ascalon and the critically acclaimedAmortals and Vegas Knights. His latest work is the Magic: The Gathering comic book. For more about him and his work, visit Forbeck.com.