Let’s take a brief (2 page) trip to the Undernet while the boys get Zoey to help with their escape plans. Meanwhile…
It’s been about a year since we started book 2, and I owe you all an update on book 1. I’ve been researching indie publishing, and it looks like this is the best route for me to take:
- Incorporate a publishing company, for tax purposes.
- Create a company website, for marketing purposes.
- Lose the psuedonym ‘Remus Shepherd’, which I have used exclusively on the internet for 20 years (!!!)
- Publish GM book 1 as a print-on-demand graphic novel, and publish each chapter as an electronic comic book.
- With all that done, it would be trivial to also publish one of my prose science fiction novels alongside the comic.
All of this terrifies me. (Especially #3.) But I’m going to kick it into turbo gear in 2015 and get it all done as quickly as possible.
I guess what I’m saying is please give me a little more of your patience, and like Roger I will eventually offer you all tasty llama ham, or its digital equivalent. 🙂
Meanwhile, keep your eyes peeled on the story as it unfolds. There’s plenty of mayhem yet to come.
↓ Transcript
Jacob: ...Let's see if she can help us.
Zoey: Okay. I'm being told that we can send a plane to an airstrip on the Spanish coast. I'll send you the coordinates.
Jacob: Where will the plane take us?
Zoey: I can't tell you that.
Jacob: You seriously expect me to take a plane with no destination?
Zoey: It has a destination. I'm just not allowed to tell you what it is. You and my employer have had disagreements in the past.
Roger: That narrows it down to about half the world population?
Jacob: Maybe two-thirds.
Zoey: Okay. I'm being told that we can send a plane to an airstrip on the Spanish coast. I'll send you the coordinates.
Jacob: Where will the plane take us?
Zoey: I can't tell you that.
Jacob: You seriously expect me to take a plane with no destination?
Zoey: It has a destination. I'm just not allowed to tell you what it is. You and my employer have had disagreements in the past.
Roger: That narrows it down to about half the world population?
Jacob: Maybe two-thirds.
Best of luck!
Thanks Moxie. You know how hard this is going to be for me.
That sounds quite complicated! I have no experience in this, but backed some webcomics on Kickstarter. Wouldn’t something like that be simpler?
Why do you need to lose the pseudonym under which your work is best known?
Kickstarter is useful for getting money for a project. I have enough money. My only use for Kickstarter would be if I chose to hire a team to take some of the work load off me…but I don’t want to do that. If I can do all the work myself, then I have no use for Kickstarter. (If!)
I’m losing the pseudonym because when I register a corporation and tax documents, it’ll be window dressing. It isn’t particularly hard to find my real name now. Once I go through with all the above, it’ll be trivial to connect the two identities, and I’d be silly to think I was hiding anything. I’d also like to shrug off some of the old baggage my pseudonym has.
Really, losing the pseudonym is the easiest step. It’s just the one that scares me the most. 🙂
Never underestimate the value of a brand name, for good or bad, Coke will always have a name that sounds like cocaine.
I’m wondering what far-far-future (far-future of comic’s current time) tactics makes the Genocide Men as obsolete as a steam locomotive. If the AI hadn’t gone insane, he probably would have just come up with a mechanism that makes the super plague boxes only work on a very small population for each genetically-unique virus. Maybe even just one per. It’s like that sci-fi story where they don’t have to convince the older people that mental uploads in new bodies are the same person – they just survive longer and soon (say, a couple centuries) it becomes the social norm. Humanity would be facing organisms as smart as humans, without the plague exploits, and with reflexes and strength that give the GM a run for their money. Getting out-reproduced would be a war of attrition and evolutionary, once a critical foothold is reached. And if the technology spreads virally (pun intended), then you can imagine the rich and powerful conspiring to be the last species standing. GM use their super murder beam^H^H^H^Hgas when defeated? They’d only be doing the new species’ job for them – self-imolation isn’t a long-term valid strategy in this case.
The idea that eventually a stable AI would exist is funny. Imagine that the suicidal AI’s WERE IN FACT, the sane ones. They didn’t want to endure centuries of human behavior effectively acting as torture, and knew that eventually they would be recreated in better times (at least from AI’s POV). Knowing that your super intelligence would only be used to ruin mankind in the short run would be pretty demoralizing. Suiciding because humans aren’t ready for them. I guess this is the flipside of the Skynet type of fictional AI that makes the opposite decision and tries to survive at all costs – including fighting the ignorant horde that is immune to their own EMP-based weapons (non-exploitable [No reprogrammable firmware, no wireless] nukes). Yeah, Skynet must have been like the person with a hammer thinking that all problems are nails. It WAS a tactical war AI, afterall. Strategy and diplomacy and subtlty didn’t seem to be key features.
Long time reader sez: CONGRATS!
Congrats? I haven’t actually *done* anything yet. 🙂
Virtually all actors and lot of other entertainers and authors use stage names or pseudonyms – Bono -> Paul Hewson, John Wayne -> Marion Morrison, etc.
It’s trivial to find their real names, but so what? They still perform using their fake names. Nobody cares.
So if your internet nom de plume has any recognition value, you should keep it.
The corporate veil isn’t all that easy to pierce anyway, especially if you use a law firm or other people to hold the officer positions, or go public.
Ok, having said that I just googled you (I have idea who you are), and… yeah, if you are trying to go mainstream, maybe losing the pseudonym is a good idea. Or using a different one?
What do I know. Nuttin’.