I’ve been a fan of ‘electronic media bundles’ since the original Humble Bundle launch, and obviously had a lot of fun co-creating the game bundle website Indie Royale, until I handed our half over to the Tenshi folks at the start of the year.
Although I’m plenty busy in my dayjob helping to run GDC and Black Hat, I was keen to continue working with bundles for fun. After a (never-launched) attempt at something more complex and music-related called Triselector, I got talking to the super-smart ex-Gizmodo/Lifehacker editor Jason Chen about his StoryBundle project, based around another of my loves, the written word, which works pretty much like this:
“StoryBundle is a way for people who love to read to discover quality indie books written by indie authors. Think of us like a friend that scours independent books for undiscovered gems, then bundles these titles together for one low price that you decide.”
Having been a patron of StoryBundle before (plug: their Fantasy Bundle is now running!), I’m impressed at how smooth their site is – all books are in DRM-free .epub and .mobi formats, and you can even easily email the books you buy to your Kindle hardware/software, using their website.
So I thought I should apply the concept to something I know about – and Jason and I have agreed I’m going to be curating a bundle (and maybe more than one, depending on how the first one does!) focusing on video game history and culture, planned for launch in the next couple of months.
So I wanted to both pre-announce the bundle for prospective readers, and ask – if you’ve written a book in this area, you hold the rights to it (or you’ve got your publisher to agree to the concept!) and you’re interested in having it in a ‘pay what you want’ eBook bundle, please contact me and we’ll check it out. Super excited to see what’s out there in game writing that I might not be aware of!
Although I’m also doing an open call for submissions, we already have a bunch of verbal yes-es from authors/publishers for the first bundle, including first-person writing from renowned game industry pioneers, leading critical writing about games of yesterday and today, and even some acclaimed game-related fiction.
So if you’re just a reader – as opposed to an author – you should still keep an eye on this fine bundle of upcoming words. Thanks for reading, and more soon…