Andromeda Stardust Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Darn. Price you pay for early adoption. Without the early adoption, there would be no second edition, nor would we get the sequel Business is War. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seethransom Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Will I have to buy that twice too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro Rogue Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 I don't understand what the issue is with us releasing a second edition. Most books go through that. Ultimate History of Video Games went through multiple editions, Game Over's gone through four editions (the second was only a year after the first edition), Phoenix is now in it's 4th edition, Rusel's working on the third edition of High Score, and so on... It's almost as out of touch with the norm as the few people I've seen in a huff because they say we should be giving the second edition for free to whoever bought the first edition. Like any publisher anywhere (including any of the above) have ever done that. It's not a software update, it's a next edition of a book. 7 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 (edited) What I think was so frustrating about the Tramiels was I was around when they took over and there was alot of things that they did that ended up being disappointments. But now, later down the line when you take things into consideration and hear a little more about what they had to deal with. A little respect is due, despite the feelings of dissapointment that I dealt with during the "Tramiel" years. Like the cover... a tad bit "70'ish" for me.. but it reminds me so much of early Atari that I do like it. I'm still trying to talk my wife into at least letting me get the ipad edition of Business Is Fun. But even if I do that I still have to tear her away from her Ipad long enough for me to be able to read it! Edited July 11, 2014 by Shannon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ransom Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 I don't understand what the issue is with us releasing a second edition. Most books go through that. Ultimate History of Video Games went through multiple editions, Game Over's gone through four editions (the second was only a year after the first edition), Phoenix is now in it's 4th edition, Rusel's working on the third edition of High Score, and so on... It's almost as out of touch with the norm as the few people I've seen in a huff because they say we should be giving the second edition for free to whoever bought the first edition. Like any publisher anywhere (including any of the above) have ever done that. It's not a software update, it's a next edition of a book. Not everyone has a first edition that is as poorly edited as the first edition of your book. That said, I understand about the physical copies. No one should expect a free physical book. But ebooks? The marginal cost of an ebook is zero. It would be a nice goodwill gesture to give a free (or low cost) second edition of the ebook to those who bought them. It might even encourage people to buy the second volume despite the very annoying flaws of the first book. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro Rogue Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Not everyone has a first edition that is as poorly edited as the first edition of your book. Snarky comments like that have little to do with the majority of the handful of people who have been complaining about there being a second edition coming. It's been about changes/additions to the actual content. The bulk have been happy that we're doing it to correct any previous issues as well. And I beg to differ, I've seen self published books with major issues far beyond anything that happened to ours. Like I've said, we were simply rushed to get it out for the anniversary and to the kickstarter backers and fans who kept rabidly demanding it be out already, where was it? These were many of the same people who then complained when it was. It was just not enough time for editing an 800 page book, we could have have used another six months to do things how we wanted. That's precisely why we've been taking our time with the second edition and this second book. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ransom Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 Snarky comments like that have little to do with the majority of the handful of people who have been complaining about there being a second edition coming. It's been about changes/additions to the actual content. The bulk have been happy that we're doing it to correct any previous issues as well. And I beg to differ, I've seen self published books with major issues far beyond anything that happened to ours. Like I've said, we were simply rushed to get it out for the anniversary and to the kickstarter backers and fans who kept rabidly demanding it be out already, where was it? These were many of the same people who then complained when it was. It was just not enough time for editing an 800 page book, we could have have used another six months to do things how we wanted. That's precisely why we've been taking our time with the second edition and this second book. I don't buy a lot of self-published books, so if that's what you're comparing your work to I can't really comment. I only know that I felt burned when I bought your book and had to stumble over so many poorly edited passages. Since I bought it in ebook form, at the time I was holding out hope that the obvious flaws would be corrected and an update provided at little to no cost. I am glad you plan to take sufficient time editing the second book, and it's good that you're going back and re-editing the first book. Such informative content deserves professional presentation. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro Rogue Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 I don't buy a lot of self-published books, so if that's what you're comparing your work to I can't really comment. I only know that I felt burned when I bought your book and had to stumble over so many poorly edited passages. Since I bought it in ebook form, at the time I was holding out hope that the obvious flaws would be corrected and an update provided at little to no cost. I am glad you plan to take sufficient time editing the second book, and it's good that you're going back and re-editing the first book. Such informative content deserves professional presentation. Understood. The e-book introduced a whole bunch of different headaches for us due to the converter firm we used. Most of the other ones wanted a good $1000 to convert an 800 page book into mobi and ePub formats, and being tapped we had to go with a firm out of India who promised to do it for less. You get what you pay for and we had the issues with the end of line hyphens from the print edition being left in words that were not longer end of line. When we did the storybundle deal this past spring, we had to pay a good chunk just to have that fixed and we did immediately push that out on Kindle and iBook after the bundle was over. Plus all the rest of the earnings from that went in to this cover and the forthcoming cover for the second edition (which we will be revealing in September at CGE). With the major layout and other changes I have planned, we thought it was best just to focus on doing everything for the second edition rather than reworking specifically for another digital update (not to mention us having to pay a lot again for the conversion when that'd be better spent on the actual second edition conversion down the line). And if people were wondering why we didn't use free conversion tools (including the one that comes with inDesign) it's because they choked on the 800 pages and screwed up type and layout to such a degree that manually editing the multiple formats top to bottom to fix everything was needed which defeated the purpose and was taking a hell of a lot of time to do for even fixing a single chapter. In the interim, we've approached all the major publishers and a lot of mid-level ones as well for the possibility of publishing with them. We were left with the majority of them saying what we wanted to avoid in the first place: they want to buy the book outright, do with it what they please (usually stated as cutting out half the information to get it down to 400 or so pages at most) and we'd be lucky if we get 5% of our own book sales. Another portion simply declined outright stating that video game history books don't sell. So we're left with continuing to self publish, which was certainly a learning process for us - in the creation, publication and marketing process. In the latter we quickly discovered that brick and mortar stores won't stock your book if it's print on demand because they can't return unsold copies. So book stores are immediately stacked in the regular publisher's favor. That left us with an online presence being our only avenue. Plus over the last year and a half we've had to re-invest the bulk of the money made into PR campaigns and other related efforts just to get the word out, not including all the time we've put in trying grass roots efforts to promote it. For the first six months, every reviewer we encountered wanted a print copy for review, and I don't think people realize that we have to buy the books same as everyone else (just a little cheaper) and pay a higher shipping rate so that quickly added up as well. I know I saw one or two posts on European atari forums and commentary on blogs alleging that we were taking the money and running or living "high" off it in the Caribbean or something. Hearing those types of allegations make me sick. We didn't do the first book and aren't doing the next two to make money, it's a loosing proposition that we hope to break even on or maybe someday years from now make a little over what's all been put in. We did this purely out of love for the subject. We're also not going to do pre-orders this time around, Amazon payments really screwed that up for us, either not reporting sign-ups correctly to us (and eventually getting lost) because of the length in time between the pre-order and when we were able to publish, or not releasing funds until after we opened the book for regular order. Plus again, it's print on demand so in order for us to get copies as stated we need to order them like everyone else. Which means we have to open up the book to the public in order to get copies, which further pissed off the people who pre-ordered because people were going online able to order their book while they were still waiting for theirs. And then we were winding up having to fill a lot of these out of pocket because the money hadn't been released to us yet (not to mention the fortune in shipping since again we pay more than someone actually ordering the book directly through Amazon since we don't get the supersaver shipping they do). Right now we're scrounging for funds to head out to California again to do a last batch of in person interviews for Atari Corp. like the last book, and are debating back and forth whether to try and do a kickstarter for that again or take on the debt. Cross country airfare for both of us, hotel (we stay in roach motels to keep the cost down but even that adds up being out there for a week to 10 days), car, gas (very expensive driving all over the bay area and surrounding areas), food (including needing to take the people we interview out sometimes because they expect it), plus shipping back all the materials they're donating can be expensive. (And some people donated stuff that needed to be shipped back to them, incurring double shipping costs). 10 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Allan Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 When your done with the books you can write another book on how to self-publish (and how not to self-publish) a book. Allan 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ransom Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 When your done with the books you can write another book on how to self-publish (and how not to self-publish) a book. Allan No kidding! What a mess. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 I don't buy a lot of self-published books, so if that's what you're comparing your work to I can't really comment. I have read a few. Let's just say it can get a whole lot worse than in "Business is Fun". English is my second language, and even I noticed lots of spelling errors in the book. But let's face facts here: without today's self-publishing and print on demand, books like this would never be available at all, or cost $100 a piece. So I happily accept the occasional cringe and enjoy the content. Of course that doesn't mean I don't appreciate correcting some stuff in the second edition. I'd love to get the extra content of the second edition for free or for cheap, but if not, that's life. I'm fine with edition 1 as it is. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karokoenig Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 (edited) When your done with the books you can write another book on how to self-publish (and how not to self-publish) a book. "you're" Edited July 11, 2014 by karokoenig 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Random Terrain Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 So I happily accept the occasional cringe and enjoy the content. It's hard to believe that any books have spelling errors in them anymore since just about everything has a spell checker built in these days. Even Firefox has a spell checker. Using the wrong (correctly spelled) word is harder to catch, but people can use grammar checkers similar to this one: whitesmoke.com/free-online-checker A grammar checker may not catch everything, but it's better than using nothing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Allan Posted July 11, 2014 Share Posted July 11, 2014 "you're" Just to be clear, that was a real mistake and not a dig at the book. I really do love the book and look forward to the other two. My only real gripe that I have with the first book is that it is just to small. Allan 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+wood_jl Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 I don't understand what the issue is with us releasing a second edition. Most books go through that. There's absolutely NOTHING wrong with it. People complain when they buy a new video game console and then later there's a revised unit, or a price cut, or whatever - when they've clearly seen this pattern before. You can never please every person, but you'll still please a hell of a lot of people. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seethransom Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 (edited) I don't understand what the issue is with us releasing a second edition. Most books go through that. Ultimate History of Video Games went through multiple editions, Game Over's gone through four editions (the second was only a year after the first edition), Phoenix is now in it's 4th edition, Rusel's working on the third edition of High Score, and so on... It's almost as out of touch with the norm as the few people I've seen in a huff because they say we should be giving the second edition for free to whoever bought the first edition. Like any publisher anywhere (including any of the above) have ever done that. It's not a software update, it's a next edition of a book. I don't want my money back, nor do I want anything free. I would like to have the option of buying a copy of the revised info, as an "add on pack", or supplemental like a PDR would have each time something has been revised. Otherwise, I see many consumers would wait. I know I am not a popular crowd, but I will speak for them. I do have a mental disorder, my grammar is bad. Sorry. I only have the money once. I am not a middle aged guy with lots of disposable income. I am on the poverty line. But I speak from somewhere in between (don't feel bad for me). $9.99 for a soft cover copy of majorly changed information, and new material (not grammar changes, or non facts) to Display next to my other book. A paid upgrade to the E-book perhaps? I loved supporting you. I loved the book. Both of you I love everything about you. The book was a 99% success for a self published book. I don't love being out of the loop, because I don't re-buy books. Best respects, but you are no George Lucas. Mark Edited July 12, 2014 by Seethransom Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro Rogue Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 . Best respects, but you are no George Lucas. That was random. Lol, I would hope not, he makes fantasy movies and we wrote a non-fiction book about a company. Plus he's not exactly known for stellar writing and dialogue (even he refers to himself as the "king of wooden dialogue"). And then there's Willow... and Crystal Skull... Not to mention that these books contain the multithreaded stories of lots and lots of people over an ever changing cast, not a few main characters in a story largely taken from previous movies. Though I'm not sure what comparing our book to a movie maker is supposed to accomplish. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seethransom Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 nice dodge. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Retro Rogue Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 There's nothing to dodge, I already explained why what you wanted isn't common and isn't going to happen. And the Lucas comment was just more oddity to me. But thanks for voicing your opinion, we appreciate everyone's. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sincity Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 Interested. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andromeda Stardust Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 Not everyone has a first edition that is as poorly edited as the first edition of your book. Where's the dislike button when you need one? Seriously dude, my grammar sucks and I noticed a lot of errors but it didn't prevent my enjoyment of the soap-opera like style the book presented the information. Sometimes the truth is stanger than fiction. I will be buying the second edition for a reread as well as Business is War. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seethransom Posted July 12, 2014 Share Posted July 12, 2014 Your Welcome. Good luck with the next one. You charmed me out of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
high voltage Posted July 14, 2014 Share Posted July 14, 2014 First books was an excellent read, I read it multiple times at work, took me like weeks to read through it once. Grammar mistakes are in every book, just read some Stephen King or Lee Child, yep, grammar errors, and those people get paid 100s of 1000s of $s. Yeah I'll buy the second edition but first I'm looking forward to the second book in the trilogy (Hey,it's like The Lord of the Rings trilogy) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
high voltage Posted July 14, 2014 Share Posted July 14, 2014 Did you make at least a little bit of monies with the first book? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MadBomber Posted July 14, 2014 Share Posted July 14, 2014 Best respects, but you are no George Lucas. That was random. Lol, I would hope not, he makes fantasy movies and we wrote a non-fiction book about a company. Plus he's not exactly known for stellar writing and dialogue (even he refers to himself as the "king of wooden dialogue"). And then there's Willow... and Crystal Skull... Not to mention that these books contain the multithreaded stories of lots and lots of people over an ever changing cast, not a few main characters in a story largely taken from previous movies. Though I'm not sure what comparing our book to a movie maker is supposed to accomplish. I imagine he was alluding to Lucas' habit of releasing updated versions of his movies. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Like us on Facebook
Follow us on Twitter
AtariAge on Instagram
Watch us on YouTube
Chat on Discord
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.