This has been a fun week and there are bunch of flaming bowling balls I need to keep airborne. Which is fine. I just have to make sure I keep paying attention. Before we get to the fun stuff there are a couple of important anniversaries to note. First, and vitally important to me, it was six years ago this week Kim and I had our first date. Given that it was not my finest moment, I was kind of drunk by the time she arrived, the fact that she married me this summer still has left a few people confused and curious. Which is fine. That day we took the first of, what would become, many selfies together.

Thanks to having her in my life I was finally able to calm down enough to truly focus on my craft and not react like a toddler on meth every time I saw a pretty girl. And that’s good, since apparently I have some good looking fans. One, a fetish model and comic book fan, Sabrina Zaremba posted some risqué shots showing off her Legends Parallel collection, among other things. One year ago this week, LP‘s artist, Leslie Tejlor celebrated that by creating a pin-up poster of her in all her glory reading Issue #1 of Legends Parallel. Try not to click that link if your boss is looking over your shoulder. Save it for your alone time.

Welcome to my world. You’re going to like it here. Keep scrolling for more adventures.Bill McSciFi

Over the last couple of years, in part due to the pandemic, I have crossed paths with some publicists who took pity on me and tried to help me not look like the forgotten step-child who keeps missing the bus. Thanks to them I was introduced to a company whose sole purpose in life is to sell books. They don’t care about social media impressions, they sneer at “popular posts,” and not much else seems to impress them other than sales. I proudly sent them everything I had hoping they would be dutifully impressed and jump right in to make me rich. They jumped in, all right, mostly to ask if I was inebriated twenty-four hours a day. Then they sent me a list of what the real world needed. All of it is within our grasp, so Azoth Khem Publishing and I are busting a move or two to get it all together. Everything, from wholesale price breaks to color schemes, has to be assesed, altered, and brought up to their standards.

All of this means that, starting around September 19, promos for SPLICE: HIT BIT TECHNOLOGY will begin appearing in places where people buy books like SPLICE. And only those places. It won’t be paired with Costco or Victoria’s Secret ads. Their motto, “We don’t care who sees the book, only who buys it” is more focused than I could ever be.

As I work with them I realize why they don’t advertise. While there are many authors who could afford their services, they aren’t nearly as expensive as you might think, they require a solid infrastructure to insure that all sales will be fulfilled, large quantity orders won’t be a problem, that there’s a guaranteed method for returns, and so on. That “and so on” part is the most daunting. You really can’t make those guarantees without having many ducks in a row.

Fortunately, thanks to the diligence of the nice people at Azoth Khem, our quack-quacks are quacking quite nicely.

The goals here are simple; (1) sell more books, and (2) make this an ongoing relationship.

Bonus for the fans? Later this year there will be a repackaged edition of SPLICE, a box set of The Brittle Riders, book two of Goptri of the Mists, and a new head shot of me which I have been promised won’t make me look like a bridge troll.

Yeppers, it’s an exciting time to be in McsciFi-Land. Still the best amusement park you’ll never visit. Until next week, stay safe, sane, and occasionally sober.Bill McSciFi
Bill McSciFi