Do You Want Bonus Content in your book?

This week, I bring you book news and an investigation into bonus content. I talked to some folks to get a read on what it is. So let's go!

Last week, I brought you new books. Not just these omnibuses, but they are available too!

This week, I bring you a more cost-effective way to get physical books that star me and my family and some other characters too. This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker Series as usual. No weird character took over this week. Although someone tried.

Buy Paperbacks Direct

What am I talking about?

Well, one of the perks of moving to a new distributor is a direct connection to the printer who prints many of our books. (Not the special edition ones with the gold foiling unfortunately but everything else.)

What does that mean?

It means you can order paperbacks of our books directly from the printer. Yes, we still get a small royalty and you get to save the 30%+ markup that bookstores put on our books.

So that’s why the prices aren’t nice round numbers because the printing cost is not a nice round number that ends in 99.

Find links on our website to buy all our books in paperback directly from the printer. Definitely check there first if you’re looking to get physical books that star me and my family and friends and some other characters too.

Updated eBook Files

If you purchased an ebook directly from us either from Patreon or our shop or any kickstarter, you can find updated files in your Bookfunnel account.

We didn’t change the story just the front and back matter and the formatting to make everything look more uniform.

We did not update the special edition ebooks or Chaos Rises, just our regular ebooks. So if you want the updated versions, they are in your Bookfunnel library. There’s nothing for you to do unless you want to read them on your device and then you’d have to send them over.

So that’s two more items I can check off my scribe’s to-do list.

Bonus Content

Last week, I asked about bonus content since during my research into special editions, I kept finding campaigns that mentioned it. The bonus content is mentioned as being part of the book, but they don’t say what it is.

So I asked if anyone else had seen that and if they knew what this mysterious bonus content is.

Someone replied! Sue said:

“Based on what I’ve learned from folks who are able to participate in Kickstarters, bonuses (“swag”) can include all sorts of rewards, such as exclusive novellas, character art cards, character stickers, character desk pads or mouse pads, posters, almost anything related to the books or games is possible!”

Thank you Sue for replying!

We don’t have an exclusive novella right now.

If you want my scribe to write one, that would push the release for the Riders of the Apocalypse books and Curse Breaker Jousts.

Melinda made character cards years ago, so we could do something with that. She did that back in 2018/2019 when I floated the idea of making a card game out of the Curse Breaker series.

What happened to those cards?

Well, we looked into the logistics and it quickly got very expensive very fast to print the cards and boxes and booklets if we did it through print on demand. We’d have to do a print run to get the cost down to something we’d be comfortable charging. So Melinda shelved the idea for now.

But it’s not dead. Our first kickstarter which just features new Curse Breaker books and only new Curse Breaker books will be next year. It’s a brand new trilogy that takes place minutes after Curse Breaker Jousts ends because it ends on a pretty wild plot twist, and I plan to take full advantage of that plot twist in the sequel.

It’s a really fun twist. At least I think so. I wanted this particular character and my dad to meet since he was introduced in the Rogue Gods Trilogy, and that’s all I’ll say.

You should bookmark this newsletter and come back after you read to the very end of Curse Breaker Jousts and leave a comment letting me know if you enjoyed that twist too.

Depending on how that campaign goes, we could come back to the card game idea in the future. So watch this space.

For now, Melinda has to finish Chaos Resigns and Chaos in Chains. She posted chapters 26-29 of Chaos Reigns on Patreon and Substack this week, and it’s heading for a really fun twist too featuring another Rogue Gods Trilogy character. But not the same one that shows up at the end of Curse Breaker Jousts. I laid exclusive claim to that one and all other books have to keep their hands off him.

You can read those new chapters now. The twist is coming in future chapters since Melinda is not done writing that chapter. Follow the Kickstarter to get notified when it launches:

Okay back to bonus content. We found an author who would talk a bit about the bonus content inside her special edition book. She may have been amenable because my scribe helped her proof her special edition, but that still counts!

So TJ, what did you add as bonus content in the special edition for Lost Mage:

“I added a few small side scenes from alternate points of view (like characters who have relatively small roles in the story—like one of the monks at the temple, the loan shark in the city where the women need a place to lie low. I built character bios to offer insights to the characters, both secondary ones as well as the main characters. And I offered background into the world building, the magic system, and the political structure. Things that you don't info-dump into a story but impact how things work.” —TJ Muir

The bonus pages are also illustrated with images of the characters and places. TJ forgot to mention that but my scribe confirmed that she saw images in that section. It’s like a reference section for her world.

You can get the special edition of Lost Mage with all that bonus content included right now:

The campaign is live so you can back it not just follow it. TJ didn’t have an updated image that said back it now but you can do that.

So that brings me back to my original question, would you want bonus content like TJ included?

Or would you want that reference material as a separate book?

Let me know!

I hope you read amazing books this week and if you have not seen Project Hail Mary or read it, I can’t recommend it enough. My scribe loves both the movie and the book, and she has asked me not to count how many times she watched it instead of writing.

But you know that I’m keeping track, and I expect one scene per time she watched it in the next Curse Breaker book.

That’s it for this week. See you next Monday!