Archive for September, 2010

Oh, hello there. I didn’t see you come in.

I’m just tickled pink to announce that this letter I’m writing will soon become our 200th article to be posted to Silicon Sasquatch.

In case you’re not keen on numbers, let me break it down for you: since December of 2008, we’ve written, edited, argued over, published, and drank to forget about two hundred reviews, editorials, and whatever else we thought sounded worth writing about at the time. We haven’t earned a penny for any of this stuff, which means it’s either been a two-year labor of love or a byproduct of our undiagnosed mania. Either way, we’re glad you’ve stuck it out with us through thick and thin.

So that’s why I’m so excited to finally announce that we’re making a book about the whole dang old thing, and you’ll be able to get your very own copy just in time for Festivus. And it’s gonna be cheap!

A sample spread from the upcoming book (click for larger, more readable version)

When I began working on the book, it was under less optimistic circumstances. We had gone about a month without any updates and I was starting to worry that we were approaching the end of the Sasquatch. Worried, I began searching for the best way to preserve the work we’d done, and a self-published book made the most sense. We’d have a permanent, tangible copy of all the things we’d labored over, and if nothing else it’d be something to remember those days of blogging about games in a positive light.

But when I compared our earliest articles to the things we’d produced in more recent days, I was shocked to see what a difference there was in the quality and readability of our work. I don’t mean to gloat or anything; we had really come a long way. And that rekindled my passion for this blog more than ever.

So we’re writing regularly, and we’re working harder than ever, and the time seems right to produce a book — but not the same book I’d originally started working on. It’s no longer a paean to a failed endeavor by a few disillusioned journalism students; instead, it’s a fond reflection on the challenges and successes of the first two years of our first major independent project as writers and a look forward at where we hope to take this enterprise. We want to share an inside look at what it’s been like attempting to get an independent publication off the ground with no financial support. And more than anything, we want to write a book that our fans — you stalwart supporters who believed in us from the start, or maybe just forgot to remove us from your RSS feed reader — will love.

We’re still ironing out the final composition of the book, but here’s our current road map:

• Around 40 or 50 of our most significant articles, reproduced in full, accompanied with written commentary by the original author
• Original essays reflecting on the earliest days of the Silicon Sasquatch project, the successes and failures along the way, and our plans for the future of the blog
• Previously unpublished content that, for one reason or another, never made it onto the site
• More cool stuff that we haven’t quite finalized just yet

But why write a book when the internet is totally free and has naked ladies and dudes? Well, there are a few great things that a printed book offers us:

• A permanent keepsake so we’ll have something to wave around and shout about to strangers when we’re inevitably living in cardboard boxes
• An opportunity to hand-pick those articles that we editors feel represent the best work we’ve done to date
• An ideal format for providing written commentary on each of those articles

Pricing has yet to be finalized because it’s directly related to the length of the book, and we haven’t quite nailed down a final page count yet, but we’ll be announcing more details as soon as we’re able to.

As with everything else we’ve done so far, we’re not planning on making any money off this book. We just want to make something that we think our fans will want to own and to release it at a price that’s reasonable.

As always, we welcome any comments and questions you might have about the book, and we’ll be sure to keep you posted. But in the meantime, I want to express the sincere thanks of the entire Silicon Sasquatch crew for your dedication and support. We wouldn’t have stuck it out this long if you guys weren’t so patient and involved over the last few years.

Yours in Xenu,

Nick