Astrolabe 19: Why you need to pre-order this issue, FFVI for people with jobs, and Austin Channing Brown's quest to prove she's still here

Join ‘round this soapbox, fellow villagers, for Astrolabe’s very first guest editorial is here! This issue, I’ve invited Jason Sanford, whose own brilliant newsletter, Genre Grapevine, is a finalist for this year’s Hugo Awards, to write a guest editorial. Jason’s got his finger on the pulse of SFF fandom, and he’s going to tell us why you always see authors talking about pre-orders.

Enjoy!

~Aidan

My first novel Plague Birds comes out on September 21, so if you think an essay about the importance of pre-ordering books is a bit of a self-promotion, why yes, it is. 

But this is also the reality I’m living right now. I’ve spent most of my life working on my writing. I’ve published short stories in a number of magazines and even won a few awards. However, Plague Birds is my first novel and, unfortunately, how the book does will be seen as a judgment on my entire career as a writer.

This isn’t my opinion. This is the opinion of all the booksellers, literary agents, publishers, and others who obsessively track book sales in today’s literary marketplace. How your first book does directly impacts an author’s ability to sell future books.

While this has always been true to a degree, an author’s sales numbers have been increasingly critical since 2001, when BookScan launched and began providing easy to access sales numbers of print books in the United States. Then Amazon came along and took the tracking of book sales to new, ever obsessive heights.

As Fonda Lee recently said in a very good tweet, it can be difficult for novels to succeed these days unless the book has a big publisher marketing campaign or the author is a celebrity. However, as Lee also pointed out, the good news is word of mouth can help an author when they don’t have the first two keys to success. This is why it’s so important to post reviews of books you love and tell others about these books.

But there’s also another thing which can help authors: pre-orders.

Pre-orders are essentially a vote of confidence in an author and their book. Amazon heavily tracks pre-order metrics and these numbers determine how many physical copies are stocked. Even Kindle pre-orders help position a book for more success. The same happens with independent booksellers. 

And you better believe publishers pay attention to pre-orders.

These are tough times for authors and it’s increasingly difficult for individual books to gain attention. So if you love a particular author, definitely review and recommend their books. 

But also consider pre-ordering their next book. Pre-orders show the publishing world that an author’s fans are invested in their books. And pre-orders definitely help position an author’s books for success.

Jason Sanford is an award-winning author and a full member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Born and raised in the American South, he currently lives in the Midwestern U.S. with his family. His life’s adventures include work as an archaeologist and as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I’ve made no secret of the way Terry Brooks and his work has shaped my career as a writer. “The Rise and Fall of Shannara” is not only a review of the long-running series’s final volume, but an extensive look at the series’s turbulent history with several suggested jumping on points.

This issue, Late to the Party looks to the future with a retro-inspired JRPG from Something Classic Games called Quartet. I recently spoke with the game’s director Pat Holleman for a project, and I came away impressed by what he had to say about the game and the state of western indie JRPGs. (But, more on that later.)

Quartet looks to the Golden Age of JRPGs for inspiration, and the result is a snappy, nostalgic experience that still feels modern and in conversation with the past rather than shackled by it. At the game’s outset, the player is provided a choice of four protagonists, each of who has their own opening chapter. These can be played in any order, and once they’ve all been completed, the narrative shifts to a party-based quest with all the characters united (along with four other adventurers they’ve met along the way—including a full-on playable HIPPOPOTAMUS named Juno). In this way, it brings to mind classics like Dragon Quest IV or Wild Arms as it weaves separate stories into one cohesive narrative quilt.

“Quartet is Final Fantasy VI for people with a job,” Holleman told me when we spoke about the game. As gamers during the JRPG Golden Age, Holleman and his colleagues saw an opportunity to make games that evoke their favourites through similar storytelling techniques, combat systems, and graphics—but they also want to make games that fit into their increasingly busy lives as adults and parents. So in Quartet story quests take only 20-30 minutes, not hours, and the overall experience lasts half the length of a typical JRPG.

The demo itself takes place in the middle of the game, after the eight protagonists have met. Right off the bat, I was impressed with the game’s visuals and atmosphere. Something Classic’s previous game, Shadows of Adam, was a great throw-back to 16-bit generation JRPGs like Final Fantasy IV, and you can continue to see the influence that Golden Age had on Quartet. I could see the fingerprints of many of my favourite titles on the game—from Lufia 2 to Live-a-live, and of course the Final Fantasy games. The pixel art graphics are rich and full of charm, and the music evokes some of my favourite soundtracks of the era, with perhaps a touch of influence from the PlayStation-era with added complexity to the melodies.

The game really shines in its combat system. It’s quick and snappy, and the turn-order (which is one of my favourite JRPG combat mechanics—hearkening back to the days of Grandia) gives you strategic control over the course of battle. Each character provides unique opportunities in and out of battle, and the unique AP system encourages the player to go full out each turn (AP is restored at the end of each turn, changing combat into a resource management tug-of-war).

Holleman tells me there will be no required grinding in the game—as long as the player follows the critical path and doesn’t run from battles they’ll be more than capable of progressing through the game. Playability in the age of day jobs and children is a huge priority for the Something Classic team, and it shows in the snappy pace and forgiving systems built into Quartet‘s narrative and gameplay.

“We all have mortgages, right?” Holleman laughed. “We’ve got 20 hours a month, or maybe even 20 hours a year, to play games. So, we want to make a game players like us can can finish.”

Quartet is currently nearing the end of its Kickstarter campaign—with stretch goals for the Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4/5 coming down the pipeline. I’ve already backed the game, and, based on the demo and Something Classic’s pedigree, Quartet looks like another great addition to the modern trend of JRPGs that call back to the genre’s Golden Age.

Since the 2020 BLM movement, I’ve been making an active and sustained effort to improve my understanding of racism, anti-racism, and how I can make individual changes to play my part in creating a more equitable world.

Austin Channing Brown’s I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness is a concise book bursting with voice and intelligent dissection of race relations and intersectionality—all told with Brown’s trademark storytelling knack. She’s able to draw on personal experience, and tie those anecdotes into larger societal narratives in a way that’s effortlessly readable (or, in my case, listenable. The audiobook, narrated by Brown, is terrific.)

Of particular note to me were Brown’s observations about how white organizations often fail to deliver cultural change and better equity and inclusion by hiding behind passive talks and seminars, often aimed at the bulk of lower-level employees, instead of engaging in active change from the top down. It’s a brilliant book, and Brown covers a breathtaking amount of ground within its short page count.

Um. Would you LOOK at that cover art for Jason Sanford’s Plague Birds? Gorgeous. I’m a big fan of Jason’s work, so I’ve been looking to have him guest write for Astrolabe for a while now. Let me know if you’d like to see more guest editorials in the future!

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Enjoy Astrolabe? Want more SFF and retro gaming goodies? You can find me on Twitter and my website.