(click for a closer look at the full TOC, to see who’s illustrated each story in the book)

• MOD on Reddit! I have upboated it.

• We’re going to make the Kindle version available in the future; it won’t be by tomorrow though. It won’t have the illustrations, because the Kindle’s screen will just ruin 75% of them, but it’ll be the full text. Update: Working on solving this. We’re going to make it a paid download like anything else in the Amazon store, but if you forward us your receipt from a purchase of the printed book we’ll send you a Kindle-compatible file for free! (As soon as we finish formatting the file; might be a week or so.)

We can’t necessarily make the same offer regarding every ebook format; there are just too many of them. If your Sony Reader or whatever can handle a .TXT file, though, great! Send us your receipt. We’ll look into an ePub version too; I don’t even know what that entails, but we’ll try.

If you want to buy the printed book on Tuesday to support the effort, but do not actually want the book itself, feel free to have it sent to us. We’ll donate any books we receive to libraries, schools, use them promotionally, etc.

Wondermark Enterprises
Attn: MOD
2554 Lincoln Blvd #214
Venice, CA 90291

Or, have it sent to a friend!

If you want to wait and buy the Kindle version once it goes on sale, that’s cool too. We appreciate the support no matter what form it takes.

• Some folks have been asking for a preview of the book, or more information about the contents. Perfectly reasonable! Here are some of the MOD stories that’re available online already:

“FLAMING MARSHMALLOW,” by Camille Alexa, online in audio form in Escape Pod (under its original title, “Flaming Marshmallow and Other Deaths”)

“EXPLODED,” by Tom Francis. Posted by the author on Google Docs.

And here is the story “HIV INFECTION FROM MACHINE OF DEATH NEEDLE,” by Brian Quinlan, in its entirety:

“Well,” I thought, “that sucks.”

In the book it is illustrated by KC Green.

• Who are these authors? A few biographical tidbits:

Many of the authors are working writers with extensive publishing credits: James L. Sutter, Tom Francis, Pelotard, and Jeff Stautz, to name a few.

This was Camille Alexa‘s first published story first story written and submitted anywhere. She has since gone on to an illustrious writing career; her short story collection Push of the Sky (which includes her MOD story) is a finalist for the Endeavour Award, given annually to Pacific Northwest authors of science fiction & fantasy.

Rafa Franco lives in Argentina; C. E. Guimont lives in Germany; Gord Sellar lives in South Korea; Pelotard lives in Sweden.

Daliso Chaponda is a Malawian stand-up comedian and writer currently based in the UK.

David Michael Wharton is an editor for Creative Screenwriting magazine.

Erin McKean is a lexicographer, former dictionary editor, and the founder of Wordnik.com.

Kit Yona runs an auto salvage yard in New Jersey.

Yahtzee Croshaw is the creator of the “Zero Punctuation” video-game reviews for The Escapist magazine.

Shaenon K. Garrity and Jeffrey Channing Wells, individual contributors, are also the collaborative authors of the comic strip Skin Horse.

Randall Munroe is the author of the webcomic xkcd.

• Our (free) audiobook will include the voice talents of many of the authors, plus Jesse Thorn, MC Frontalot, Zach Weiner, Lore Sjöberg, Dave Kellett, Kris Straub, Colleen AF Venable, Joel Watson, and one other secret person we’re waiting to confirm. Yahtzee Croshaw reads his own story.

• The full PDF of the book will be made available next month — but we can share this preview with you now:

CLICK ME

It’s the first forty pages (several stories’ worth) and it should give you a pretty decent sense of the quality of the book!

BUY IT OCT. 26 (AMAZON LINK)

Thank you!

Super-excited to hear that everyone else is as excited as we are about our October 26 campaign! Here are the answers to some questions we’ve fielded today:

• Will you be offering a Kindle version?

Ideally yes! Since hearing many requests for a Kindle version over the last few days, we’ve gotten to work putting that together. Depending on how long the Amazon approval process takes for that, we’ll let you know whether to expect it by Tuesday.

While we’re happy to offer that version for folks who don’t want to deal with a physical book for any of a million great reasons, it should be said that Amazon treats a Kindle book as an entirely separate product from the printed book. Thus, buying the Kindle version doesn’t contribute to the main flash-mob campaign. If we can get a secondary campaign going for the Kindle version, great, that’d be amazing! But we’re also a little concerned about splitting the effort.

Here’s an idea we had, and you guys tell us if it’s dumb: if we made the Kindle version 100% free, would people be willing to buy a print copy as well, strictly to help out the campaign and chalk up the maximum number of sales for the paperback? You could have the books shipped directly to us, and we would donate those copies to libraries and schools — so you’d never have to deal with a book you didn’t want, or pay shipping to someplace expensive. Leave us a comment with your thoughts on this idea.

To clarify, there’d be absolutely no obligation for folks to buy a print copy; the Kindle version would just be free for anyone who wanted to read the book that way.

The other option would be to just charge a regular amount for the Kindle version and make that another sales option. And of course all this is predicated on a Kindle version being approved by Amazon in time.

Also I just realized that I don’t even know if you can make a Kindle book free in the Amazon store. So much to learn!

• Will the book appear on Amazon.ca / co.uk / other non-American sites?

At present time, we have no way of getting it onto the international sites; each territory requires a separate distribution agreement and for the time being, that’s beyond our scope. Additionally, buying from international sites wouldn’t contribute to the main campaign because it’s a different product as far as Amazon is concerned.

You can buy from Amazon.com for shipping to foreign addresses, but we know shipping sometimes becomes a headache. It’s a less-than-ideal situation, we know, but it’s what we have to work with for the moment. The book will be available through our own e-store, shipping worldwide, starting in November.

• What time specifically should we focus our sales on? In which time zone?

The more concentrated the sales, the better, but beyond a certain point that’s impossible to manage. Let’s just say roughly the period of business hours in North America.

So for Europeans, that’s afternoon and evening on the 26th; for Australians, New Zealanders, and others in that region it’d be early morning to afternoon on the 27th. But anywhere in that ballpark is totally fine!

More questions? Ask ’em in the comments!

We’ve come a long way.

It was a lark, to begin with. A Dinosaur Comic, a few messageboard posts, and all of a sudden so many people had so many good ideas that it seemed natural to put a book together. It started small, but everyone we pitched the idea to was as fascinated as we were. So naturally, we ratcheted up our ambition — let’s make it a big book, get everybody involved, open submissions to the world, pay people…

We had no idea how big this would be. About 700 submissions in just a few months. We read every story, loving some, setting them aside, arguing among ourselves, wishing we could publish more, and finally, agonizingly, whittling it down to 30. We peppered the mix with some original work of our own as well, hired a ton of our friends and folks we admired from the world of comics and webcomics to illustrate the book, and we had a manuscript all set to shop to publishers.

Then we learned a little something about the anthology market. Stephen King isn’t in this book. Neither is Dave Eggers or Neil Gaiman or Nick Hornby. Nobody would buy this little book full of stories from nobody famous, we were told. We talked with six different agents who fell in love with this book; one even fell deeply in love and tried her hardest to sell it to anybody who would listen. One editor at a publishing house told us “Let me be blunt: I love this premise; I love this project; I want to read this book […] the sample stories included in the proposal are really very strong, and if they’re all that good, then this is a genre anthology of high literary quality.”

But it was 2008, 2009. “The economy,” we were told. “And it’s an anthology.”

During that time between when we opened submissions in 2007 and now, a funny thing happened. We learned a lot about how publishing works, but the most important thing we learned was that big trade publishing is like a train. Big trade publishing runs on tracks. Big trade publishing can’t turn on a dime; big trade publishing desperately needs all the coal it can find to run — meaning licensing rights. Audio rights. Electronic rights. Foreign rights and movie rights. They sell all those rights separately and hopefully make enough money from it all to pay the rent on the New York office and the salary of all the staffers in that office.

We didn’t want to sell ebook rights; we wanted to release the ebook for free as a PDF. We didn’t want to sell audio rights; we wanted to record the audiobook ourselves, and release it for free as a podcast. Movie rights remain with the authors — if you love one of the stories in this book and want to make a blockbuster film from it, contact the author and give them the money. We’re not in the middle.

And we live on the internet enough that we knew we could sell this book.

This isn’t some vanity-press sour-grapes effort. The simple truth is that we probably can’t compete on the shelves at Barnes & Noble alongside every other book in the world. The agents and the publishers are right; it might not work for a mass market. That’s okay. We don’t need to sell it to everyone. We don’t need to sell 100,000 copies; we don’t have the rent on a New York office to pay for.

We only need to sell it to you.

On October 26, we want to send a message that a little project dragged kicking and screaming from “crazy idea” past “it’ll never work” all the way to “By God, they actually did it” can make a big splash. We’re internet people; you are too. We want to prove to all the people who said “this will never sell” that internet people make things happen.

Did you know that on any given day, an Amazon.com bestseller only sells a few hundred copies? Sure, they sell a few hundred copies a day for weeks and months on end, but what we’ve learned is that it only takes a few hundred sales on a single day to become an Amazon.com bestseller.

We want Machine of Death to become a Number One bestseller for exactly one day — October 26.

Here is our book’s listing on Amazon: machineofdeath.net/oct26/ — blog it, retweet it, add your affiliate link, post it on your bulletin board at work, shout it from the rooftops, tattoo it on your dog. (Note: the title may not have populated through all of Amazon’s search databases yet. Use the direct link whenever you can, so people can find it.)

Now, if you are morally opposed to patronizing Amazon for any reason, that’s totally fine. The book will be available online in our own e-store in early November, and (hopefully) through regular bookstore distribution sometime after that. If you’re international and can’t patronize Amazon.com, you can watch for it in our own store later and help us spread the word in the meantime. Individual contributors may be retailing it themselves through various means as well, at their discretion. The ebook and audiobook are coming soon, and both of those will be free.

But if you can help us become a bestseller for a day, October 26 is that day. Here are some link banners you can use if you like — point them to this post, or to the Amazon link, or to your own affiliate-laden Amazon link, or to your elaborate MOD fanfic, or whatever. Blog, tweet, or join our Facebook event and invite your friends. Every bit of promotion helps. Let’s see if we can do this.

More posts throughout the week with more details!

P.S. Camron Miller or William Grallo, if you see this, please email us: info [at] machineofdeath.net. Thanks!

After a long year of excitement, disappointment, renewed excitement, continued disappointment, thickheadedness, obstinacy and relief, we are pleased to announce that Machine of Death will be officially released this October by Bearstache Books, the boutique printing arm of Wondermark Enterprises.

We have also added illustrator Ramón Pérez to the list of contributors! And we have a smashing cover by Justin Van Genderen:

The book will be released in trade paperback and ebook formats, with an audiobook to follow.

More updates soon!

We’ve received several inquiries as to the status of the project, and we’re now at a point where we can confidently present a list of contributing illustrators (below). Though our manuscript is complete, we feel we owe it to the project to follow up every lead with the publishers who have expressed interest, which as many of you know can be an extremely protracted process.

We are also in receipt of many of your requests for feedback on your stories, which is a thing we shall still do in the months to come. We thank you for your patience, and hope it will arrive like a sparkling surprise long after you have forgotten all about us.

Rest assured that this project is very much alive and will one day soon groan its way into life with a sound not heard since the gods rent Day from Night in days forgotten by all but the tortoise-folk.

The illustrators who will be featured in the book are:

John Allison
Kate Beaton
Brandon Bolt
Vera Brosgol
Jeffrey Brown
Scott Campbell
Mitch Clem
Danielle Corsetto
Aaron Diaz
Rene Engström
Jess Fink
Dorothy Gambrell
KC Green
Matt Haley
Christopher Hastings
Paul Horn
John Keogh
Karl Kerschl
Kazu Kibuishi
Adam Koford
Roger Langridge
Les McClaine
Brian McLachlan
Kevin McShane
Dylan Meconis
Carly Monardo
Jesse Reklaw
Katie Sekelsky
Cameron Stewart
Kris Straub
Kean Soo
Kelly Tindall
Marcus Thiele
Dean Trippe
Shannon Wheeler
UPDATE: and Ramón Pérez!

I know! We are excited too.