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BuzzyMag.com Sharon Lee & Steve Miller Interview Part 3.
JKW:...all these wonderful [century] creatures that you've created
plus all the stratas within [Lia] society and everything else. I was
looking...it's a wonderful, wonderful thing for an RPG. Have you been
approached yet for RPG rights?
Sharon Lee: RPG rights are available.
Steve Miller: Yeah. It's a yes and no. We have had several people offer to
do it. Nobody in a way that seemed anything other than...
Sharon Lee: But it would be really cool.
Steve Miller: We had one offer from a company that was so reclusive they
wanted us to sign a non-disclosure agreement to the fact that somebody was
even looking at it. We could not tell anybody that anybody was even
thinking about doing it until they had produced the game which they would
pay us for after they had started selling things.
JKW: That sounds very wrong.
Steve Miller: It seems like a really good deal for somebody.
Sharon Lee: But we didn't think it was us.
Steve Miller: Not for us. So we've not had a serious . . .
JKW: Everybody out there, they are all available if you have a
rational offer.
Steve Miller: We have an agent who takes care of these kinds of things.
JKW: There you go. How about in terms of television and film? Have
you ever thought about that? Have you ever casted in your own mind?
Steve Miller: There's several layers to the question there. Ann [Mcafrey]
is a good friend of ours. Ann has been through heck and high water.
Sharon Lee: Turn to the Dragon writers [inaudible 01:42] screen.
JKW: I know it's amazing isn't it?
Sharon Lee: It is.
Steve Miller: She's been through a lot. We have some idea of some of the
complexity there. As for casting, nobody has seriously approached us for
it. It would be good that they did but nobody has come to us and said,
"We'd like to make you an offer." We have sent book to several movie
companies and several TV producers that they said, "We'd be interested...",
so you send them some book, but we've never heard back.
Sharon Lee: I think part of the problem with the lead and stuff is that
even though it's action and adventure is so much of it is nuance and in the
comedy of manners part of it which would kind of hard to get one to a film.
I can see someone doing [Agent of Change] as a straight, start run [now]
it's five kind of a movie.
JKW: Again, the rights are available for the right price.
Steve Miller: For us to try to assume a character, the problem is that we
are so certain of some of the people that we couldn't possibly say, "Johnny
Depp is perfect for about six of the characters, but other than that..."
Sharon Lee: Johnny Depp [inaudible 02:52] universe. There you go.
Steve Miller: Aside from that we haven't tired to do that. Our fans
regularly do . . .
Sharon Lee: [inaudible 03:00] recurring.
JKW: You are part of the 21st century now and you have electronic
additions that people can download from the net, WebScriptions, could you
tell us a little about that?
Sharon Lee: WebScriptions is Baen Books' electronic publishing arm and if
you go to www.baenbooks.com, there's a convenient tab there that says
WebScriptions e-books. You click on it and all the [leading] books are
available electronically from WebScriptions and many of the short stories
are also available electronically from WebScriptions. You can download them
in HTML, in PDF, there's instructions on how you can download WebScriptions
to your Kindle and read it on your Kindle. They're really on top of that.
Steve Miller: They're on top of that. Interesting enough Baen has picked up
on you mentioned [Pledge Lane] and Baen has picked up Pledge Lane, which
was originally produced as a chapter after a week online from our own
website. We have had someone come along and also electronically do a
podcast of Pledge Lane, so they read that once a week or so as we were
producing the original. Now that's continued with [Soltation] which was
another book that they picked up. We put that online so people could catch
that. Week by week, and now Charlie [Schelenker] is doing a podcast of that
which will go up one at a time.
Sharon Lee: The first half just went up right before we came to [inaudible
04:28].
Steve Miller: That's also available in any reasonable Google on our names
is going to come across as...the WebScription things are really interesting
because we've been doing electronic books since 1988 and 1989.
Sharon Lee: We were doing electronic books on big disks.
Steve Miller: We were producing books on disk and almost went bankrupt as a
result.
Sharon Lee: What a way to lose your shirt.
Steve Miller: And then we were involved with the [Ambien] publishing for
some years and they eventually...
Sharon Lee: We at one point carried all the [leading] books in
electronically, but they had proprietary format.
Steve Miller: That was difficult. The good thing about the WebScriptions
and the way Baen does it. It is not a proprietary format and all you need
to do is, once you've bought the book, you have the rights to read it and
continue it. Where with some of the DRM situations, if you switch
platforms, you stop using a Mac ...
Sharon Lee: If you downloaded it to your desktop and you want to put it on
your net book to take it someplace, you can't read your book.
Steve Miller: That's not the case with the Baen WebScriptions. The
WebScriptions allow, once you've bought the book, it's your book and that's
a very good feature of that.
Visit BuzzyMag.com For Part 4.