RED LIGHT BYTES: The Roger Steele Special! (4-29-2024)
THE SHORT CIRCUIT REVOLUTION: OUT NOW! All About The Novella & Your Regularly Scheduled Briefing
OUT NOW ON PAPERBACK ($7 USD) & EBOOK ($5 USD) ON AMAZON!
Join Recon Agent Roger Steele in a night Haven won’t soon forget! Sent undercover to investigate the death of an Infantry contact, what looks like a peaceable protest organization, led by the tough-talking Lucille Devenreux, soon reveals a deadly conspiracy! It’s a perplexing affair fraught with duplicitous politicians, strange technology, and the ever-mysterious intentions of the sentient computer network A.C.E.S., and it all adds up to a lesson in how to short-circuit a revolution!
The Short Circuit Revolution is this franchise’s first novella, and one of which I am very proud. As mentioned in the book’s introduction, Roger Steele was originally meant to be part of our main set of characters, alongside General Knox, Valentina, Lita (who helps Roger throughout his escapade) and Nic Ridgefield. It was a tough time serializing his debut story last year thanks to my own inexperience, but the chance to go back and edit has resulted in what I truly believe to be one of the strongest stories this series has yet produced yet.
Calling it a spy thriller almost seems a disservice, if only because it transcends that baseline genre and becomes what every great 365 Infantry story truly is: a hardboiled, humorful, surreal work of speculative fiction paced like the pulps of yore. From the bottom of my heart, I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Once more, that’s The Short Circuit Revolution available now on PAPERBACK ($7 USD) and EBOOK ($5 USD), with the latter enrolled in Kindle Unlimited for the next 90 days!
And for those who wish to experience the story in its original serial format, you’re in luck! Steeled Spies is now available in its own tab, and the eight-part adventure has been updated with the book’s additional material while retaining its original cliffhanger structure. Access to Steeled Spies and even more great fiction, audio dramas, and more can be yours for just $5/Month here on Substack. Here’s to the first of many exciting espionage adventures yet to come!
The 365-Dollar Promise
In honor of our latest addition to the Base’s growing library, I wanted give a short explanation of why $5 USD is our gold standard for pricing here at 365 Infantry. Why our subscription service and quarterly magazine are $5, why all our main range eBooks are priced at $5, and why music albums like the Alan Firedale soundtracks are priced at $5. If you want to know what’s in a crisp Lincoln for us here at HQ, the answer is simple: it’s the closest to classic print pricing.
Anyone who owns a classic Marvel floppy or back issues of old hero pulps like The Shadow and Doc Savage will know exactly what we’re talking about. All that imagination, all that exciting storytelling, all that resplendent art, and you used to grab ‘em with your groceries without having to bat an eye. Nowadays, with the splintering of streaming services, rising costs of printing, movie tickets and AAA games, affordable entertainment faces a tremendous uphill battle. And whereas most people will come to you as a creative and say “jack your price up, don’t undercut yourself, they’re more likely to buy the $20 book,” we here at 365 Infantry say to hell with that!
While our print range has to accommodate the costs of Amazon’s printers, the one honest-to-God blessing I have is that can have our newly established quarterly edition printed at $5. It’s still inflated, and if I was king of the world, I’d fix it so a dollar could get you 10 comics or 10 magazines, but with the hands we’re dealt, I consider our approach to be the best possible option, and the closest to our spinner-rack forebears.
This series is a largely self-contained operation. We have no authors to pay, no marketing expenses to front. Just one madman telling his mad stories, supported by some extraordinary talents to help bring that vision to life. And while I keep my men paid, I do my best to keep these prices down because I want my stories in the most hands possible. Think about how many books will go on the collector’s market for exorbitant prices, paid for as status symbols and financial assets, and not to be read and enjoyed as they were once supposed to.
Now consider that, all currently available 365 Infantry titles combined, runs you $44 to put on your shelves and $23 to put on your eReader. That’s nearly 90 stories across five titles in two years. If we run it thru a deflation calculator from 2024 to 1938 (the debut of Action Comics #1, now infamous for its pricing on the collector’s market), those $23 USD would be the equivalent to a $1.04 USD.
A BUCK AND FOUR PENNIES.
And for those wondering where that Lincoln sits in this equation: the $5 bill of today would equate to 23-cents in Depression-era dollars, and that spare change would get you two off the spinner rack.
I don’t cling to this model purely for nostalgia, there’s plenty of that on display in my work as-is, but I cling to it because I truly believe my work is not only worth your hard-earned money, but it’s worth more by being affordable. And I can only hope that the work put into this series brings the same joy and entertainment as those incredible pulps and comics of old. And, in perhaps the best place to shove that crusty old Hard to Kill joke, “you can take that to the bank!”
The Updates
Things have throttled up like a drag strip from Hell around here, and I couldn’t be more excited. Our maestro of the illustrated image, Mr. Kevin John Jacob, is hard at work cranking out these amazing sheets of high-octane awesomeness, though you may notice the aspect ratio is more on the spaghetti western side of things. While that may fit tonally with the latest adventure of our pseudo-Roman gladiators, we have a very special reveal coming soon about the changes we’re making to the look of 365 Infantry and its illustrations.
Speaking of writing, the pen’s been on fire these past few sessions, with all stories for our Summer 2024 issue having been spearheaded, and some taking off in the blink of an eye. Writing this series has never been a smoother operation, and never have I written these tales at these near-blistering speeds. Dare I say it, kids, but pulp speed is upon us! I consider this development a sign of greater things soon to come.
PROGRESS REPORT ON THE REUPLOADS: 24 stories and 2 flash fiction collections left on the docket. With any luck, we’ll be finished this week! Similarly, we’ve also freshened up our About page to give those just joining us all the latest on our goals and plans for the series.
To tease a few more items going into May, expect our Alan Firedale - Original Soundtrack Vol. 2 to release at the end of the month in lieu of our regularly scheduled book. We hope to have a few bonus tracks scrounged up for fans of the wild red wolf and his lovable hot rod Golden Cloud, and perhaps we’ll dig into the WHOL archives and append one of Stan Winshaw’s old scripts to the album…
And lastly, to begin the slow but steady revealing process, we hope to have the first of a very special kind of Electric Extra due out in the middle of May. I will say simply that it is a project that began work back in February and through the efforts of some extraordinary talents, has brought what was once an idle dream and a long-term goal of this series to life in a small but wonderful way.
May God Bless You & This Force. Be Seeing You!