I'm not a writer and have no idea how good or bad their pay is in comparison to other options - this just caught my eye. I figured I'd post in case anyone was interested or knows someone who might be interested. As far as I know, their stuff is less visual novel and more text-based "choose your own adventure." I own one of their works, Choice of Robots, but haven't tried it yet.

ETA - And, oh hey, there's at least one author I recognize in their lineup. Sorcery Is for Saps was written by Hilari Bell and Anna-Maria Crum. I haven't read any of Bell's works, but I own Fall of a Kingdom, the first book in her Farsala trilogy. Dang, now I wish Choice of Games had an "Author Browse" feature.

And another one: Max Gladstone wrote Deathless: The City's Thirst and Choice of the Deathless.

Mari Shu, a factory drudge in the year 4000-something, must choose how to protect her sisters, her purity, and her own conscience in a bleak futuristic society that’s been polluted by smog, rampant commercialism, tacky jumpsuits, sexual perversions, unjust socioeconomics, interstellar travel, and inconsistent use of the Oxford comma.

In this first of many planned interactive adventures, Mari Shu’s decision to stick to Olde Earth opportunities, such as professional sexxoring, has deeper consequences than she could ever have dreamed possible.

Warning: Book contains offensive material. Buttloads of boatloads of offensive, vulgar, disrespectful, and possibly triggering material. Sexual, political, economic, racial, physical, typographical, religious—really, trying to hit all the big ones. Please make sure to sign your correct name to the hate mail so we can give proper credit in the follow-up volume entitled, “The Hate Mails to Mari Shu”.

Warning 2: What that means is this entire book is a spoof. A joke. A hoot. It wasn’t born out of hatred of any aspect of genre fiction and culture or even hatred of human beings but instead out of love, true love. No, seriously, quit laughing. Oh, wait, you’re supposed to laugh, because it’s parody

Review

This is  a farce which plays with all the science fiction romance tropes. I wanted it to work for me but comedy is very personal and this failed to tickle me.

It is free if you wish to check it out. 

The reason I liked this book so much when I was a kid was because it contained the code for four adventure games (which you had to type into the computer yourself). I was always trying to get my hands on it so that I could type them up and then play them. As I have mentioned previously, back in the early days of computers you did not have that many games available so one had to resort to typing games out by hand, and these books were great because they also assisted you in learning how to program a computer. Mind you, back in those days you would not see anything like this:

or this:

Computers and computer games were the hobbies of a small minority and as such it was difficult to make a profit from a computer game since the market for such games was quite small. As such, you would have magazines like this:

which were devoted to providing you with the code for games and other programs so that you could either enter them into the computer (which was time consuming), or use them as examples so that you could develop your own programs (or games). I also remember magazines like this:

which were little more than advertisement rags for new computer games, though they also contained a section with hints for adventure games and cheat codes for arcade games.

The internet has changed all of that because if one wants to share programs, hints, or cheat codes, one simply places it online. In the older days one would have to release their products through computer stores, or publish their code in a magazine. Now all they have to do is upload their program to the internet. The days of sitting down in front of a computer typing out code is long gone (though people still do it – they are called computer programmers).

However my Dad (who has used computers his entire life and has witnessed their development from one room monstrosities to the laptops we have today) told me last night that these books were quite useful as they taught people how to program a computer. I know that I learnt most of my computer skills from sitting down for hours on end copying out code. There were also some games that one could hack into the code so that you could work out the solution to the game (at least if they were adventure games). However, I think I will move on to the next topic of discussion when I get to my next computer book.

A new site, Silkwords, offers erotica and romance in a Choose Your Own Adventure format.  Try it, you might like it.

http://darkwriter67.wordpress.com/2014/12/05/silkwords-choose-your-path-romance-and-erotica/

One generally does not see many of these types of books around these days considering that the modern computer game generally has the same amount of people developing it as your standard Hollywood blockbuster movie. This is probably not true for apps though, and I am sure you can find books out there that will help you write apps. Maybe there is even a book called 'Writing Apps for Dummies' or 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Apps': who knows?

Anyway, back in the days of the Commodore 64 (a computer that pretty much every teenage computer geek in the city would own) it was much easier to write computer games (though don't expect anything on the level of Call of Duty: Black Ops). I remember using a computer language called BASIC (don't ask me what it stands for because as a kid I thought the reason the called it BASIC was because I actually understood how to use it and I could write computer games with it) to write my own games (not that I didn't have plenty of games already, it is just I either got board of them quickly, or they were too hard and you couldn't look up the solutions on the internet).

This book is one of a collection of books that I had that I could use to help me learn how to write text based adventure games (though these days they are called interactive fiction because modern adventure games have all the bells and whistles that you would expect to come from a mass marketed game) though I don't remember ever actually writing the game that was at the back of the book (The Case of the Missing Adventure – how lame). I did collect these books though, and this one is currently sitting at my feet, though I have no real interest in putting it anywhere except back into the shed where I pulled it out from this morning – these days if you want to write your own adventure/CRPG(which stands for Computer Roleplaying Game) many of the games actually come with their own level editor/creator for you to use.