Between 1998 and 2002, Roberson was part of the writer's collective
Clockwork Storybook, alongside comic book creators
Bill Willingham (of
Elementals and, later,
Fables fame),
Lilah Sturges (who would go on to co-write
Jack of Fables with Willingham and relaunch
House of Mystery for
Vertigo) and
Mark Finn (also a
Robert E. Howard scholar and playwright). Starting as a writing group, Clockwork Storybook developed into a monthly online anthology, then a publishing imprint of the same name. The collective attempted to capitalize on the growing trend of
print on demand and launched with four print titles in early 2001. Roberson produced four novels for Clockwork Storybook, three of which were subsequently expanded and reprinted:
Voices of Thunder (Feb. 2001) was revised to become
Book of Secrets (
Angry Robot, 2009),
Set the Seas on Fire (Dec. 2001) was expanded for its 2007 release by
Solaris, while
Any Time at All (Sep. 2002) became
Here, There and Everywhere (
Pyr, 2005). After the dissolution of Clockwork Storybook, Roberson decided to focus on his career as a writer and soon after made his first professional sale with the short story for the
Live without a Net anthology, edited by
Lou Anders and published by
Roc. The book was published in 2003 and paved the way for future sales to ''
Asimov's Science Fiction and other anthologies such as Tales of the Shadowmen, Postscripts, Black October Magazine, Fantastic Metropolis, RevolutionSF, Twilight Tales, Opi8, Alien Skin, Electric Velocipede, Subterranean Magazine and Lone Star Stories''. The following year, Anders, whom Roberson considered "something of a personal patron", was hired as an editorial director at
Prometheus Books' new science fiction imprint Pyr and bought Roberson's
Here, There and Everywhere, the first novel in his
Bonaventure-Carmody series. In 2003, Roberson also started up his own small-press publishing house
MonkeyBrain, having "discovered in the few years of helping run the CWSB imprint, that [he] really enjoyed being a publisher." Roberson, who runs MonkeyBrain along with his business partner and spouse Allison Baker, decided early on that the company would deal exclusively in "traditional offset trade-paperbacks and hardcovers," distributed internationally, rather than printed on demand. In November, 2005, Roberson edited the first volume in a projected annual series of
Adventure anthologies, comprising "original fiction in the spirit of early twentieth-century pulp fiction magazines" across the genres, featuring contributions from Lou Anders, Mark Finn,
Paul Di Filippo,
Michael Moorcock and
Kim Newman. At the 2008
San Diego Comic-Con, it was announced that Roberson was set to write a comic book mini-series set in the universe of the
Vertigo series
Fables, which was created by fellow former Clockwork Storybook author Bill Willingham. The mini-series, titled
Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love and illustrated by
Shawn McManus, was described by Roberson as featuring "spies, sex, and shoes." In late 2010, Roberson was selected by
DC Comics to complete the "
Grounded" story arc in the
Superman ongoing series, which he worked on alongside his creator-owned Vertigo series
iZombie and the
Cinderella: From Fabletown with Love sequel mini-series, subtitled
Fables are Forever. In 2012, Roberson announced he would no longer write for DC Comics due to their unethical treatment of creators. That same year, MonkeyBrain launched a
new publishing arm for creator-owned comics that would focus solely on
digital distribution through
Comixology. ==Personal life==