Gamebook store

Saturday 6 November 2010

Fabled Lands covers

I'm up to my eyeballs in PDF formats and preflight checks for print compliance, but there's just time to bob up to the surface and let you have a sneak peek at the first four covers. The layouts are by Leo Hartas, my Mirabilis co-creator and longtime friend and collaborator - check us out on DriveThruComics. On the FL books, page count is coming in around 240 pages per book and we are still on course for a December release, at least for these first four books. With luck they should be available to preorder on Amazon pretty soon.

22 comments:

  1. Excelent news!
    do you know the price?

    ReplyDelete
  2. That is awesome news! Looked at my old versions the other day, and they're just falling to bits here down in the tropics...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ikaros, they are going to be $8.99 per book, £5.99 in the UK and 6.99 euros in France and the rest of the continent.

    Andrew, surely it's Ikaros who ought to be having that kind of problem with the heat of the sun :)

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is great! But is the price is high enough to be fine? I thought it will be higher than £4.99 back in 1995. If taking RPI into account, it will be worth £7.15 now.

    Speaking of 240 pages! After checking my ancient copy of Fabled Lands, they generally came to 95 pages. Does it have more contents?

    Lastly, :) I am looking so forward to replaying them.

    ReplyDelete
  5. There's no extra content, Joe, though we have fixed the broken links. The difference in page count is due to the format, which is now 5" by 8" like a regular paperback.

    Wrt price, we need to pick up new readers. I didn't want 2nd edition FL to be like the reissue of Dragon Warriors, where you've got expensive hardbacks which are very nicely produced but are only selling to people who are already DW fans. At $8.99 we're hoping that FL can pick up a whole lot of new readers - and that the books are cheap enough for FL fans to gift them to friends.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wonderful. Can't wait to order these!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Catherine A. McClarey8 November 2010 at 13:19

    I have a son in college who no longer has ready access to my paper copies of the original FL books -- these reprints might make excellent Christmas presents for him!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Sweet. I will purchase them and give them away as gifts too.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I have also noticed that there were some codewords on the list that were nowhere to be found on your travels, as well as codewords you pick up that weren't on the list. As for your closing and/or fixing farmable loops: The main loop was (if I recall correctly) the mansion in The Lords of the Rising Sun, where if you manange to make it through, you can reap all of the items you desire.

    I still cannot believe that these reprints are actually here, my regards to those involved!

    ReplyDelete
  10. Catherine, Alf and Anon - we're pulling out all the stops so those first four books can be under everyone's Christmas tree :)

    Mike, I think we've caught all the missing codewords. I've flagged up the loop in LotRS though that will probably not be out till early next year, so if anyone spots any glaring errors in Books Five and Six there's still time to let us know.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Spread the love, Gabriele - give a set of FL books for Christmas :)

    ReplyDelete
  12. Dave please promise us you will let us know on the blog the moment that Amazon lists these new books!

    By the way, is there going to be any kind of advertising, pr, marketing or promotional activity for the books?

    ReplyDelete
  13. I will, Alberto. As for marketing - that's not my department. Fabled Lands LLP (the company the controls the rights to FL, Dragon Warriors and Dirk Lloyd) is currently revamping its website and hopefully a PR move will be part of that. We're going to rely heavily on word-of-mouth to get things moving, so I'll be asking every FL enthusiast to get out there and make new converts.

    Incidentally, does anybody know if there's an FL Facebook page? I'm not on Facebook myself, but Jamie is and I know he's set up a Dirk Lloyd page - just wondering if he's done one for FL.

    ReplyDelete
  14. There is a Fabled Lands Group page, set up by Dirk, Mikael, and Shane. Admittedly, there is not much activity going on at the moment, although I haven't hesitated to stir up interest by any means possible.

    ReplyDelete
  15. Any plans to sell autographed editions of the books? I'd definitely pay extra for that.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Li, I'd be happy to oblige but I don't see how we'd work it. You'll be buying direct from Amazon or Barnes & Noble, not from Fabled Lands LLP. However, we do have a notion of setting up an online store at some point (to be called The Spark Furnace - you heard it here first) and if that goes ahead then we will certainly include some signed copies.

    ReplyDelete
  17. They would be found in Barnes and Noble stores or strictly online? I'd buy an autographed book with a photo of the crew: Dave, Jamie, Russ, Min,Oliver Johnson, et al. It'll probably cost a fortune though, as many autographed editions do. $100, when the unautographed book sells for $10-15? I'm not sure about that (I'm referring to "Natural Cures They Don't Want You To Know About" by Kevin Trudeau)Well, he's a huckster anyway, but still.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Hi all. You can find out more on the FAbled Lands facebook page:

    http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=124772550907224

    There's the gamebooks, the RPG by Greywood and Fabled Lands on iPod and iphone too! Well, soon, anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  19. The books will just be available online, Mike. As we're using print-on-demand, if we set the wholesale discount at 55% of cover price (which is what most retail outlets expect) we'd only be making a profit of 3 cents a copy - and there'd never be any more books in the series at that rate! Fortunately, online bookstores will settle for a more reasonable discount.

    I certainly wouldn't charge for my autograph. But since we never get to see the copies that are going to customers (they're shipped direct from Amazon's or B&N's warehouse) there's no way for us to sign them.

    ReplyDelete
  20. I think we need to clebrate Jamie's first post in the blog!

    ReplyDelete
  21. You're right, Alberto! I see that he didn't actually go to the trouble of logging into Blogger, but it's a start. Next year: his first post :-)

    ReplyDelete