FL art book
More news from Megara Entertainment - and before you traditional print-loving readers look away in disgust, it's not apps this time! Megara are planning to release an Art of the Fabled Lands book which will be a full-color volume of plates from the app. I'm assured it will be fully compatible with the FL print books, in that each picture will be labeled with the appropriate paragraph number. And it'll be on sale in about a month. Full details of when, why, where and how much on the Megara website.
Labels: artwork, Megara Entertainment
Joe 16 April 2011 at 06:32
:) Oh good! Will look forward to that and will most certainly buy it. Can't find it on Megara website though...
Dave Morris 16 April 2011 at 07:28
Hi Joe - hmm, that's odd. Mikael Louys at Megara emailed me aboout it days ago so it should be up on their site by now. If I get any more news I'll post it here.
We are still in the process of making it (quite some work) and we'll be selling it in one month on LULU on the web, I will be updating the website in only one month when it becomes available for order !
Mikael, Megara
Lulu? Good luck!
My wife had some real headaches with Lulu. They withdrew her book from Amazon Marketplace, losing her the 20+ 5-star reviews she'd built up, then told her off for tweeting and blogging about their lack of service: "It's a shame you don't devote that energy to getting new reviews." Yeah, tell your customers off, you morons. Finally they got the book listed again and Amazon (bless 'em) reinstated the reviews. Then a few weeks later a similar thing happened. So we are not very pro-Lulu in this household.
Having said that, the problems seem to happen because they change their systems unannounced and don't have the staff to cope with the fallout. What they really need to sharpen themselves up is a few competitors.
dirtywhitecandy 16 April 2011 at 12:43
Don't put your book on Amazon via Lulu. My page has disappeared twice and was only reinstated after I screamed blue murder on Facebook and Twitter.
I only did that because they never answered emails to the support team.
The second time, my page was up but my book 'unavailable'. The Amazon engine pointed people to other books instead, and I watched as each day it told me what customers bought after they'd looked for my book and couldn't find it. That made it look, when my book became available again, as though it was no good. In fact it was because Lulu didn't solve the problem until I yelled at them.
Here's an example of one of their responses.
Me: Why isn't my book on Amazon?
Lulu: We're as much in the dark as you
Me: Does that mean you can't provide this service?
No reply.
Sorry for boring you with all this detail but it's to back up this statemet which will otherwise look libellous. Lulu is incapable of keeping a book reliably available on Amazon, and if you put your book on Amazon through Lulu you will lose potential sales.
I'm moving to Createspace.
Thanks for the return on experience Dave and Roz. I'll analyse Createspace too before taking a decision on where to sell the artbook.
The problem with Createspace, Mikael, is that I think they accept a maximum file size of 100 MB. That's fine for a novel or textbook, but useless for comics and art books.
The best solution is Lightning Source, who are considerably cheaper than Lulu (a 100-page full color hardback costs around $17 to print using LS) but it does require a little more setting up. LS give you distribution via Barnes & Noble and Amazon in Europe and America.
mundialecter 17 April 2011 at 05:56
A German friend of mine uses that : http://www.epubli.de/publish
(but I don't know if it's better, nein, ich weiss nicht...)
Ikaros 17 April 2011 at 15:11
I like the idea of an artbook full color!
Thanks for the news and good luck!
kingfede 18 April 2011 at 00:47
Quite a nice idea indeed! It could be interesting expecially for younger readers, I think.
I'm quite sad that the print edition has been pulled on a side by these new technological projects, but business is business and I can understand FL LLP.
I only wonder how we could expect new volumes to be available for i-things, and when this possible Omnibus edition (or a Box set, maybe, which could be quite nice I think, although maybe at a slightly higher price) of books 5-8 could come...
The idea of switching the order of the books is not a problem in my opinon, both because 6 of them have never been written, so balancing can be arranged to make them fully playable, and entering one land before or after another isn't that important.
That's pretty good news from where I stand, particularly the print book compatibility. I'd really love to see a combined volume (colour art with the paragraphs themselves), but I guess that might annoy others like me who had already bought the four Amazon books. Maybe a future deluxe edition?
Finally, thanks for posting the iPad screenshot, I was wondering how they were going to handle starting new games in the app when the additional books were added. :)
~Dahak
Hi Dahak, I wonder if they could have added the paragraph text as well. The art book will be a lot more expensive than the paperbacks so I don't think anyone would begrudge them having the text too. After all, it's really no different from a hardback. But that would have meant a lot more work for the Megara team, and we don't want to distract them from the apps.
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