Mirabilis Year of Wonders book 2

Gearing up for the (hopefully) imminent release of Volume 2 of Mirabilis, my ongoing comic book fantasy epic, here is an online preview of the first ten pages. New to the party? In that case, you can see how the story starts with the first 30 pages of Volume 1 online here.

If it's your cuppa, you can still order the gorgeous hardcover edition of Book 1 here and you can pre-order Book 2 here. And the paperback edition is available here.

A means to an end

The flipbook of Royal Mythological Society vignettes that I wrote with erstwhile Dragon Warriors and Fighting Fantasy artist Leo Hartas goes to the top spot this week as an experiment.

We originally tried these flipbooks on the online reading site BookBuzzr as a way of promoting our Mirabilis comic book. The idea is that people get to read a dozen pages or so for free and, if they like what they see, there's a link right there to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and so on.

Much to my surprise, we found our comic trailers were consistently scoring in the Top Ten spot on BookBuzzr. And that's comics, which these days are almost as much a niche interest as role-playing. So I got to thinking... Maybe BookBuzzer would be a useful way to steer readers towards the reissued Fabled Lands gamebooks as well.

Take a look at the RMS example and give us your feedback. Would you be willing to read a gamebook excerpt in the BookBuzzr flipbook format, or are flipbooks designed too much for linear reading? If FL books 5 and 6 were released in this kind of format, would you pay for those (and how much?) or would you insist on print copies?

Even if you don't care for reading digital books, you can see how an online showcase version like BookBuzzr can be the focal point for comments, reviews and social network integration in order to build a wide enough readership to sustain print publishing. I know you'll agree with that because you're reading another example of the exact same principle right now.

With any proposed experiment like this, there are always going to be some premature howls of protest. "Pay for digital content? Over my dead body!" Fine - if that's how you feel, tell us. We're just exploring options at this stage for ways to get the FL books out to a wider readership than the loyal core of longtime fans. Most likely a combination of digital and print (as exemplified by BookBuzzr's service) is the way to go. If getting to the coveted #1 slot on BookBuzzr would drive 10,000 people to look at this blog and/or our books on Amazon, that could have a significant impact on the future of the FL series. So, click on the sample above and leave us a comment. On BookBuzzr, I mean, not here - it's time to start preaching outside the choir!