The supersize option

All of the Fabled Lands books are now back in print in large format editions. These are 8" by 10", matching the original 1990s books -- though not, unfortunately, with those old fold-out covers that marked FL out as a hybrid of RPG, gamebook and boardgame.

But here's a heads-up. If you're ordering from Amazon, you're very likely to see a message telling you the books are "temporarily out of stock". The reason for that is they're set up for print on demand, which means that when you order a copy, Amazon sends a request to the printer (Ingram Spark) and your copy is added to the print queue. So naturally it isn't in stock at the time you order; that's the point of print on demand.

That message doesn't appear if you order the smaller format books because we set those up on Createspace, another POD company that Amazon bought a few years ago. It does seem as if Amazon's policy is to list books printed by rival POD companies as out of stock, but not to do that if the book is printed by Createspace.

Point is, you should get your book delivered in the same time either way. Amazon might tell you it'll take 1-2 months, or even that they are unable to say when the book will be delivered, but the fact is it'll probably arrive within a fortnight. Some Amazon customers have told me they even received an email from Amazon saying that they couldn't give a delivery date, only for the book to turn up that very same day.

There are other options, though. You can ask your local physical bookstore to order a copy for you. If they say they don't know how to do that, give them the ISBN and tell them to look on Gardners.

Or you can buy from Barnes & Noble who, not having their own print division, are happy just to supply what the customer wants without all the hassle.

Over the Blood-Dark Sea
The Plains of Howling Darkness
The Court of Hidden Faces
Lords of the Rising Sun

The snag there is that the first two books are printed by Createspace, who won't supply to B&N, so you have to get those from Amazon. It's a war, and book buyers are in the middle of it. Don't let the Soulwatch grind you down.

A noose of light

I probably don’t have to declare at this stage that I’m kind of an admirer of Russ Nicholson’s artwork. I’ve wanted his illustrations in my books since way back in 1984, when I had to track him down to Papua New Guinea to get him to supply the drawings for Eye of the Dragon.

And everybody knows that as far as the Fabled Lands series is concerned, Russ is “the third author” (it’s like being the Fifth Beatle, only with less hair). His imagination made it real, gave it substance, and that’s not just my and Jamie’s opinion – just look at how the apps drew on his original art.

Likewise Leo Hartas, not just an artist who is brilliant at conveying charm in his quirkily imaginative scenes, but one of my closest friends and, of course, my creative partner on projects like Mirabilis.

As I was lucky enough to get these guys as the illustrators of my Virtual Reality books in the mid-90s, you can bet that I wanted to retain their illustrations in the new incarnation of those books under the Critical IF imprint. And yet, Once Upon A Time In Arabia (the book formerly known as Twist of Fate) does not feature Russ’s great pictures, instead relying for visual embellishment on the more obscure (these days) William Harvey. No, not the blood guy.

I am very conscious that gamebooks are all about the nostalgia. Switching things around is as welcome to most gamebook aficionados as a bacon sarnie to a Salafi. So why the change?

To explain that, first I must ask you to cast your mind back – or, indeed, just click the link – to the announcement that Fabled Lands LLP would be partnering with Osprey Books to bring back Virtual Reality in digital format. Because the original plan to do them in HTML5 was deemed too expensive, we decided to go with EPUB3 format, which we thought would be cheaper. (It wasn’t, but that’s a detail.)

It soon turned out that we wouldn’t be able to have much interior artwork in any EPUB3 versions. As in, no art at all once you were past the prologue. So each book was to have two or three black and white illustrations. These were not by Russ or Leo and I wasn’t involved in commissioning them. No big deal, I thought, as I could still use the original artwork in the print editions. Then it turned out there were to be no print editions after all, only the ebooks.

Dry your tears. For various reasons, the planned partnership was abandoned and the ebooks canned. Still, we had the books all edited and ready to go – and Createspace makes it very easy to publish paperbacks and distribute them via Amazon. So, after quickly striking agreements with Russ and Leo, we were back in business.

Except… These are pictures you don’t want to mess up. Only sharp high-resolution images would do. I finally got the best quality my scanner is capable of by razor-blading copies of the VR books to pieces and scanning at 600 dpi. It worked out fine for Heart of Ice, Necklace of Skulls and Down Among the Dead Men. The snag is that I had no spare copy of Twist of Fate (I hope you’ll forgive me not wanting to mutilate the only one I had left) and it would cost $150 to buy a spare on Amazon. Hence the decision was taken to resort to the illustrations of Mr Harvey, which had the benefit of being (a) specifically drawn for the Arabian Nights and (b) out of copyright for seventy-seven years. Oh, and pretty good. Not Russ or Leo quality, but evocative enough.

As Scheherazade’s beleaguered heroes are fond of saying, God alone is all-powerful. OK then. But I managed three out of four, and I can live with that.

Books with backbone

I said it probably wouldn't hold delivery up for more than 24 hours, and already Amazon have the slightly revised edition of Book Five back on sale, now with altered spine font to make it consistent with Books 1-4. (Oliver, you can stop brushing your teeth now.)

But I'm not bothered about fonts and point sizes, you're saying? What about the content, you ask? Well, the new edition has attractive greyscale maps which are a big improvement on the pure black-&-white of the first four books.

And it also has the six pre-generated characters from the original 1996 Pan Macmillan edition - one of whom (see if you can guess) is Jamie's own all-time favourite player character from our roleplaying campaign.

Silver linings

Okay, the bad news first because it isn't that bad. Amazon is listing Book Five as "currently unavailable". This is just for a day or two and is while we get our new printer to sort out a couple of minor details. You can still place orders, and it probably won't delay delivery by more than 24 hours or so.

The good news is that this should improve consistency of printing between the first four books and these latest ones. So please bear with us - it's a learning curve, but it's an upward one. And another bit of good news is that we're now expecting to have Book Six on sale before the end of September. Tell your friends. Come to that, tell your enemies.

Back in print: The Court of Hidden Faces!

Back on sale today for the first time in at least a decade, it's Fabled Lands Book 5: The Court of Hidden Faces, and I don't think I could do better than quote the back cover blurb:

SET OUT ON A JOURNEY OF UNLIMITED ADVENTURE

At THE COURT OF HIDDEN FACES, no one is who they seem. The sinister lords of the Uttakin go masked to hide their treachery. The secret police of the god Ebron kill those who flout their fanatical codes. In this tyrannical realm of betrayal and assassination, life is cheap. But rich rewards await the adventurer courageous enough to penetrate this hostile land.

Will you uncover the secrets of the High King’s citadel, where no mortal has trod for ten generations? Or wrest the holy sword from the crypt of Kizil Irmak, the Harbinger of War? Or find the key that unlocks the greatest secret of all – the means to open the Gate of Time and travel back into the past?

Your fate is in your own hands. You choose your skills, your goals, where you will venture and what you will do. The only limit is your imagination. The choices are all yours. And success will give you the power to venture ever deeper into the amazing role-playing world that is Fabled Lands.

Book 6 isn't far behind - it's already at proof stage, so with luck and a following wind it could be on sale in just a few weeks. I know, I know - we should have had them both out last year. But better late than never. Let's light a taper now and pray to Ebron that sales will allow us to restart (or should that be kickstart?) the series.

Actually, you could help with that. Jamie and I believe that Fabled Lands are some of the best gamebooks out there. Nothing else is like them, that's for sure. But they came late in the big gamebook boom of the '80s and early '90s, and because of that they aren't nearly as well known as our other work, even though we think they are as fresh and innovative today as they were back then.

If there's one single thing that will bring Fabled Lands to a wider audience, it's reviews - especially on Amazon. I appreciate that old-time fans of the series won't necessarily want to buy the new edition, but that's no reason not to drop onto Amazon and say what you thought of one of the books. It doesn't need to be an essay for the Times Literary Supplement, just a star rating and a couple of sentences will do. It takes about as long as brewing a cup of tea.

The more reviews we get, the higher we climb on Amazon's recommendations list and so the more people will get to hear of the books. Just twenty or thirty reviews can make a significant difference, so if you know anybody who has enjoyed an FL book but hasn't got round to a review: please feel free to pester them, shame them, hassle and hector them mercilessly until they give in. And then award yourself a free blessing of your choice, for verily you will be a hero of the land of Harkuna and your glory will be shouted in its halls.


We hope that the book will soon also be available from Amazon Italy, Amazon Germany, Amazon France and Amazon Spain. As we're using Createspace as the printer, and Amazon own Createspace, distribution to European Amazon outlets should follow pretty swiftly after the US and UK.

Strange tales from another world

A cross-post from the Mirabilis blog today which is likely to be of interest to only a few Fabled Lands readers, I guess, but if you occasionally yearn for something else to while away your leisure hours other than blasting shotgun holes in waves of marauding zombies, here's something completely different...

I've blogged before about A J Alan, radio raconteur of '20s and '30s Britain. Think of an English Rod Serling, only on the wireless instead of the TV and with considerably less formulaic a cast to his storytelling.

That era was the Burgess Shale of broadcasting, when interesting ideas and a willingness to experiment trumped such things beloved of marketing as genre, ratings and tribally narrow tastes. A J Alan's tales of the odd, the quirky, the (mildly) racy and the (sometimes) supernatural were definitely perfect for long winter evenings by the fireside with tendrils of grimy London fog pressing up against the window panes. Not "the Twilight Zone" so much as "the Velvet Hour" - which, I know, some say is dawn, not dusk, but I think of it as the time when cocktails may be respectably mixed and drunk and one might start to think about dressing for dinner - at least, in the world that Mr Alan and his listeners inhabited.

I mention this now because Spark Furnace Books have just published a paperback edition of But That's A Detail, my collection of A J Alan stories. So if you want something different, and really rather good, I'd say it's an absolute snip at £3.99.