New episode: "The Sleep of Reason"

This week: Estelle can’t run away from home fast enough. Meanwhile, the Kind Gentleman gets some face time with Jack at last. See why they call him the King of Nasty in “The Sleep of Reason” right here and then check out all the episodes here.

Incidentally, owing to a snag with our flipbook reader, the last page of the story went up this morning without word balloons. It's fixed now, but the interesting thing is that it worked pretty well on the strength of the pictures alone. Alfred Hitchcock used to say that the mark of a well-made movie was that you could follow the story with the sound off. I guess it's true of comics also. Compare the talky version on the site with the pristine page below - which do you prefer? (Bearing in mind that your opinion could put me out of a job!)

Comics on the iPad

Comics by comiXology concept from comiXology on Vimeo.
On the opening day of the Angoulême comics festival comes more news about Apple’s eagerly-awaited iPad and how it can be used for reading comics.

I was already a convert on the strength of just the iPhone. Paper comics are nice to collect, sure. I can hardly move around my study without tripping over piles of Hellblazer and B.P.R.D. back issues, never mind all the graphic novels (they live in another room). But from a commercial point of view print comics are on a hiding to nothing. High print costs and changes in distribution have taken comics off the newsstands and into specialized hobby outlets. New readers aren’t finding comics now, and meanwhile the shrinking hardcore who are reading them have driven the content more and more niche.

Graphic novels in print make even less sense, especially in the tiny UK market. Even if you include the USA, the average sales for an English-language graphic novel in print form are around 25,000 units a year. On a £10 retail price, the publisher is lucky to take £1.50 a copy after print and distribution costs – and out of that they have to pay editorial, advertising and the creators’ royalties. You could make more money by hollowing out the book and selling it with a frozen pizza inside.

Now flashforward to a world of iPad comics. You can now reach a much broader, and therefore potentially much bigger, market, as Eric Stephenson of Image Comics points out:

"There's tremendous potential for the iPad to make comics available to a much wider audience than we're currently reaching. Paper comics will no doubt around for a long time to come, but I think this is an important step in making comics more accessible than they've ever been."

A broader market means more accessible content, which will translate much better into movies and videogames and TV shows – which is, after all, the commercial goal of a lot of this stuff in a medium-agnostic world.

But forget the bigger, broader market for a moment. Just assume you’re a publisher and you get the exact same sales figures on iPad as you were getting with a print book. Now you’re selling for about $9, that’s £5.50. After Apple’s cut you’re taking £3.85 per unit sold – more than twice what you were getting with print books. And advertising and editorial overheads are still there, but you don’t have to worry about shipping crates of books to stores all over the western hemisphere.

Overall, once everybody else is paid, your profit as a publisher is going to be three to four times what you make by selling a physical book.

So what? We care about the content here, right, not the business model? Well, to that I’d say that the days when an author could live in an ivory tower are long gone. Nowadays you need to understand how the publisher is making money from your work, partly so that you can negotiate a fair deal and partly because you might be doing it all yourself before long.

But, okay, leave the commercial stuff to one side. As a reader, why should I be excited about comics on the iPad?

First of all: they look better. Leo and I printed up some copies of Mirabilis Book One on Lulu because we wanted to actually get our hands on the thing and show it to friends. And Lulu’s print quality is pretty good – better than you’d see in 90% of the graphic novels on sale in your local bookstore, if indeed you can find where they keep the graphic novels in your local bookstore. But you know what? Gorgeous as Leo's and Nikos's artwork is, it looks even better on screen.

I’ve been a comic book fan for forty years and yet I would prefer to read a graphic novel on an iPad. But you don’t have to choose sides on this. Based on trade paperback sales compared to monthly comic books, if 100,000 people buy an iPad comic, as many as 15,000 of them will also want to buy the printed book later.

Okay, sorry, I’m back onto the financials there. And you don’t have to plan your comic as a profitable enterprise. The good news is, even if you are only doing it for love, putting it out on the iPad still makes more sense.

On top of that, electronic publishing makes it a lot easier to give customers a free sample before they buy. With so much content around to choose from, who these days is going to walk into a bookstore and hand over $15 for a graphic novel they know nothing about? Affluent, dyed-in-the-wool, older readers – and not all that many of them. We’re acutely aware of this with Mirabilis, which is likely to cost around $25 at retail and that’s just the first book. You get a lot for your money, but still – it’s got to be preferable to read the first couple of chapters for free, and then make up your mind.

And on that note, there’ll be a new episode on the Mirabilis site tomorrow. If you have an iPad, why not take a look at it on that.

The best gamebook ever? Discover for yourself – it’s free!

UPDATE: Oct 14 2012 - I've taken down the free Heart of Ice file because the book is due to be re-released in spring 2013 by Osprey Books, along with half a dozen other gamebooks by me and Jamie Thomson - with more to come after that, we hope. Read all about it on the Fabled Lands blog.

In the twenty-third century the world is dying. Only a few million humans are left clinging to existence as the weather worsens and ice tightens its inexorable grip on the planet.

The cause of this slow death is Gaia, the AI satellite system designed to regulate Earth's climate. But Gaia has gone mad, and instead of a paradise she has made of the world a frozen hell.

Mankind's last glimmer of hope is the Heart, a crystalline meteorite thought to have been forged in the Big Bang. It has the ability to shape a universe, the one who touches it becoming mankind's savior and wielding the power of a god - or a devil.

The power to make yourself lord of a new creation is a tempting prize. The greatest heroes of the age covet the Heart for themselves, and the race is on.

The quest for ultimate power will take you across a dying world, contending with monsters, mutants and desperate men, to the haunted city of Du-En in the midst of the Saharan ice wastes.

You will need all your resourcefulness to choose the right allies, outwit your rivals, and be first to reach the Heart.

Now don't say I don't spoil you, because we've got a free gift and it's a big ‘un. Right HERE you can download an interactive PDF of my sci-fi adventure gamebook Heart of Ice, complete with exquisite illustrations by fantasy gaming legend Russ Nicholson and evocative maps by Leo. You won't need dice, you won't need a pencil. Just unzip the file and get playing.

And if you like it, please tell a friend. Or mail it to them. Shout about it on forums. Tweet about it. Plug it in your own blog (it’s http://tinyurl.com/y8qo9ou if you do, and I thank you from the bottom of my not-at-all icy heart). That’s it, that’s the only payment – we just ask that you help spread the word to everyone who might enjoy it.

Now, I appreciate that in these days of freebies everywhere, you do have to look a gift horse in the mouth. It may not cost you money, but there's still your time to think of. So I will say that Heart of Ice has been frequently described in reviews as "the best gamebook ever" and, although I obviously can't comment on that, it is the best gamebook I ever wrote and, frankly, that does probably make it the best gamebook ever. (Hey – it's honesty you're after here, right?)

If further incentive is needed, take a look at some reviewers’ comments:

• “The game system is not only simple and elegant, but it also makes an absolute joy out of character creation.”
• “Superb use of exposition, tone, and detail.”
• “The characterization surpasses that of many a novel.”
• “Technology whose deeper secrets are lost to the centuries meshes wonderfully with a kind of freakish neo-Renaissance civilization of explorers, opportunists, merchants and nobles.”
• “At all times this world feels as if it exists outside of your immediate experiences, outside of the page.”
• “The metaphysical element reflected in the skill set melds seamlessly into the setting.”
• “It shows every sign of having been written by someone who loves the gamebook medium, and with great narrative skill and vision to back that energy up.”
• “The best character design, the best one-shot world design and the best writing.”
• “Heart of Ice is an experience to remember.”

Thanks to Paul Mason, print publisher of Heart of Ice, for okaying the free ebook version. And to Per Jorner for insights and critique.

New episode today!

Estelle has a showdown with Miss Bodgkiss – and comes off worse. The coin finds a new owner – and awakens murderous envy. Jack encounters Gus again – not in a dream this time. And the Kind Gentleman makes himself right at home. All in “A Coin for the Ferryman”, this week’s episode available here. Or read the story right from the beginning here.

Mirabilis in Japanese: "Stung!" part 2

And, following on from yesterday, here's the rest of episode one in Japanese:

Thanks again to Paul and Keiko Mason, to whom I bear a great on for all their work on the translation and formatting of this version.

Mirabilis episode 1 in Japanese

Hold it, hatamoto! No need to resort to funshi, because here at last are the eagerly-awaited opening 5 pages of the Mirabilis saga in Japanese, heralded here a week or so ago. We'll be running the remaining 5 pages of Episode One tomorrow - then we've got to figure out how to get our online flipbooks to start at the back so we can put this up with all the other episodes. Manga it ain't, I grant you that, but try envisaging it as the storyboards for the first reel of a Studio Ghibli movie and you'll see it just as we intended.

Strictly hush-hush

Good news - though the barest whiff so far - from AintItCool, who have this story that Joss Whedon is meeting with John Landgraf, the head of cable channel FX. I call it a whiff because they're only getting together over a meal at this stage, but after hearing Mr Landgraf's words of admiration for Joss's work I'm sure there'll be candles and music and chocolates.

Seeing as FX are behind the greatest television drama series ever (The Shield, if you even have to ask) and Joss is responsible for Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is of course the other greatest television drama series ever, I'm just praying for a quick betrothal followed by the pitter-patter of brilliant new shows. After the tragic demise of Dollhouse, cable is the obvious move for Joss. (Actually, it was the obvious move after Firefly... Joss, for such a smart guy, you took your time, man!)