Hope you've enjoyed this week's posts on ancient broadsheet seller Jemmy Catnach and related. As mentioned in the comments, I took the weekend off to put these features together just for a change of pace as I've done almost nothing for the past two months except work on the first titles to come from Bear Alley Books. The first book will be out within a matter of weeks so you can imagine everything is a bit fraught at the moment.Above is the Phantom Patrol cover with the logo and lettering in place. Apart from a barcode, I'm not going to spoil the cover image with any other blurb. I figure I've only got 300 copies to shift, so there's no point in a sales pitch on the book itself. That'll appear on the BAB website... or if you're buying it at a convention I'll be in facing you across a table, telling you how darn good it is and poking you with a stick until you believe me. (OK, the stick might be an exaggeration.)
Where we are at the moment: as I write this (late Thursday night... almost Friday, in fact) I'm sorting out proofs of both books—a final proof of Phantom Patrol and a second proof of Cursitor Doom because I made some improvements to it during the week in light of the first proof. At the moment it looks like Phantom Patrol will beat Cursitor out of the traps, although I'd like to get both books out together.
Both books are now ISBN registered and are popping up all over the place... apparently you can buy it cheapest at Waterstones. Quite how I've no idea as I've no distribution deal with Waterstones, W. H. Smiths or Foyles, who are all offering the book. Nor will the books be available through Amazon at list price for reasons I'll go into another day—the long and short of it is that I'd be losing too much money on every order because of the horrific charges incurred selling through Amazon.
Talking of selling... Friday (that's now today!) should see at least part of the ordering system go live. Hopefully all of it. We may be working on it quite late into the day, so if you're reading this early Friday, don't expect to see any major changes just yet. Come back over the weekend (or Monday, if you do your browsing at work!). I'll post a note here at Bear Alley when things are up and running as most people visit here first.
Thanks to everyone for their patience... the waiting's nearly over, I promise.
It's commandable that you don't want "to spoil the cover image with any other blurb", but I wouldn't mind to do an exception by putting the names Gerry Embleton and Willie Patterson somewhere in there. I'm sure they are at least credited inside, right?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! I've put in a lot of work trying to discover who wrote and drew these things and credits appear on the title page. But it gets a bit tricky sometimes: for the Cursitor Doom volume, there were two artists and three writers, so figuring out how to fit that lot on the cover persuaded me that it might be best just to stick to the title page for credits. There's also a story index in the book which will tell you which stories were done by which artists and writers as best as I have been able to discover.
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