Something I think we'll be doing on 128 pp books is using a thicker paper than Blood and Sand. Some books too may wind up being thicker. (Land of Fire and Ice is 144 pages, but the same price as Blood and Sand.)

Many Thanks

Many Thanks

Sir Parn of House Tytalus, Prince and Knight of the Great White Oak, Dragon Knight of the Order of Hermes!!:)

~Alex

We will not release a softcover of Blood and Sand (unless something unusual and surprising that I can't presently imagine happens).

The reality is that almost no ArM books get reprinted, besides the core rulebook, and there is even less reason to do so now that we have PDF as an option (we can make a book available to the fans who really want it and can't find a copy in circulation, and the economics of putting up an out-of-print title as PDF are much better than the economics of reprinting). We have a pretty good idea of how many copies an Ars Magica sourcebook can sell in 2-5 years (depending on how popular it is), and we print accordingly. Books that are important enough to reprint often are the books that also can do with revised editions (which isn't outrageous if it's been 5+ years since original release).

So in the future you can expect that we'll do one hardcover printing of a sourcebook; when that sells out, we will most likely make it available as a pay-per-download PDF. If it's a really strong seller, we might consider a reprinting (something like the Wizard's Grimoire might qualify), or a new edition (if it's justified). The time between print publication and PDF publication is likely to be something between 2 years and "never," depending on how many books we happened to print and how well we forecast the rate of sales.

You said you won't buy Blood & Sand because of the binding, but that you'll buy other books solely because of the quality work your favorite authors produce. I'm not sure I see the correlation, there. Niall Christie's work on Blood & Sand is excellent; it's vivid, it's lively and it welcomes players and readers to the setting in a way that's sometimes hard to do in ArM books. Whatever unfortunate problem caused the books at your local retailer to become bowed could very well happen to a book by David Chart, too.

I suppose what I'm getting at it is this: your criterion for automatic purchase (author) and your criterion for automatic rejection (physical condition of the book) can come into conflict. If your local retailer's copy of the next Chart ArM title was bowed, would you buy it? Which of the two criteria is more important to you as a consumer? I'm honestly curious.

word,
Will Hindmarch
Atlas Games

My hope would be that we'll nail print runs just about right to have hardcover books sell out in a couple of years. Then the people who were kind of interested, but not ready to pay full price, would be able to buy the book as a PDF at a far reduced rate (like $10 instead of $30).

And, of course, there will always be eBay and similar outlets where used books can be acquired.

In the meantime, as you say, "hardcover I won't buy unless it says Genest, Bank, or Chart," -- well, then we just need to get those guys to write more, or show you how other writers live up to the high standards those guys have set. :) (IMHO, Niall's book certainly does, but YMMV.)

What I'm hearing is that you ARE willing to pay a premium price...for a book that you really believe will be useful to you. Our goal then should not be to make marginally useful books that are cheap enough that you're willing to buy them, but to make all new books ones that are useful and compelling enough that the most people possible are ready to step up to the cash registers with cash in hand.

I'd like books like this to be thicker, too. We may be able to do that a bit. Going to softcover doesn't save us much; in the spreadsheets I've run, we'd have needed a softcover of the same book to have been $27 or $28. (In the quantities that Ars Magica sells, a high proportion of the costs are fixed -- we spend $X on writing, whether we sell 800 copies or 8000, whereas printing is at least partly proportional to quantity.)

Since you asked/mentioned...

>Especially the cover painting was good as well as

Credit goes to Wizards of the Coast. The cover art was one of the pieces commissioned for 4th edition by them, way back in 1995 or 1996. We had not used it yet.

> the engravings and Eric Hotz usual woodblock print borders.

The engravings are indeed public domain (19th century artwork), and were happily well suited to the topic (pictures of Saladin, various kings on crusade, etc.). I should point out that Eric didn't do the woodcuts (which is why he's not in the credits!) -- it was our art director, Scott, emulating the same style, since we were unfortunately unable to procure Eric's work for this book. (We do have Eric doing the woodcuts for Land of Fire and Ice however. I don't have the margin woodcuts in hand yet -- they should be on our computers tomorrow -- but some of the stuff we do have is very cool, especially the one of the trolls.)

> Some of the art was recycled, as far as I remember the djinn
> drawings was from "the Sorcerers Slave".

It looks similar in style, but that's an original piece by Jesse Mohn. The "recycled" work in the book are all the public domain pieces by Alphonse de Neuville.

Part of our cost-containment strategy on Ars Magica is to make more use of appropriate public domain artwork. I've dropped a lot of money in recent months on antique books, in fact, for this purpose (expecting to save money on the art budget in the long run). Ars Magica offers a unique opportunity for truly appropriate use of public domain artwork, from 19th century works like de Neuville's historical illustrations to actual medieval pieces. (In the upcoming book Faerie Stories, for instance, I'm using one image of a medieval ivory carving of knights jousting. The image I'm using is actually an engraving from a book about ancient and medieval ivories published in something like 1911.)

I thoroughly approve of using public domain art for Ars books. The pieces in Blood and Sand, and ones I've seen in other RPG books (like The Riddle of Steel) all add a certain authentic flavor to the book that most modern drawings lack.

Its release is too far in the future to set a date, though.

David Chart
Ars Magica Line Editor