It’s been a year now since I moved to working full time on Curious King, and I haven’t looked back! Whilst the market has changed somewhat in that time, I’m still very excited to keep publishing and will try and adapt where possible as I’d love to do this as long as I possibly can!
The last 6 weeks have been very productive for the press and we are pushing ahead with the books we have announced and laying the groundwork for the ones we have yet to announce.
In that time we also pre-ordered on Before They are Hanged which was great as I know it’s a busy time for collectors of SFF Limited Run books.
The Blade Itself
All copies of the signed cover print by Tommy Arnold have been sent out to customers. We had a snag on the shipping as about 6 prints went missing for a couple of weeks, but they’ve started turning up now on people’s doorsteps. If you have ordered a print and it hasn’t arrived yet then please get in touch.
There will also be 3 more copies going back up on the website (signed and numbered) once I’ve confirmed all current customers have received theirs, and I’ll put out a post when I’m planning to put those copies up.
Before They are Hanged
Pre-order has come and gone, and there are only a couple of Lettered Editions left on the website as the Deluxe and Standard Edition sold out fairly quickly. As mentioned in previous posts the interior layouts have been done and the platemakers have started the process for letterpress printing. We will be printing both BTAH and Last Argument of Kings at the same time so we can finish them both quicker than anticipated.
Vance Kovacs turned in a fantastic dustjacket for book 2 and is well on with the interiors with these due in mid-year. We’ve been given the printing slot for end of Summer, so hopefully we can get these out before Xmas, but may well slip to Q1 2025 depending on any delays in the supply chain.
The Fifth Season
It’s all systems go as we received the final piece of art from John Anthony di Giovanni at the start of the month. These have already been proofed, printed and added to the bookblocks ready for binding.
We’ve had to make some changes to the Deluxe and Lettered Edition to ensure they last the test of time. The Deluxe Edition slipcase is now capped with a cream leather (same as the cover of the book) as the marbled cloth wears quite quickly and you lose some of the sharpness. The Lettered Edition has had a piece of rosewood added to the spine and had some gilding done to it. Not only that we’ve added in some magnets to ensure the lid doesn’t slide off when temperatures change (as can happen with wood).
Ludlow’s are well on with the binding now, and we’re hoping to have all copies shipped out within 6-8 weeks. I’ll be able to give a more accurate update, next month.
As with The Blade Itself there may be a couple more copies of the Standard Edition going back up on the website once we’ve done the bulk of the shipping – but we won’t know until they start going out. So those who weren’t able to pick one up, might have another shot. Also, every now and then someone cancels their order and a copy automatically goes back up on the website, so if you see one up there, it’s a legit copy.
We have also made the decision to carry on using John Anthony di Giovanni on the art for books 2 and 3 as originally planned. John is an incredible artist and his style works so well for this series, it would be great to use him for all three. We may have to look further out timewise to complete the series as there are schedules to juggle.
Hyperion
Hot on the heels of The Fifth Season. Currently being printed by Pat and Ellen at Nomad Letterpress – the plates took a little longer than we anticipated despite the interiors being submitted in October last year.
Jaime Jones has almost finished all the colour plates too and they’re looking sensational. These will be finished way ahead of binding, so we’ll have all our pieces ready once printing has finished.
Not only that, the Roman Numeral Edition prototype has been finished now and I’m really pleased with it. This took a hell of a lot longer than expected (started the concepts on this a year ago) but we’re nearly there. I realise the market for Roman Numeral editions has taken a bit of a dive over the last few months so unsure how many and what price point we produce. My plan was do to 8 copies around the £7k mark due to the amount of R&D that has gone on this, but we shall see. Any interested parties please get in contact so I can assess.
I’ll be taking some pictures of the current prototype and writing out a long post explaining the long process we took to get where we are. These should be going up in the near future – the current rights holders for RN editions will of course be given first refusal.
This will be bound as soon as printing is done, and we’re predicting late Summer for delivery, possibly earlier. Work on Fall of Hyperion will start very soon, as Jaime will be moving straight onto this. Art will likely take a year, and we’ll update you as the year goes on.
Legend
Announced a couple of months back and working away to bring this to life. One exciting thing we can announce at this stage is we will also be having Mark Lawrence (another legendary British fantasy author) contribute an afterword and signature to each edition. Mark isn’t the only contributor, Stella Gemmell is also contributing a foreword to this edition and will be signing it too.
We recently shared some images in the David Gemmell facebook fan group of some depictions of Snaga the artist Justin Sweet has come up with. Just is quite the perfectionist and after an original sketch of Snaga, he decided he needed to explore this further and supplied the below;
