In case you missed me blathering about it with a profound sense of relief, I’ve finally finished my latest book project—Good Nintentions, a massive overhaul and expansion of GameSpite Quarterly 5, in which most of the existing content (except that by other writers, which I left alone) has been heavily revised and newly written content comprises almost half the book—and it’s now up on Amazon. The base price for the book, which is more than 300 pages long, printed in full color with full bleeds in an 8×10 format, if $50. Amazon has a tendency to discount prices on stuff like this, so it could well drop at some point, if only temporarily. The list price on Game Boy World 1989 is $25, but they’ve had it at $22.50 or less since it debuted half a year ago. So who knows!
I realize $50 is kind of a lot. I probably wouldn’t want to pay that, personally! Happily, then, I am able to offer a black-and-white book for about a third of the price of the color edition (the list price is $18). Both editions contain all the same content; I produced them from the same InDesign file, with the one difference being that I darkened some page elements for improved contrast in monochrome. Both editions have Bill Mudron’s awesome cover in full color, so you win either way.
Producing the B&W edition of Good Nintentions also made me realize I could do the same thing with Game Boy World 1989. So now there’s a version of that book available in monochrome for $13.
In summary:
- Good Nintentions in color
- Good Nintentions in black and white
- Game Boy World 1989 in color
- Game Boy World 1989 in black-and-white
Amazon is working to link together the different versions of each book so that you can pick either/or from the same product page, which is cool. I’ll also be posting a Kindle version of Game Boy World 1989 in a few weeks (though you can get it now from StoryBundle’s current Games Bundle, ahem). As for a Kindle edition of Good Nintentions… um, it’ll be a while. A long while. I’d have to rebuild the book from top-to-bottom, and after months and months of working on it in my spare time, I’m kiiiiinda sick of looking at it right now. Please understand.
In case you’re curious about how the new book compares to GameSpite Quarterly 5, this spread offers a pretty good example of the differences between the two editions:
A two-page spread from Good Nintentions.
A two-page spread from GSQ5 featuring the same games, sized relatively to Good Nintentions (5×8″ versus 8×10″)
And here’s a second two-page spread that contains the other two titles covered on the GN sample.
In other words, Good Nintentions features a cleaner layout, a denser layout (twice as much material on a single page), a less cramped feel, screenshots that have been presented in their full format without obstructions, significantly expanded text, and (optionally) color. It technically contains fewer pages (326 versus 440), but obviously there’s a pretty big difference in what’s happening on those pages. The original 440 pages compacted down to about 200 when I did the initial format conversion, for reference.
Anyway, I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about this, and I feel like a shill writing about it, so from here on out it’s back to plain ol’ normal blogging for my after-hours ventures. And making videos. Game Boy World, of course, but also some other stuff to mix things up, because despite the title of this blog entry a man can only handle so much monochrome.