Last night I got home and settled in to work on some layout for the big Fantasy Firearms project. I know I have said it before, but I can’t reccomend enough lynda.com for training to get the most out of the Adobe suite.  I am taking advantage of styles in CS4 that let me format the text with a click or two.  You work the text once, for example I was laying out magic item entries, and once you have it the way you want it you can copy the formatting into a style.  From then on you can simply click on a style and it formats everything consistently.  The styles work on words, paragraphs, cells and entire tables.  I was sitting there with the Pathfinder main rule book in my hand checking how they did the layout for certain entries, and found I could replicate the formatting quite easily.  I got through the entire manuscript save the last fifteen pages.

To be sure, there still needs to be some art inserted, and the text has to be massaged to make if fit nicely, but the basic formatting is done.  The project is really starting to come together, and is proving a great learning experience that will make future projects better.

I’ll also be putting out some more Adventurer’s Wanted posters this week, along with a couple Traveller releases later in the month.

The iPad announcement has generated a lot of discussion in the publishing field as a whole, as well as our little dark and dusty corner of it.  As I said on a forum post I am not a PDF publisher; I am digital content publisher.  PDF is just a format.  There are and will be other formats.  All in all I am very excited about the prospects for the future.  Which brings me to the idea I just had.  I was talking about a movie idea with a co-worker, and hashed together a throw-away plot for a generic action movie to make a point.  But that got the wheels turning and the germ from that throw-away idea was mixed with another idea or two I had rattling around in my Grey Matter Junk Drawer and I was off.  Inspiration had struck and I jotted down some furious notes.  Until this week all I had was a title, a cool sounding name that I knew I wanted to turn into a project.  Well, now I had the flesh to go over the bones of the idea.  I won’t bore anyone with the details just yet, but I will drop the title I came up with a few years ago.  I thought it sounded cool and knew some day I would do something with it.

Daughters of the Arcane Blade

It’s just five words that I thought sounded neat.  Now I had a cool idea to go with the title.  I was tossing the options around in my head on how best to get this idea “out there”.  Option one was to write it as a novel.  As I would be the writer this seems the least collaborative option and probobly the easiest and cheapest way to see the project finished.  Then I thought a comic book format would be great.  I can picture some great visuals to go along with the words that give life to the story behind the title.  More collabrative since I would have to work with an artist and maybe some ink/colorists as well.  And of course, what good idea doesn’t cry out to be made as a movie!?  I could write it as a screenplay and make a movie out of it.  (Or sell the screenplay to someone with the money to make a movie out of it, whichever.) I was honestly weighing the different options (including some RPG related releases to be sure!) when it hit me…

Why pick just one?  How many movies were first books or comics?  How many comics are based on TV shows, books or movies?  Heck, even video games are spawning novels, comics and movie adaptions.  All this gelled around the term “Transmedia” I first heard during the iPad/Publishing discussions.  The story wants to be told, and some formats serve better than others for telling the story, but in the new media reality a story need not remain locked in one form. As a publisher I can’t afford to keep ideas confined into one little box.

So who knows, in a few months time you could be reading Daughters of the Arcane Blade on your Kindle, Nook, iPad or dead-tree book.  Some time after that you might find the comic book on DriveThruComics or the iBook store.  It is even possible that some day you might be sitting on your couch watching my crazy idea as a movie full of action, adventure and gun-play!  It could also be that you sit around a table and play an RPG based on my idea.  Or maybe none of that will happen.  The exciting thing is that each and every one of them are indeed possible today, and will become even more likely in the future as the barriers to entry continue to be lowered.  It truly is an exciting time to be a small PDF digital content publisher!