Hey guys, it’s time for your annual Rage News! And this year, we actually have real news!
Let’s begin slowly with cut-and-pasted news from last year about the Rage Series, still in production, and still late.
Alex Nascimento is still in the process of inking Rage #7. Once the inking is done, I’m going to either look for a colorist, or handle the colors of Rage #7 myself. Rage #7’s delay isn’t really a problem though, since I’m hard at work on The Second Night, a book which will follow on the events of Rage #6, and should be out next year (yeah, I know, that’s what I said last year, but the writing of the Serena projects took all my free time. More about that later). The book is set to feature all the Rage and Serena characters introduced so far, and a lot more! The story will take place right after Rage #6, and you’ll understand when you read it why it could only be written as an Interactive Adventure Book. My first idea was to make it an RPG, but I thought about all my readers who don’t quite like playing RPGs, and will need to know what happened in between Rage #6 and #7. Making it first an IAB, and then adapting the story into an RPG was the best solution. I’ll tell you more about it when the time comes.
Now, let us accelerate the pace.
Worlds of Rage #11 is finished, and live! It features a cover by Yonami, and new chapters of the action-packed series Arcana drawn by Walmir Archanjo, and of the series Serena, drawn by Stéphane Degardin!
Now that this issue of Worlds of Rage is finished, I’ve compiled all the chapters of Serena into a new printed compilation available in hardcover and softcover exclusively on Amazon. And as a bonus, the Kindle digital version of the book is available exclusively on Amazon too, and it’s even free to Kindle Unlimited Subscribers!
And for those who don’t have enough Serena, there’s a whole Characters Book too, titled The Temple of Pearls, and also drawn by Stéphane Degardin. Well I’m calling it a Characters Book because that’s the only name I have for it (and it does feature Character Files), but I assure you it’s a lot more than that! You’ll understand when you read it. There are three versions of this book with a different double-cover for each (and the same content, don’t worry), so you can choose which one you like the most (or buy all three. I wouldn’t do that, but it’s your choice). You’ll understand why I had to have Stéphane create three covers when you read The Temple of Pearls.
All the printed versions of these books are already available exclusively on Amazon, and the Kindle versions will follow at some point, but there’s been a little setback. To sum it up, the digital versions will be available in all the digital libraries publishing books in PDF format, but not yet to all those who publish books exclusively in ePub format.
Here’s what happened, for the more tech savvy among you. Some 6 years ago, I tested the first version of Affinity Publisher, and while testing it, I wrote a book (in French only sorry), that I published on digital libraries like Apple Books or Amazon Kindle. To that end, I had to create an ePub file of the book. Since Affinity Publisher doesn’t allow yet exportation in ePub, I exported the book as a flattened PDF, converted the PDF into an Apple Pages document, and exported the resulting document in ePub. The process is a little easier with Amazon Kindle, since I can open the PDF directly into the Kindle Create App and then export it in their own KPF format. And everyone was fine with it! Even though I actually converted a formatted text file as a series of image files, Apple and Amazon still allowed me to publish the book! And then, AI happened… Actually, it’s a coincidence, but five years later, at the time Apple and Amazon began working on their own AIs, I received a message from Apple telling me that my book wasn’t suited for publication on Apple Books, so I had to recreate it entirely in Apple Pages (which wasn’t that hard, since there were next to no images in it). The problem isn’t the same with The Temple of Pearls. As there are too many images and text wrapping, recreating the whole book for an ePub publication either into Apple Pages or in Adobe InDesign is going to be too much work for… not that much money, obviously. So I tried anyway to publish the book the old way, and so far all the Temple of Pearls digital books have been validated by Apple (surprisingly), and rejected by Amazon. I’ve created each book’s respective entry in Kindle Direct, but I’m going to wait for Serif to add an ePub exportation function to Affinity Publisher before creating ePub versions. I do know that Serif has been working on an ePub Exportation function, but I don’t know when it will be available in beta. When it’s available, I promise you I’ll test the beta as a priority, and create ePub versions of all my books. Until then, you’ll have to be patient, sorry.
And since we’re on the subject, let’s not part without talking about my relationship with AI and Artists. As you know, I’m publishing my own books, which (in France at least) means I’m not really an Artist, so I don’t get any support from real Artists (save the few of them who are my friends), nor by retailers (because I’m publishing my printed books on Amazon) and least of all from publishers. It also means that there won’t be any press releases about my books on official sites about comics because the emails got lost. So when all these people are in trouble, when publishers are threatened by tons of auto-publishers crowding the market on Amazon, when retailers are threatened by the Amazon business model, when Artists and newswriters are threatened by AI, they won’t get any support from me either. As you might have guessed, I’m against the policy of companies concerning the training of their AIs, but I’m not against AI as a technology, and I’m definitely against Artists always complaining. For those of you who want more of my opinions about AI, I’ve written a ton of text about it on this page. The text is in French (my native language), and I didn’t care enough to translate it, so if you really want to read it, you’ll need to either use an AI-powered online translator, or pay a French-to-English human translator so that he doesn’t lose his job as people are so fond to say… So sorry about it.
See you on Christmas!
Eric