As we commented a few months ago about the ‘Blood/Iron Wings’ phenomenon, we were facing a bestseller that was not only selling for itself, with bookstores immersed in chaos and speculation unleashed in second-hand buying and selling apps like Wallapop. The expectation was also multiplied by the appearance of special editions of the novel that sold out in a matter of minutes.
Fully with the Empyrean. ‘Wings of Blood’ and ‘Wings of Iron’ are the first two installments of the six-book (projected) ‘Empyrean’ saga. There are talks of five million readers, a series adaptation is in preparation by Amazon and it spent 41 weeks on ‘The New York Times’ best-seller lists. In Spain, an expectation was generated that surpassed the calculations of its publisher, Planeta, which launched a Collector’s Edition with the edge of the pages (the “taco”) colored and with characteristic motifs of the series.
They take it out of my hands. The first installment of the saga had a circulation of 75,000 copies, of which 30,000 arrived with a tinted heel. The work was repeated with ‘Iron Wings’, but the special edition came out without a Price increase, something that had happened with the previous edition. The result: massive requests for the special edition and, later, speculation and protests on social networks. As we reported at the time, the sales that exceeded the publisher’s expectations (three times more than expected) and the policy of large stores to hoard copies caused more than one disruption to booksellers and readers.
Continuous reissues. The world of highly demanded literary sagas and franchises, fans of ‘Game of Thrones’ know perfectly well, can easily become games of endurance for patient readers. Publishers have to manage to sell the same product over and over again, and that is why they invent new editions, each year more special than the previous ones. This time, the novelty with ‘Empíreo’ has been the Collector’s and Enriched Edition, which is essentially the same book with new decoration on the heel and an unpublished introductory text. Does it add anything substantial to what has already been seen? No. Will there be fans who Buy the book for the third time? Definitely.
Not just Christmas. The phenomenon of special editions is not exclusive to fantasy sagas, nor is it exclusive to Christmas. Already in the summer, Spanish publishers realized the wealth of this type of editions, which numbered in the dozens in each publisher. For example, Penguin or Planeta, two of the largest publishing groups in the country, have all kinds of special editions, many of them with colored blocks: sagas and hits like ‘Sins’, ‘Shadowhunters’, ‘A court of fog and Fury’, ‘Elantris’ or ‘Red Queen’, and even classics and hits from the past such as ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Normal People’, ‘Infinity in a Reed’ or the inevitable reissues continuations of authors like Tolkien or Martin.
The box phenomenon. The highlight of this phenomenon are the boxes, which allow books that have already been individually in bookstores to be relaunched without changes. One of the most popular cases is the box that compiles the entire saga of ‘Blackwater’, one of the undisputed publishing successes of the year, and which serves to put back on the Christmas shelf a series of books that have already made their corresponding life cycle in bookstores. Penguin, for example, has several boxes with the Harry Potter saga, each of them decorated in the style of each of the houses in the saga. Another way to keep alive a series that is already closed but continues to provide huge benefits.
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