Friday, September 04, 2009

The Wheel of Time eBook repackaging. (Or, Wo0t!)

Tor's biggest selling fantasy series is Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time. If you don't know already, it's hard to overestimate just how popular this series is. Beginning October 27th we will start to release ebook editions.

The most exciting part, for me at least, is that they will have new covers -- each book by a different artist. We have a great mix fantasy heavy-hitters and artists not typically associated with the genre. Each will bring their own style to the project, creating fourteen new visions of Jordan's world.

Commissioned so far:

The Eye of the World
David Grove

The Great Hunt
Kekai Kotaki

The Dragon Reborn
Donato Giancola

The Shadow Rising
Sam Weber

I have a loose wish-list for the rest of the series and have been working closely with the WoT editor, Harriet McDougal, and have started an excellent dialogue with Tor.com's Leigh Butler, and Dragonmount's Jason Denzel on these. I'll release images as I can. From teh couple sketches we have in so far, this should be a fun ride!

Please note: Images above are samples of past work from the artists, not paintings for this project.

10 comments:

leemoyer said...

Wow, what a great project. Something to look forward to.

I LOVE that Something Wicked poster. I was just showing Liz the scene of Mr. Dark in the library and talking about how Jonathan Pryce knocked me back with his brilliance.

Anonymous said...

Any chance this is the "secret project" from a week or two ago? Though that may have been a tweet, I forget. Very cool none the less.

Mihai A. said...

This will look certainly great. I can't wait to see the future artwork :)

Anonymous said...

Thoughts on different artists for each book? Personaly I love it! Though seems to me the series would be unified with the same artist like the first go around with Darrell Sweet. Am I correct to assume its like this because they are ebooks? More freedom with cover art here? Just curios about the decision to market these like this.

Donald McLean said...

Hard to get excited about this when Tor has such a rotten record on ebook releases especially w/r to prices and format availability.

Stephen said...

Fantastic! great artists as always

Michael baldwin said...

To bad the e-books were not out sooner. It would have been really nice to have them before the release of The Gathering storm. i hope I can get them all listened to before the big release.

Anonymous said...

What does it take normally for an artist to catch your eye? I've seen one or two posts where you find a new "art crush" but Tor's covers seem to be the same list of heavy hitters over and over again. I love the art of all of those guys, but it would be nice to see someone new and young. (and also a better female to male ration. There are plenty of female illustrators out there!)

Anonymous said...

Congratulations Sam! Sounds like a great project. I wonder, does TOR have artists lined up for all of the books of the series yet?

I am kinda partial to The Wheel of Time...

Anonymous said...

please don't disappoint us. i haven't read any of this series yet, and have wanted to for years. neeeeed the e-editions.