Lee
Hi Karen, I'm glad you found a way into this deck. I wish you the best of luck on the project and I look forward to seeing the results - I'm sure they'll be great!
New Alice Tarot Deck from Baba Studios!!!
baba-prague
Thanks Lee. I think the Bohemian Gothic was the key actually - it opened up the possibility of doing things in a much less RWS way. I mean, the Alice deck will be readable as a RWS deck (nothing will actually contradict the broad RWS structure), but the visuals won't reflect the RWS pictures - though the meanings will. It sounds so obvious now, but wasn't obvious to me a couple of years back when we discussed this. The other factor was the new Bohemian Cats illustrations we are also working on - they made us look at slightly different ways of doing anthropomorphic animals and that's been important.Lee said:
Anyway, we think that around midnight last night we finally decided on the style that we're going with. It's going to be a rather new look for us - though I think still very recognisably Baba Studio.
baba-prague
There will indeed be a limited edition deck. We haven't decided on anything about it exactly yet but we've already discussed two or three metallic possibilities. It really will depend on how the cards turn out once we're a bit further on. We like the idea of copper too - seems to fit, doesn't it? But we just have to see more of the cards first. So far, they have quite a rich colour palette.
We also don't know about print run for the limited. I think it may be a bit more than 500 as I'm very aware that many people were disappointed when they couldn't get the other limited edition decks. However, the limited editions take a bit of TLC and we want to include one or two special extras and so the print run will still be small.
Please, please, please, don't anyone email me a pre-order yet
Much as we appreciate this, we won't take any pre-orders for many months - not until the deck is nearly ready to go. There will be lots of pre-notifications and it'll all be in the newsletter of course, so no-one will miss it.
We also don't know about print run for the limited. I think it may be a bit more than 500 as I'm very aware that many people were disappointed when they couldn't get the other limited edition decks. However, the limited editions take a bit of TLC and we want to include one or two special extras and so the print run will still be small.
Please, please, please, don't anyone email me a pre-order yet
Much as we appreciate this, we won't take any pre-orders for many months - not until the deck is nearly ready to go. There will be lots of pre-notifications and it'll all be in the newsletter of course, so no-one will miss it.midniteeye
thanks karen, but you may want to consider keeping the limited edition at 500, since the beauty of a limited edition is that it is limited, and not widely available.
i take that with the alice tarot, and potential reissue and tweaking of the bohemian gothic, perhaps even the victorian romantic, see of logo will probably be further pushed into the future.
just an idea, but you might want to do the re-issue until the alice tarot is well into it's product life cycle, so to avoid competing against yourself for the same money pool. not all the tarot buyers have the kind of money to make multiple purchases at the same time. those who do, mostly already have the behemian gothic and the victorian romantic.
i take that with the alice tarot, and potential reissue and tweaking of the bohemian gothic, perhaps even the victorian romantic, see of logo will probably be further pushed into the future.
just an idea, but you might want to do the re-issue until the alice tarot is well into it's product life cycle, so to avoid competing against yourself for the same money pool. not all the tarot buyers have the kind of money to make multiple purchases at the same time. those who do, mostly already have the behemian gothic and the victorian romantic.
gregory
I have several limited editions of 1000. It is the limited that is the thing, not so much the number of them, IMHO. Though I would expect larger editions to have lower prices, if you see what I mean. A deck in an edition of 100 is always going to command a higher price.
midniteeye
gregory said:
wouldn't a smaller edition with higher price allow the artist more freedom to make the deck and it's companion items more special?
Le Fanu
But wasn't the 1st "limited edition" Tarot of Prague 3,000? Or was that just the size of the print run rather than a specifically "limited" edition...?midniteeye said:
Either way, when a baba baby comes into the world - whether Ltd edition, mass market, whataver - it is always special and always finds it's right public..
I said in the other thread and I shall briefly repeat myself here; I think the news is thrilling. Just enjoy the creative process; enjoy the journey without thinking of the arrival right now. Congratulations on taking this decision and I hope the process is exciting, unpredictable, enriching and free of hiccups! And pressure!
baba-prague
midniteeye said:
No, not necessarily. I mean, because we publish ourselves (a choice we've made in spite of some publishing offers) we pretty much have freedom in any case.
I've had a lot of feedback about people feeling that 500 of the VR Gold and BG Silver was basically too low. The result was that they shot up in price very fast and so many people who wanted them couldn't afford them. We didn't expect this (I imagined them eventually being worth $200 or so, but really didn't think about them ever being as expensive as they are), but it's too late to do anything about it as it's unfair to re-run them now. So for Alice, we are going to think very carefully about what the best limited edition run will be. Feedback on this is very welcome as we want to try to get it right.
Le Fanu
I vote for 1,000. Nice round number. Double what you did in the past. Sounds right somehow...
baba-prague
Le Fanu said:
It was actually 3500 if you count the separate decks. It was our first deck and we hadn't a CLUE what a limited edition run should be. It was quite large in retrospect!
It was a truly limited edition though - we genuinely will never reprint that presentation of the deck or those exact cards. From now on any Tarot of Prague reprints will be of the second, open edition. Though frankly, it looks unlikely we will reprint this deck. A shame, but that's how it seems.
The horrible pressure on the last two decks - which almost prevented us ever doing a deck again (and in the case of the BG made Alex ill for a month or two afterwards) was that we put them in our distributors' catalogues 6 months in advance, with a publication date. This gave us some cast-in-stone (ish) deadlines.
Our very kind US distributor has now agreed that we don't have to do this, but instead can send out a flyer as and when any decks are finished. This means that we are not committed to crazy deadlines and so hopefully won't be working until 2, 3 or even 4 in the morning for weeks at a time (honestly, that's how the BG was). It's an enormous difference - and means that suddenly we can enjoy the process far more and play around all we want. In business terms that's probably NOT a good thing
but in artistic and social ones, it definitely is.