BL Publishing, the publishing wing of tabletop wargaming giant Games Workshop, is planning a new line of pocket-sized graphic novels, launching in October.  The new line will be sold by GW's new Entertainment and Media Division (see 'Games Workshop Building Second U.S. Sales Force').  We talked to Sales and Marketing Manager Vincent Rospond about the company's plans, not only for this new line, but for other titles as well:

Tell us about your new line.

It's a line of pocket-sized graphic novels that will be about 100-150 pages, b/w, reasonably priced at $9.99.  They're based on our comics and of course they're in that GW style. 

When are they coming out?

In October.  The first one is called Titan, and it's going to be Titan, a previous book #1 through #3 and then #4.  It's going to be four books in one--three that were previously released in a smaller page count, larger format.

So there will be some material that wasn't previously released?

Yes, about 50 pages of new material.  That's coming out in October.  Then the next thing that's going to be coming out is going to be Darkblade.  Then we have Hellbrandt Grimm.  We have a special Storms of Chaos, which is a fantasy graphic novel coming out in February. 

All in this format?
Yes they are.   They're great because they stack easily on the bookshelf, you can see them nice and neat.  I think they're very attractively priced

Is the material always going to be a mix of new and old?

Yes, everything will have new material in it.  What we're doing is taking some of the old material which was in a comic book sized format and putting it in the pocket format, but we're also bringing a lot of new material into it, so it will be a little bit of everything. 

How many graphic novels in this size will you put out this year?

Somewhere between four and six altogether.

What else do you have coming out this fall?

There will be a videogame in October.  It's called Dawn of War and it's done in conjunction with THQ.  It will be a real-time strategy-based game based on the Warhammer 40,000 world.  And we're doing a book called Dawn of War to tie into the videogame. 

Last year we had a project with THQ called Firewarrior.  We did a book based on that as well that did fairly well.  The books take the background material, and we're creating a story around it, and every once in a while there are little secrets built into the book, but you've just got to read it.

You have a novel tied into the new Blade movie?

That's coming out in December, and that will be releasing in time with the movie.  It's a novelization of Blade III -- Blade Trinity.  We've done pretty well with the movie novelizations we've done in the past, like Butterfly Effect, Freddy and Jason, and Texas Chainsaw, and we think Blade Trinity should be along those lines.  It's a great movie and it's a good script.

Does that go straight to mass market format or start out in a trade paperback?