Status Report

Wow, lots of news recently! For those that missed it, Animorphs got a dedicated time slot in the Scholastic Spring 2011 LIVE Preview Webcast today, and the Animorphs segment portion of it was presented by David Levithan (V.P. Editorial Director of Scholastic). The live webcast is now officially over, but will soon be available to watch on Scholastic again (No idea when exactly, but we’ll make a new post as soon as it does!)

Update: Just received word that it will be available 6pm ET on Wednesday, October 20. We’ll post the link once it’s available!

In the mean while though, here are a few pictures that I quickly snapped while it was being talked about:

I didn’t get a chance to listen to everything, but Mr. Levithan was talking about the relaunch of the series from the 90s, and how it would work for audiences today. The snapshots I took also officially confirms the Animorphs #1 book cover that we posted recently. (And in case anyone is wondering about the 3rd pic, it’s him trying to re-enact the morphing pose, from himself to a moose, lol. He was doing this because he mentioned that they couldn’t show the full animation effects for the lenticular morphing online.)

Going along with that, Scholastic is also planning a full on assault with marketing plans for the re-release. The first book is already in their Online Catalog, with a Summer Series Ad PDF that finally displays the full before-and-after of the first cover! Behold, our new Jake model for Animorphs!

Set within the catalog, there is also a 12-Copy Mixed Floor Display item available for retailers, which will hold both Animorphs #1 & 2, but no pictures are available for it yet.

Lastly, here are also some marketing plans of what Scholastic intends to do with upcoming relaunch of the series:

Marketing Plans

Over 35 million copies of the original series in print!

• 100,000-copy announced first print
• National media campaign
• Select author appearances
• Major advertising campaign, including:
• In-theater advertising in select markets
• Online advertising linking to special content on Animorphs website www.scholastic.com/animorphs update, including:
• Games & Video
• Summer camp sampling
• Outreach to Animorphs fan sites

Quotes / Reviews

Praise for Animorphs

“Engaging… impressive.” –School Library Journal

“There’s clearly something about Animorphs that has kept kids enthralled.” –Publisher’s Weekly

I think that’s everything for now. Expect more updates soon! Lots of things are coming up, and we’ll try to stay on top of it all to keep you fully updated!

A recent Michael Grant interview from the Edinburgh Book Festival reveals that there are two new projects in the works. One is ARG, and the other is a (currently unnamed) shared project that is supposed to reunite Michael Grant and K.A. Applegate as a writing team.

For those that are unaware, both Michael Grant and K.A. Applegate are married, and both of them were the co-authors and co-creators for Animorphs, Everworld, Remnants, and several other series. After Remnants, they both decided to write different kinds of books. K.A focused on younger readers with Roscoe Riley Rules, while Michael focused on GONE. So it’s important to note that this new upcoming project will be the first book to reunite the husband and wife duo since Remnants (last published in 2003).

No details yet as to what the project is about or what it will be called, but you know we’re excited! And we’ll be sure to keep you updated on the specifics as we get them ourselves. In the mean time though, here is a quote from Michael on the subject:

“We’ve decided that there’s a lot more peace in our house when we work on separate projects, and we worked together mostly up until we had the children. Before we had kids 13 years ago, and we continued to work together after that, but you know with their tendency to grow, and start talking and things, it becomes a bigger pain in the butt as it were. So it becomes more and more difficult to keep up, and at that point we didn’t have the time for sitting around and argue. It took up a lot of time, but it looks like there’s a project we’ll do together, a single kind of book.”

Also, there are parts in the interview where Michael Grant gives a little more insight into the Animorphs ending vs the GONE ending. Here’s a short quote:

“When we ended Animorphs, the series I wrote with my wife, we caught all kinds of hell from readers because we left an ambiguous ending. We did that for a reason; we went dark at the end and we’d had like this 60 book series, a war story the entire time, so we thought at the end we want to show consequences and we want to show what’s happened to these kids. So we killed off a major character. We had a kind of mix, you know? Some die, some recover easily, some profit from it, some don’t, but I think everybody was more or less OK with that. What they weren’t OK with was that we didn’t put a big giant period at the end of it.

When I wrap this [GONE] series, there will be a big giant period at the end. Everybody will know what happened, it won’t be like Lost where you have to strain to figure it out. As I go along I make sure I know what I’m doing, and it all will make some kind of sense.” He pauses. “Some kind of sense.”

Aside from that, the only other new detail left to note about is for the 5th GONE book. It has now been renamed from ‘Darkness’ to ‘Fear’ (due to cover space). With a total of 6 books in the series, the following upcoming titles are as follows: #4 Plague, #5 Fear, and #6 Light.

You can read the entire interview at: Bookwitch’s Blog.

Following up from our previous post, Micheal Grant (co-author/co-creator of Animorphs) has now updated his tour page with 16 TV & Radio interviews that he did recently, along with another update saying that he is now on his way to meet fans in Australia and New Zealand!

As part of his trip, he has created a new video for his fans in Australia, which you can check out right here:

The tour is set from October 24 to November 13, however a fully detailed schedule has yet to be posted. For the latest information, check out themichaelgrant.com.

Michael Grant (co-author/co-creator of Animorphs) is currently on his U.K Tour to promote Gone, and his newest series The Magnificent 12. For those in the area, the full schedule of his U.K Tour has now been updated on his new website: www.themichaelgrant.com. Click here for the Tour page.

His new website also features a new blog for himself. So be sure to keep an eye on that for regular updates. (His previous blog, The Stupid Blog Name, is now closed, and I have changed the links on the right side accordingly).

Also, there is a trailer up for The Magnificent 12 series (posted below), and a new U.K one for Lies (Gone #3). Both are available on Michael Grant’s site.

About 2 days ago Michael Grant updated his Facebook with a new status regarding a promotional Animorphs video that he was making for the Scholastic sales people:

And not too long after, he sent a direct message to fans via Richard (owner of RAF). It seems that they are going the same route as they did for the Gone video submissions from a little while back. Here is the full letter from Michael and K.A to the fans:

Katherine and I have some information we’d like to share, and a favor we’d like to ask.

Not sure if you’ve heard this yet but ANIMORPHS will be re-issued in spring/summer 2011. That is definite and official.

An editor at Scholastic is combing the first two books for outdated references, sending suggested fixes, and asking us to approve. Which we’ve now done.

Scholastic will re-cover the books using something called a lenticular cover. So far as we know it’s just the first 2 books, then I guess they’ll wait and see how sales go before issuing more.

Scholastic has asked us to prepare a small video to show at the sales meeting in early August. We realized that the sales people probably don’t really know what ANIMORPHS has meant to so many people. So we wondered whether RAF participants might be interested in sending us some brief video clips just saying what ANIMORPHS has meant to them. They could be extemporaneous, or they could read from some of the lovely letters they’ve sent over the years. The only real guidance we have to offer is to make sure the audio is audible. Use as high definition as you have available, but don’t sweat it if it doesn’t quite look like Avatar. Sincerity is more important than technique.

If you’d post this letter that would be very helpful.

Please ask any who wish to participate to forward their video to jake-at-jakemates.com.

Thanks,

Michael and Katherine

So to sum up, here are the new things we now know:

Regarding the Re-Release:

• The first spring/summer 2011 re-release is now said to be covering only the first 2 books: #1 The Invasion, and #2 The Visitor. Not as volumes for multiple books, but as an individual release of those two books only, with the new covers.

• The books are now going to be updated with outdated references. An editor has gone through the first 2 books, and Michael & K.A have just recently approved the changes to them.

Regarding the Animorphs Video Submissions:

• The video is being submitted to sales people who apparently have no previous knowledge on the kind of impact the series had in its original run. According to Michael & K.A’s letter, the meeting is sometime early August, so time is crucial if fans want to get their videos in. The sooner fans can get their videos submitted, the more time Jake (their son) will have to edit and piece it together for Scholastic.

• Submissions should be sent to jake@jakemates.com. (Anything on Youtube might not be taken, so send the files directly to him!)

• RAF has already begun a discussion thread on how they should go about with their videos. To participate, please go here.

• Please remember that this is for all Animorphs fans. Michael & K.A sent this letter to RAF because they are, without a doubt, the largest Animorphs community online at the moment. However the message is openly directed to every Animorphs fan online as well. There are plenty of smaller Animorphs communities out there. Youtube, LiveJournal, DeviantArt, Facebook, etc, wherever they may be, please pass this message onto them (or individually onto your friends) if you’re in touch! It would be a great help to make sure that K.A & Michael have enough material to work with, and that they have a lasting impact on the sales force that is in charge of reviving the series for next year.

• UPDATE: Thanks to a poster named Kalamu at the Animorphs LiveJournal Community, I was reminded of how many Animorph fans we have in different countries. Kalamu said that she couldn’t make a video because she was not very fluent in English. This is not a problem at all! In fact, it’s a bit of a plus!

  If we have fans in foriegn countries telling Scholastic how much they love Animorphs (in their first language), then it’ll be the most direct way of letting Scholastic know of how much of a worldwide appeal the series still has! And who knows? It may even give your country a better chance at having the Animorphs be re-released in your own language! (The original run of Animorphs was published in over 20 different languages. So yes, it’s very possible to have that again!).

  However, please just remember to add in English subtitles to your video before submitting it in, so that the Scholastic staff can fully understand what you’re saying. (It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. Any basic program like Windows Movie Maker can easily do this. OR, if you’re really not that good with computers, then simply film the entire thing using Flash Cards, as another LJ poster suggested!)

That about covers it for now. I will keep you guys updated as I hear more. NOW GO SUBMIT YOUR VIDEO!

Michael Grant (co-author/co-creator) of Animorphs contacted me yesterday with a quick update regarding the Animorphs Classic re-release:

It’s official: Animorphs books will be re-released with the first 2 coming in summer of 2011. They will have lenticular covers. (Look it up: we had to.)

Lenticular covers basically means that they will be 3D and/or animated. You may have seen examples of this already on various products or DVD releases throughout the years. I’m guessing that Scholastic will most likely use the current covers we have and add a morphing animation to them (much similar to the morphing cards that we got with the Invasion Board Game). But this is entirely speculation on my part, so we’ll have to see where they go from here.

Anyways, that’s it for now! I’ll post more details regarding those 2 summer book releases as they come.

You can now support Hirac Delest through the Amazon Associate’s Program! Following up from our previous post, if you haven’t purchased any of the upcoming books, but plan to, then please use the following links! Each time you purchase from these specific links, Amazon gives us a small percentage of your sale back towards this site. This money then goes entirely towards the hosting & domain payments of Hirac Delest.

We hardly make enough to profit from this (approx 4-6% per sale), but every little bit helps in making sure that this archive stays online and ad-free. It’s a great way to support us if you’re already going to be ordering the books anyway. Thank you for your continued support to Hirac Delest for the last two years that we’ve been online. It’s greatly appreciated!

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Just a heads up, the deadline for Michael Grant’s Fan Promo Video is tomorrow (April 16th). If you plan on participating, be sure to submit it by then! For those that don’t follow Michael Grant’s Twitter, this promo video is for the GONE series, which will hold compilations of fans talking about why they love the series. In order to participate, here are a few things that Michael Grant has listed you must do:

1. Follow @TFSubmissions, and send an @reply to this account saying that you want to participate.
    
2. Record yourself saying what you like (or don’t like) about the GONE series. High quality video is better, but anything is accepted.
    
3. At the start of the video, have a parent say that they are OK with you being in the video.
    
4. After they step out of the video, pause for a second, and say what you like/don’t like.
    
5. Email the video to jake@jakemates.com. Don’t upload it to YouTube or any other video site, just email the file.

To keep up with any future updates for the video promo project, just follow @TFSubmissions. Best of luck to everyone!

An update from our previous post, K.A & Michael have now also joined AFF (The Animorphs Fan Forum), along with RAF, to answer questions from the fans.

The same rules apply on AFF as they do on RAF. Members have to send their questions to the staff before they are approved to be submitted to K.A & Michael. This is done to avoid any repeated questions from previous Q&As. Here are the updated links and details for both forums:

• See AFF Q&A Thread.
• Post your K.A & Michael questions here.

• See the RAF Q&A Thread.
• Send your K.A & Michael questions to Richard here.

There’s also still the Facebook Group set up specially for Michael Grant’s Gone series, for those who are fans of that. Michael Grant is still regularly answering questions there.

• Go to Gone Group Q&A

Lastly, as a way to keep all of these Q&As organized and documented (this is still an archive site, remember?), I updated the Articles section with the original RAF Classic Q&A that was held back in 2008 (It’s the one that holds that infamous response to that Animorphs movie we’ll never ever see, sadly).

• See the full RAF Classic Q&A.

As for the current Q&As, I won’t document or archive them until they are fully finished. In the mean while though, do check them out if you haven’t already. There are some great answers posted on both forums. In RAF, K.A. & Michael are even asking fans on their thoughts of a possible re-release for Animorphs in a monthly ebook form. So definitely share your opinions on this. You can bet that both K.A & Michael are reading, and that they are very interested in their fans responses.

That’s all for now. Until next time! 🙂

Richard, site owner of RAF, recently posted an update to let fans know that K.A. Applegate and Michael Grant are coming back to answer questions from fans on the forums! The Q&A is going to be working a little differently this time though. Instead of everyone rushing in and overwhelming the duo, Richard is asking posters to send in questions directly to him instead. This will get rid of any well known FAQs, or duplicates that the fans asked last time.

• See the RAF Q&A Thread
• Send your questions to Richard (to pass along to K.A. & Michael)

Also, for any Gone fans out there, there is a separate group on Facebook where Michael Grant has begun answering questions on a weekly basis.

• Go to Gone Group Q&A

Lastly, you can now also follow us on Twitter! Our Twitter account is @hiracdelestnews. Follow us to get the latest updates, like this one, tweeted directly to you! You can also join our Facebook Fan Page to get the same benefit. Everything has been updated on the right side of the blog!

That’s all for now, until next time! 🙂