Status Report

About an hour ago, Scholastic made an official press release for the Animorphs relaunch, and at the same time revealed the morphing animation for Animorphs #1’s Lenticular Cover! You can see the animation here: http://bit.ly/fSdVQp. (The animation is in flash, so if anyone is able to save a copy of it, either as a gif or avi, please email me!)

As for Scholastic’s press release, it highlights a new quote by K.A. Applegate:

“I am thrilled at the re-launch of Animorphs,” said K.A. Applegate. “Animorphs had far more impact on readers than I ever expected. Animorphs fan sites and works of fan fiction number in the thousands even today. Every library I visit has the old tattered copies, some now barely held together with glue and tape. So I’m very excited at the chance to retire those dog-eared old books, to ratify the enduring faith of the die-hard fans, and most of all, to reach a whole new generation of readers. The invasion is on, the Yeerks are everywhere, and the only ones who can stop them are the small band of kids with the power to become any living creature: the Animorphs are back.”

You can see the entire press release at: mediaroom.scholastic.com.

Most of the details in there are things we already know from the 2011 Library Webcast, however it now gives us an updated release date for Animorphs #4 and #5, which are now released in September and December 2011. So the new official release schedule (along with the ISBN) is as follows:

May 2011

Animorphs #1: The Invasion (ISBN: 978-0-545-29151-4)
Animorphs #2: The Visitor (ISBN: 978-0-545-29152-1)

July 2011

Animorphs #3: The Encounter (ISBN: 978-0-545-29153-8)

September 2011

Animorphs #4: The Message (ISBN: 978-0-545-29156-9)

December 2011

Animorphs #5: The Predator

That’s all for now, but be on the lookout for more news as Scholastic moves ahead with its marketing plans for next year. And be sure to let us know if you stumble across anything interesting!

Until next time!

UPDATE: I just found out that this is our 100th Blog Post on Hirac Delest! How awesome is that?! Makes this news post even better!

For fans in Australia and New Zealand, a schedule is finally available for the upcoming appearances by Michael Grant (co-author/co-creator of Animorphs). He will be there to promote GONE and Magnificent 12 with his son Jake (aka, the REAL Computer Jack).

Australia
Oct 27th – Nov 6th

New Zealand
Nov 9th – Nov 13th.

Specific time & locations: See michaelgrantdownunder.com

Also, here is a new promo for GONE, starring Michael Grant himself!

Following up from our previous post, you can now watch the entire webcast by going to the Scholastic Librarian Preview website and clicking “Watch Replay”. The entire thing is about an hour long, so if you want to skip directly to the Animorphs bit, scroll down to the 36:20 mark to see David Levithan talk about the series.

Update: Major thanks to Kyle Maloney (who commented below) for the quick overnight delivery of this video! You can now watch the entire Animorphs portion of the Scholastic webcast in the video above. Heck, go ahead and even watch it on his Youtube page so that he gets the views, and click ‘Like’!

More importantly, be sure to spread the word! New fans, old fans, and even readers who you think might be interested in Animorphs. Share the video, share HiracDelest.com. Animorphs is out next year!

At this point, we have no way of embedding or saving the video for our own site. However, I’ll do my best to see if I can collect it for our video section before Scholastic replaces it with their next webcast in April. (If anyone knows the best way to do this, then feel free to contact me. Either by email, Facebook, or Twitter). Also, if anyone wants to transcribe the video for me, then feel free to do so, and I’ll add it along with the video!

That’s all for now. More coming soon!

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!

Animorphs #1: The Invasion, and Animorphs #2: The Visitor are now both listed on Amazon.com and are available to pre-order! Both are priced at $6.99 (US) and will be available in paperback. Here is a brief product description provided by Amazon for Animorphs #1:

The wildly popular series by K.A. Applegate is back! The first six books of Animorphs return, with striking new lenticular covers that morph.

The Earth is being invaded, but no one knows about it. When Jake, Rachel, Tobias, Cassie, and Marco stumble upon a downed alien spaceship and its dying pilot, they’re given an incredible power — they can transform into any animal they touch. With it, they become Animorphs, the unlikely champions in a secret war for the planet. And the enemies they’re fighting could be anyone, even the people closest to them. So begins K.A. Applegate’s epic series about five normal kids with a limitless amount of forms and abilities.

Interesting thing to note about the wording from the description above: It says that only the first six books are returning with new covers. If we refer this back to our previous post, it seems as though that they really are the only ones confirmed to be re-released at this point (Not the entire series, as previously believed).

My guess is that more of the series will reprinted once Scholastic has taken a look at the sales figures behind these releases. We have no idea what their plans are after that, but we can assume that they are going to continue re-releasing them if enough people are still buying them.

Aside from that, nothing else is new. Pre-order links are posted below (please use them from here if you can). We’ll be sure to keep you updated if anything else comes up!

 

Pre-Order Animorphs #1: The Invasion (Lenticular Edition)
Release Date: May 1st, 2011

Pre-Order Animorphs #2: The Visitor (Lenticular Edition)
Release Date: May 1st, 2011

**You can help support Hirac Delest if you pre-order from the links above. You will NOT be charged anything extra for doing this! All it will do is add in Hirac Delest as a referral for your transaction(s). In return, Amazon will give us a tiny percentage of your sale, which will then go entirely towards paying for the hosting and domain fees for this fan site, keeping us online and running ad-free. Doing us this small favour would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

A big credit to RAF‘s Magdaleen, who posted a sneak peek at the upcoming cover of the 2011 Re-Release Edition of Animorphs #1: The Invasion! (see right).

As most of you know from our previous posts, the new covers are supposed to be lenticular, meaning that they will transform and change right before your very eyes. So the image that you currently see is only a still of what is to be an animated version. It’s also very possible that this isn’t the final version, as the release date for the book isn’t for another 7 months.

As for the source, the image itself was found on the Ute Körner Literary Agent site, which also included an entire page blurb about the relaunching of the franchise. Here it is:

Scholastic will re-launch the internationally bestselling Animorphs series in Summer 2011, starting with a six-book arc. In its heyday, the Animorphs series sold over 20 million copies worldwide and was translated in 26 languages and was turned into a popular Nickelodeon TV show.

For the re-launch, Scholastic has updated the covers to give them a fresh, modern look: in keeping with the eye-catching nature of the original covers, the new books will make use of morphing lenticulars: the characters transform right on the covers.

An updated look gives the series new vitality for a new generation of readers.

Animorphs is sci-fi at its best: fast-paced, thought-provoking, and a lot of fun.

The page also has a downloadable PDF which contains the above blurb, along with the release dates for the rest of the books! This is the schedule that we are currently looking at:

Animorphs #01: The Invasion – May 2011
Animorphs #02: The Visitor – May 2011
Animorphs #03: The Encounter – July 2011
Animorphs #04: The Message – October 2011
Animorphs #05: The Predator – January 2012
Animorphs #06: The Capture – April 2012

Out of all of this though, the biggest surprise about this page is the fact that you can currently also ORDER a reading copy of this re-release! (However, that seems to only be available to those who have the proper publishing credentials to do so).

Lastly, there is also a heavy emphasis on the fact that Animorphs has been published in 26 languages. At the moment, we have nothing confirmed regarding translations in other countries, but we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for that info for our international fans!

That is everything new that we have learned at this point. However, there is one piece still missing, and that is the animated version of this cover. The PDF that contains the cover talks about an animated gif being attached, but it can’t be found anywhere! If anyone happens to stumble upon it, then please do email us ASAP! We’d love to take a look at this thing in action!

That’s all for now, we’ll be sure to post more info as we receive it. And again, another big big credit and thanks to Magdaleen for finding this!

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.

Following up from our previous post, the video submissions for Michael Grant & K.A Applegate’s presentation for the Scholastic meeting are now over. Michael Grant contacted me back to confirm this. Unfortunately, only some of the fan videos were able to make it to them in time for the final edit. However, Mr. Grant said that the overall meeting at Scholastic still went “very well”.

He is currently preoccupied with a million things on his schedule at the moment, but he did say that he wishes to thank everyone who took the time and effort to make sure they submitted something to them.

We’ll keep you all updated on any further news regarding the re-release as they come. Thanks to everyone who participated. 🙂