Thanks for helping launch Tune & Fairweather with your support of You Died. You were the first to give us your vote of confidence and we'll always appreciate you for that.
Fond regards,
New T&F project: Soul Arts by VaatiVidya
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Aug 20, 2021 at 08:02:13 PM
Just in case you missed the announcement, we wanted to let you know that our new art-book collaboration with VaatiVidya – Soul Arts, a compilation of gorgeous fan art submitted by the Soulsborne community – is now live on Kickstarter.
If you appreciated the quality of You Died, you will love Soul Arts.
Sample spreads from Soul Arts
If you've already backed the new campaign, thank you!
For the rest of you, there are still 24 days to go. We'd love for you to be among the first to receive this beautiful book of top-tier Soulsborne fan art.
Wish us luck!
Win a free Gravelord Servant edition, "Mother & Child" Kickstarter poster or T&F Copper Coin
over 3 years ago
– Sat, Nov 07, 2020 at 04:28:37 PM
Hello You Died backers,
As we enter the final week of Tune & Fairweather's second Kickstarter campaign, The Epicureans – a novel set in the American south that has shades of Stephen King, Tom Waits and the Coen brothers – we wanted to do a special giveaway for the You Died backers that helped us launch our publishing house.
We have a lot of ground to cover to reach our funding goal for The Epicureans and we need help getting the word out to book lovers. We'll explain the contest rules shortly but let's first go over the giveaway goodies...
THE PRIZES
You Died "Gravelord Servant" edition(quantity:1). Genuine Italian-leather copy in handcrafted scorched oak coffin.
Rare "Mother & Child" screenprint, black and red edition (quantity:3). We kept a small surplus stock of this exclusive Kickstarter reward in reserve in case we needed to replace lost or damaged shipments. This item is no longer available for purchase via the Tune & Fairweather website.
The Copper Coin (quantity:10). We had a small batch of additional coins minted after the You Died campaign. If you didn't happen to get one of these as a reward or random drop, this is your chance to get your hands on this rare T&F collectible.
- Your social post will need to include the following items to be entered into the giveaway drawing:
The hashtag #FearTheFeast (this will help us differentiate contest entries from random posts that may appear)
A tag for Tune & Fairweather so we can notice the post and enter you into the drawing (here are the profiles for T&F's Twitter, Insta and Facebook for help with tagging)
A photo of The Epicureans book cover, which you're welcome to select from the following:
DEADLINE FOR ENTRIES
In order to be eligible for the drawing, you'll need to have your social post up by Friday, the 14th of November, 12pm Irish time. At that time we'll catalogue all the entries and use a random-number-generator to select winners.
Thanks for your past support of Tune & Fairweather. And a huge 'thank you' to those of us who've decided to join us on the journey of creating this new project, which is different from You Died in many ways and offers us a variety of fresh creative challenges. We look forward to creating more behind-the-scenes content for The Epicureans.
Good luck to everybody who enters the giveaway and thanks for helping us get the word out!
A note from T&F founder Jason Killingsworth
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 05:56:39 PM
When we announced the Kickstarter campaign for a hardcover edition of You Died– a project that your support made possible – we hoped it might be the start of a long, exciting journey. Not simply an end in itself, 'one and done'.
That's why I decided to reinvest any profits left (after paying my co-author, art director, production coordinator, multiple printers and one very talented woodworker) back into the company rather than keeping any profit as personal compensation for the hundreds of hours I'd spent launching the company and revising the text of You Died for its new incarnation. The decision was not difficult.
Here's the thing: I hope to continue making beautiful books for years to come.
I've assembled a team of insanely talented people and I want to see what heights we might be capable of reaching if we keep rolling forward the lessons we internalise with each new project. If the work we did was excellent enough, maybe we could even create fans of our work that might take a risk on future projects. Even ones that didn't feature Dark Souls... or FromSoftware... or any video game at all.
That brings us to our second project, a.k.a. New Book Plus (NB+): The Epicureans, a novel by the Pulitzer-nominated author Charles McNair, whom the late Ray Bradbury once hailed as "a genetic original". I've been a massive fan of McNair's fiction for well over a decade and it boggles my mind that we have the privilege of bringing his newest novel to readers.
The Epicureans is masterfully written and somehow manages to veer effortlessly between the poles of horrific and heartwarming. There's an elite billionaire supper club that indulges in a cannibal feast each winter solstice. The twin children of a working-class family from Alabama get targeted by one of The Epicureans as an ideal delicacy for the next year's feast. The stakes couldn't be higher and we eagerly turn the pages to see what happens next.
If you appreciated the quality of You Died, we hope you'll consider supporting The Epicureans. The Kickstarter has been live for a few days now. We're just over 20% funded but I have a feeling this campaign is going to be an uphill struggle. To borrow a bit of familiar video-game lingo, we're launching a new IP. We can't fall back on the beloved Dark Souls brand this time. We might even fail! But as the old saying goes, "Fail we may. Sail we must."
We're nowhere close to done making books about FromSoftware games. There are exciting plans for the future. But we also want to create original work that paves a unique literary legacy. It's fun to be surprised. Imagine if FromSoftware had only churned out Dark Souls sequels and never taken a risk on Bloodborne (my second-favourite game they've produced after DS1).
If you've read this far, thank you again for enabling me to go on this crazy adventure in the first place. Since the launch of You Died, I've left my job in video-game marketing to see if I can make it in book publishing full-time. Life has its own surprises, its own manic swerves between terrifying and terrific. We've only got one life, might as well take some risks and have some fun while we're here.
I've heard that starting a business is a bit like jumping off a cliff and then figuring out how to build a parachute on the way down. That was definitely the case with the You Died Kickstarter.
If you think writing a book is difficult, wait till you try to print four stupidly complex versions of that book and ship copies to Singapore and Peru and Moscow and New Zealand during a global pandemic. Good thing the hundreds of hours I've spent playing Dark Souls have turned me into a zen master. I have inoculated myself against the rage-quit impulse!
You Drived
Thank you to everyone who posted photos of your deliveries to social media and tagged us in so we could celebrate with you. Our buddy illusorywall even did an unboxing video on his channel!
Hopefully 99% of you have received your books. Because of COVID-19 some of the delivery times have been extremely painful (a full month to get to Australia... oof). Thanks for your patience. We also had a handful of instances where an order failed to export from our pledge manager BackerKit to our Shopify store backend.
If you have not yet received your order (or at least gotten a shipping confirmation with your tracking details), don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected].
Update on Gravelord Servant Edition deliveries
We won't be able to tie a ribbon on the Kickstarter campaign and officially call it done until we send out the Gravelord Servant Editions. That item got hit the worst by the COVID-19 delays. And then we had to wait nearly a full month for some of the backordered metal fittings to finally come back into stock. We're investing extra money to design plywood security boxes (yep, a wooden box in which to ship our wooden box) so that those arrive to backers in perfect condition. We don't want to take any chances with these precious handmade objects.
Our master woodworker Thomas is working overtime to get these done and we expect to start shipping first thing next week. It will be worth the wait, we promise!
Again, if you've had any issues with your order, don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] so we can make it right. Unless you're 100% happy, we're not happy.
