My copy of the Dark Age of Tanks has arrived and I am very pleased with it. It is the only book of its kind, and has lots of great information.
The only slight annoyances are the lack of images (I'm sure there are more out there, look at the Secret Projects Series), the darkness of the renders - which are difficult to read in low light, a slightly brighter shade might be better - and the featuring of the FV300 series in the front cover but the lack of further information/images, which was the main reason I bought the book after seeing it there. I really do apologise if I am being overly critical, but I found the Tank Encyclopedia website more informative for certain vehicles, FV4005 anyone.
Otherwise, a very enjoyable read, and thoroughly recomended if bought cheaply on Amazon.
Hello Rafe, I can answer those.
Simple answer: Pictures cost money. There's 87 pictures in there, of which 22 are the CGI renders. The cheapest images licenses I've found so far are Bovington, which charge £25 per image (that's not including the cost you have to pay for the staff to do the work of going to find the images from their system). A few of the images were effectively open source and thus free, but not as many as I'd like. Some the image providers asked for a copy of the book, which is another cost to me. The IWM has before quoted me the cost of £800 for just 11 images. The artist to do the CGI was cheaper than the cost of licenses, hence why I used so many images from him, but it was still a significant bill. Add on the cost of research, for example a trip to Bovy includes travel, overnight accommodation, camera license in the archives and food & drink.
I make a little over £1 per book sale, and I don't shift that many books, a few hundred in the first 6 months is good going. It also took me about, five years work, I think.
So I hope you can see why there's so few images. These books run at a loss for me (first book was even more insane, I think I paid about £3500 in total for images for that!). The only reason why these can happen is the publisher pays you an advance, and then your book sales pay off the debt.
The FV300 series thing, when I wrote that section of the book I knew one of my colleagues (bloke called Ed Francis) was working on a book dedicated to the FV300 series. Rather than steal his thunder (and add another year or so to the work) I decided to skip over that part. It also made the book more cohesive, as we wouldn't suddenly veer off the FV200 to spend several chapters talking about the FV300.
Unfortunately Real Life happened and so far the FV300 book has not happened. Ed however does have a youtube channel:
Which covers a lot of British armour development. You'll see one labeled as the
Vickers Medium Cruiser Mk.1, with a tank that looks very familiar. The reason for that image is I asked Bovy for images of the FV300, their archive has the VMC Mk1 labeled as a FV300, a mistake that has been around for longer than I've been alive. So it got included under that label.
The CGI images looked ok in colour on the computer screen, but didn't translate well to black & white on the page. I did suggest to my editor that we look at something else for fixing those, and she said in her opinion they looked ok. Equally, we were under deadline pressures.
As to TE, check the name of the author, you might just find my name on the page. I know I supplied quite a few documents to Mark for the Fv4005 article.
Thinking about Forgotten Tanks and Guns, can anybody elaborate on what is 'wrong' with it, and whether it is worth me shelling out to get hold of it.
I personally don't like my first book. I've no idea if it's that old saw about 'Yourself being our own worst critic' or not. There's a lot I would have done differently now, and I'm sure people will see the differences in quality. Basically I read all the feedback on review websites, Amazon and the like, and made changes which are reflected in the quality of the two.
Part of why I dislike the book was also down to the headaches I had in pulling everything together, especially the art work. I had four artists, some turned in now work, others half the work they said they'd do. Then I had to find other artists etc. On the day of the deadline the artwork was not complete, and I was sitting there with GIMP desperately trying to knock up the rudimentary plans in the book. Even so we still overshot by a few months, then the book was lost at the publishers for 6 months (as an aside the conversion to ebook format failed, the files corrupted and had to be restarted from scratch). In general it was one of those cursed books where if it can go wrong, it will.
One good thing to come from it, is I found Andrei Kirushkin for art work. It was the first time he'd tried his hand at tanks, he then went on to do work for TE. He's been the sole artist for the Spigot book coming out, and he's a brilliant artist now!