The Black Library ‘Coming Soon’ Page – Back Again!

It’s been an interesting few weeks for Black Library fans, not least with the ongoing saga of the disappearing – and subsequently reappearing – Coming Soon page. As business decisions go that was certainly…unusual, and I’ve been following the furore that sprung up around this topic with interest. I don’t think I was the only person waiting expectantly to see if Black Library would respond to the comments and feedback from the fanbase, and lo and behold they have indeed! I think it’s worth taking another look at what’s been happening, and talking a little about the new solution BL have implemented.

A quick recap
If you’re wondering what I’m going on about, the long and short of it is that for a couple of years there had been a Coming Soon page on the Black Library website (and lately the Games Workshop site too), which detailed most of the upcoming releases for the next few months. It was a very useful tool for planning purchases and getting excited about future releases, and in hindsight it’s clear that a lot of fans valued it. Back in March, all of a sudden that page was quietly removed with no word from Black Library as to why, or how (or at first even whether) it was going to be replaced. You can check out my in-depth article if you’d like to read my full thoughts on what happened and why, and how (in my opinion) Black Library might have handled the situation a little better.

For the purpose of this article, it’s just worth reiterating a few key points around what happened:

• When the Coming Soon page was removed, there was no information provided whatsoever, which meant…
• Fans were unimpressed, with a lot of confusion and speculation around whether BL were going to provide advance information at all.
• Various people subsequently asked questions on the BL Facebook page, and the responses suggested that information would be provided across multiple channels – the Community site, Facebook, Instagram and the BL newsletter.
• A short-lived Facebook/Instagram post directed fans to the newsletter specifically, with the first upcoming release information due to be provided in May…but that was soon taken down.

It’s hard to argue with fans being frustrated by all of this, although the level of unhappiness – which bordered on aggression at times – felt a little bit out of proportion to what was actually taking place. It felt to me like a bit of a storm in a teacup, especially because when Black Library did eventually start providing some information they made sure to say that they were still planning on letting fans know about what’s coming up…just via a different channel to what they’d used before. For me the issue was more about a lack of communication – and arguably of planning – more than anything else.

The new solution
About two and a half weeks after the Coming Soon page disappeared from the Black Library website, as if by magic it reappeared in a slightly different format over on the Warhammer Community site. If you haven’t already taken a look, go check out the new version of the page here – it’s currently accessible via a banner on both the Community homepage and the Black Library website home page.

The first we heard about this new page was a Community post which announced the new version while also officially confirming the release of two new novels – Gloomspite by Andy Clark and Vaults of Terra: The Hollow Mountain by Chris Wraight. The titles and authors of both of those novels had been floating around online for a while via the wider book trade, but this was the first time Black Library had confirmed that they’re definitely coming, and also the first time the covers had been shown. I’m quite a fan of both of those covers, too!

It’s interesting to note that the Community post didn’t offer any direct recognition of all the fuss, which is a shame but not really surprising. I’d have liked to have seen even just a brief ‘you spoke, we listened’ reference, or perhaps an acknowledgement of how important this sort of information is to fans – the sort of thing the Community team have been doing with the Sisters of Battle, for example. Instead, the post offers a concise explanation of what the page will provide, which is at least pretty good as it starts to set expectations. Here’s that section:

You can take a peek into the future and see what books, audio dramas and beautiful limited editions will be coming your way in the next three months. You’ll get a first look at their covers, an idea of the story – and find out when you’ll be able to pre-order them. The page will be updated on a regular basis with new titles, to ensure that you’re always in the know about what’s coming soon from Black Library.

I like that – the “regular basis” reference for when it’s going to be updated is a bit vague (as I write this on a Sunday morning the weekend’s new release is still showing, for example) but otherwise it’s a clear and simple explanation of what the page is going to offer.

I also like the new page, overall. It’s quite different to the old one, but I like the approach it’s taken – splitting titles out by setting (with LEs called out at the top), and giving a brief blurb along with the pre-order date. It’s not perfect – I’ll talk a little later about a few improvements that I think would be good to see – but it’s pretty good. I like the way it gives an overview of what’s coming – it’s different to the old month-by-month layout, and means I need to adjust how I use the page a little, but I’m ok with that.

I’ve seen some criticism online that unlike the old version you can’t see everything at a glance, but I’m not sure I entirely agree. The old page did give a bit of an at-a-glance overview but you had to click through in order to see the full list of titles for each month, and then again to read the synopsis for each title. In contrast the new page allows you to quickly skim the blurb for each title as you scroll through the page. Sure, you can’t fit everything onto the screen…but it’s not exactly difficult to scroll up and down is it?

Does it solve the problem?
First of all, let’s be clear – it’s great to see Black Library/Warhammer Community responding to the needs and wants of the fans. I really wasn’t impressed with the way BL handled this issue, and in fact I think it only became an issue in the first place because they didn’t deal with it properly – as I said in my previous article, if they had just replaced the old page with a new solution (it didn’t have to be this version, just something!) and told fans what was happening, the majority of the fuss would have been avoided. Nevertheless, the fuss did happen…but in my opinion this new solution does a good job of calming that down. It’s not an identical replacement, and won’t appeal to everyone, but I think it does a good job. It’s certainly a better solution than asking fans to check multiple sources – keeping everything in one place is by far the most efficient solution.

You might think that this was what Black Library planned all along, and that’s certainly possible If so, however, why not just swap it over straight away? If a shiny new page on the Community site was always the plan, surely it would have made sense to wait until that was ready and then swap over seamlessly from one to the other – no need for fuss, just the excitement of something new. I don’t think this was the original plan. You just have to look at those short-lived social media posts, which directed fans to the newsletter…I think this new page is a reaction to how much fans pushed back, and a good reaction all told. Certainly a much more measured one than what we saw from a lot of fans!

I still think a petition was a little bit like overkill…

As I said earlier, it’s not perfect. It doesn’t include all of the upcoming titles that we know (from the book trade) are coming, for example. Personally I don’t think that’s a problem; the old page didn’t show everything either, and nobody complained about that! Black Library are under no obligation to tell us about every single title, and a few surprises here and there help to keep things interesting. Besides, there may well be simple reasons for not including everything – perhaps the finished artwork isn’t ready, for example.

If you’re interested, here’s a list of upcoming titles which are all confirmed in the book trade but not yet included on the Coming Soon page – mostly, I suspect, because they either don’t have finalised cover art or because they’re not due for release for quite some time yet (the page goes up to the middle of July, at the moment). I’ve mostly not included paperback editions, as it’s safe to assume that anything released in hardback recently will get a paperback at some point.

• Apocalypse by Josh Reynolds (Space Marine Conquests)
• The Uriel Ventris Chronicles: Volume 2 by Graham McNeill (40k)
• Double Eagle by Dan Abnett (40k – paperback reprint)
• On Wings of Blood: an Aeronautica Anthology (40k)
• The Great Devourer Omnibus (40k)
• The Lost and the Damned by Guy Haley (The Siege of Terra)
• Terminal Overkill by Justin D. Hill (Necromunda)
• Gotrek and Felix: The End Times by David Guymer (Warhammer Chronicles)
• Brunner the Bounty Hunter by CL Werner (Warhammer Chronicles)
• Thanquol and Boneripper by CL Werner (Warhammer Chronicles)
• Inferno! Volume 4
• The House of Night and Chain by David Annandale (Warhammer Horror)

I would say the more interesting question is not so much why aren’t those books listed, but rather when will the page be updated to include them (and other as-yet unannounced titles)? It’s going to be interesting to see how often it’s updated, and whether that happens in a similar way to how it has done in the past – i.e. once a month a new batch of titles appear – or with some other frequency. My hope is that it’s updated regularly, even if that’s just to make sure each week’s newly released titles are removed from the list, otherwise there’s a risk that it might change from being a valuable resource to an unhelpful exercise in box ticking. That’s the problem with organising it in this way and having it on the Community site, rather than the Black Library site – it’s not tied to the live product pages, so it needs updating as well as the BL site, creating additional work. Fingers crossed…

As for other areas where it’s perhaps not quite as good as it could be, here are a couple of suggestions that I would love to see implemented:

• Format: it would be good to see format(s) specified, especially so that it’s clear when a book will be getting an audiobook version. Perhaps a pictorial key, like on the BL site.
• Paperbacks: some of the currently listed books have already been released in hardback, so it would be useful to flag that these are paperback editions.
• Omnibuses: it would be helpful to include the titles of the individual books contained within each omnibus.
• Anthologies: similarly, a little more information about featured authors and story titles wouldn’t go amiss, to help fans understand whether they’ve already read these stories.
• Limited editions: at the top of the page it says that LEs “will be made available again in various ways after a period of exclusivity”, but that’s a little vague. I’d like to see it specified for each book when the standard editions are due for release.

I’m being relatively nit-picky with those suggestions, as well. I would say the format one is probably the easiest to implement and would have the most utility, but I can’t think any of them would be difficult to implement. It’s worth remembering, however, that we’re looking at the first iteration of a brand new resource – if this was something I was introducing, I would be looking for feedback and planning to roll out little tweaks over time to make it as useful as possible. Hopefully that will happen – but even if it doesn’t, this page does at least give us a reasonably good amount of information about most of what’s coming up, all in one place…which is exactly what it needs to do.

Lessons to take from this
I said it earlier and I’ll say it again – this whole issue became a real storm in a teacup, and ended up being blown entirely out of proportion by a combination of Black Library not communicating and a number of fans overreacting. Now the metaphorical dust has started to settle, I think it’s worth very quickly reflecting on a few lessons we can take from what happened.

From a fan’s perspective:

• On the one hand, it’s important not to jump to conclusions and panic. As we’ve seen from social media posts being deleted and comments removed, Black Library are justifiably not keen to see too much negativity (their overall demographic is skewed quite young, remember), so our feedback is going to be most effective when it’s polite and constructive.
• On the other hand, I think our feedback was actually heard and acted upon. We’ll never know to what extent that was true, but it looks to me like BL listened.

From Black Library’s perspective:

• Communication is key! If you’re going to make changes, all you need to do is give the fans a clear message up front, to set expectations and help make sure we don’t feel as though we’re being ignored or not considered.
• I think it’s clear to see that the fans really want to know what’s coming. The more information we get, the more likely we all are to get excited and want to buy more books! Surprises are all well and good, but we need to plan for purchases as well.

Now that the Coming Soon page is back, and with a facelift too, hopefully we can all get back to just enjoying our reading and getting excited about what’s coming out soon. Kudos to Black Library for providing a decent solution – keep that page up to date and I think we’ll all be happy!

***

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Do you like the new Coming Soon page? Have you got any ideas or suggestions for how it could be better? Drop me a line in the comments below, or come find me on Facebook or Twitter and join in the conversation.