A Legal Note

The following outlines a proposal for your perusal published on the 11th of Feb 2010. The projects within have been copyrighted at the time of conception, and are the sole property of Andy Boot until such time as partner agreements supercede this statement by mutually contracted consent.

Fumetti Deluxe: Fiction Brands For You.

Mission Statement.

We are a company that creates, conceptualises and executive produces high quality fiction content for all media. From format to book to script.

Business Plan.

This is designed as a joint venture proposal. Using the resources of a company with experience in IP brand exploitation, this company will conceptualise, develop, and market new IP brands.

Obviously, building from the ground up means investment. Usually, companies work with already established brands. However, there is a model that can build and road-test new brands at a low level of expenditure.

Phone downloads and the internet provide such a medium. Already, some publishers are developing business models that allow them to offer free content to potential customers as an enticement to buy a more developed product, which can be offered at a low unit cost as either download or print-on-demand, both in print and audio formats. Small games can be developed cheaply for low-cost download. This builds profile and following, allowing the sale of further rights in other media.

The key to this is producing the core material at a low cost and also publicising the new brands at a correspondingly low cost.

The answer is in a phone or web feed that supplies a free weekly or monthly ‘pulp’ digest of fiction and articles about the characters and brands, giving background and showing them in action. For hosting and building, plus content, there is an initial but proportionately small investment. Publicity can be generated using web rings of sites dealing in the relevant genres, and also in using techniques for tagging that draw in browsers for similar material, utilising methods of boosting the new site on search engines.

This site would build an initial audience and awareness of the new IP brands, allowing them to be marketed more efficiently into the areas of publishing, audio, TV&film, games, and franchising.

The necessity of a joint venture lies in this truth: a website can be built and launched, but the expertise and contacts of an experienced company is needed to exploit the material to its fullest potential. Without such a company, it’s just another site. With such a company, it’s using old publishing models in a  new medium as an efficient springboard to bring quality imagined material to public awareness.

In essence, we’re talking about the cyberspace equivalent of the old storypapers and pulp magazines that formed the backbone of popular fiction. Offering short stories and serials in a new way to whet the appetite for novels, games, movies and TV series.

Company Aim.

Fumetti Deluxe deals in conceptualising properties that can be developed in a variety of media. The company founder, Andy Boot, has written extensively for  Harlequin/Gold Eagle in series fiction, and has created series, written, and been series consultant for Rebellion’s Abaddon imprint. He has also created and worked on reality and game show formats for Action Time, who before their absorption into ITV were the foremost independent producer of reality and game content. For some time he worked in development for a start up called KTV, whose aim was to develop and interactive karaoke satellite channel: as an adjunct to this work, he learned a lot about the use of flash and phone tech in downloading.

All developing properties have great visual potential to go with their already existing dimensions as written characters. Although essentially a prose writer, I always think in terms of how they would look on screen – be it TV, movie, or PC console. These characters and their stories can be fitted to existing and new media: they’re ripe for book, serialisation in print on and the net, audio and animation, gaming and dramatic developments.

Partner Involvement.

How does a partner fit into this? Simple: the idea is for Fumetti Deluxe to be funded with a shared copyright agreement that will enable Carlton to benefit from the creation of intellectual property.

 

Why Use Rights Franchising?

In the media world that is evolving, branding is all-important. Most brands that a company gets involved with are already established. However, building from the ground up offers low start up and the chance to take a slice of profit from the very beginning.

Marketing Prior To Launch.

If Fumetti Deluxe launches with novel packaging as its core, the question is how to, at least partially, by-pass the problem of launching new projects in a crowded marketplace.

The key is that the writer is not the focus in these projects. The characters are. Accordingly, it is planned to start an FD website and phone feed that will have background text and visual representations of the characters. Forums for readers, the chance to post fan fiction, and some exclusive downloads are other highlights.

The key area is in making the potential readership aware of the IP before the first books hit the stands. To this end, a tie-in with the publisher’s website would trailer the website in advance. Genre sites and boards would also be targeted, as would genre magazines on-line and hard copy. Using particular board and site providers will enable FD to tag their sites, blogs and forums so that they have a better likelihood of appearing high on searches powered by Google and Yahoo. Initially, this will be run purely using blogs and forums by the likes of ProBoards, to keep costs low until work is commercially available.

Properties.

The following gives you a high concept overview of the properties. Any combination can be taken from the following for intial launch. There are adult, juvenile, and graphics properties in the list below.

All concepts, characters and properties created by Andy Boot.

* Redemptress.

            Amanda Likely is the ice queen twenty-something IT genius who runs her own corporation. She has a ruthless reputation, powered some feel by the loss of her family to Mafiya gangs when she was a child prodigy at Cambridge. What isn’t known is that her carefully acquired wealth is ploughed into a world-wide network – run by a few trusted assistants – dedicated to eradicating injustice. The ice-cold blonde becomes a flaming red-head, dressed in a black exo-skeleton bodysuit, wreaking havoc on organised crime and political terror… The Redemptress.

* Revenant.

            Jack Fallow was an Edwardian private investigator, going about his business, until an encounter with primitive super-science slowed his body’s ageing process almost to nothing. Since then, he has investigated crimes and phenomena that defy belief, while trying to account for the strange things that have happened to him. What is it like to see the world change, your friends and foes age and die while you seem to stay the same… at least on the outside. And what if one of your deadliest enemies can also stay young, orchestrating against you, unseen?

* Hangover Hall.

            What if every dimension and strand of the universe got knotted up, like a dust bunny under a bed? And what if that was in the wine cellar of a house straight out of Wodehouse? An amiable Milord with a desire to create the perfect piece of kitchenware; an alien race who see it as the perfect weapon to end a millennia-old war; a spy who falls in love with a proto-feminist secretary; a butler on the run from the police; a cook who can’t cook; trolls in the shrubbery; a wanna-be danceband saxophonist who ends up as the only Chilean policeman in England; a purple-skinned Barbarian mercenary from another world who turns out to be quite good at netball… it can only happen at Hangover Hall.

* The Haunted.

            Dr Martin Grace, philosopher and parapsychologist, is haunted by his past, which drives him forward to investigate the bizarre and the anomalous. He’s joined in this by Artemus Pyle, exiled bootlegging baron (music and film, not whiskey) from Texas, who uses his ill-gotten gains to finance Grace. The two men are looking for answers, tied together by a chance meeting in Mexico. Looking for answers of a different kind is Diana Daedelus, the goth squatter and activist who shares their house and – sometimes – Grace’s bed. All of them are searching for something. But does it lie inside or outside?

            A first story would be set in a haunted house – the fictional equivalent of the infamous Borley Rectory – which involves parapsychology and travelling through different times and dimensions to explain what ‘ghosts’ may be.

            A second story, developing the themes wider, would be Nights Of London, in which the trio travel back to 1928 to thwart a bank robbery using a primitive time-travel device that is causing temporal anomalies. The sections set in 1928 are interspersed with those set in the present, 1941, 1967, and 1992 that fill in missing parts of the story, showing how the past and present can influence each other even across temporal boundaries.

* Deadline.

            Kat Keller was a drifter, going nowhere and only caring about her daughter, until the night that she stumbled on a black op that was part of a secret cabal to establish a new world order. Shot and left for dead, she lost a year of her life, and they took her daughter. Now she wants her girl back, and she wants revenge. And there’s been enough time lost already. Tapping into conspiracy theory networks, she learns of ENOW, the secret conspiracy that has her child. And she gains allies who can help her in her one-woman war.

* Blackmail.

            Laurence Stephens is one of the idle rich. Well, he would be, if he could get his hands on his trust fund. Meanwhile, he tries to get by without doing anything approaching work. He finds allies in the shape of Sandy and Jan, two girls on the make. They hatch the perfect blackmail plan, skirting the law. It all goes well until one of their marks turns out to be a government agent, and they’re recruited… much against their will. If that wasn’t bad enough, one of their other marks takes it upon themselves to graduate from scandal to murder…

* Daughters Of Arandala.

            The society of Arandala live in a shadow realm to our own. They are all that stand between the known universe and an invasion from without by the banished elder gods and demons. Problem is that there is a rent in the fabric of the universe, and these forces can break through… into our world. Due to a quirk of fate, there are some women of Arandala who have dopplegangers in this world. These Spirit Sisters are able to step through and replace their Earthly counterparts in the fight to preserve order and harmony. But not only do they have to fight, they have to fit into their Spirit Sister’s lives without causing ripples… which can sometimes be harder.

* No Doves.

            Jack Goldman is a police officer going nowhere. Dedicated but contemptuous of authority, his career has stalled. His marriage has fallen apart, and his wife won’t let him see his son. On top of this, his beloved Grandfather is dying in a hospice. Not the right time for a gang war to break out in London. Especially as it’s fanned by the activities of the Plaistow Avengers, a gang of rogue vigilante cops. No-one believes him, not even his partner, Errol Ross. Ross is himself a rebel – son of a Jamaican diplomat who has turned his back on privilege for what he sees as the real world. But then both men are framed, and have to go on the run. The truth is that their superior runs the vigilantes, and the only way to bring him in is to side with the gangs they spend their time trying to break. If they emerge alive, where is there left for them to go?

* Pulped.

            The Pulp Thrills Publishing House in 1930’s NYC churns out five magazines filled with action every month. The Red Admiral and The Black Pearl battle crime gangs and overlords; Crash Flanagan burns up space in pursuit of an evil empire; Quaterstaff Of The Jungle battles super-science and world domination in the heart of the African continent; and Joss Likely battles forces older than the known universe. What the readers don’t realise is that the writers ARE their heroes, and all they write is true, the magazines paying for their fight against darkness. PTPH is just a front, run a hard-talking publisher who is, in reality, a scientific genius. The trouble really starts when their enemies realise that the magazines are for real, and decide to band together…

* Darkness Falls.

            Rebekah Pacey is an English Professor in a small New England town. Seemingly staid, she likes it that way. Early years spent backpacking and working with aid groups in Africa exposed her to too much violence and despair. Time running with guerrillas taught her how to fight, but she doesn’t want to go back. She has to when her estranged sister, on her way to build bridges, disappears, and all points to a chance encounter with the Crimson Moon Corp, who run the county in which she lives. Asking too many questions, attempts are made to frighten her. Which is a bad move, as Rebekah’s past comes back to her, and she fights back. Along the way, she uncovers the truth about her sister, and also the conspiracy that she unwittingly stumbled upon…

* Waldo & Emerson.

            Waldo is a Polish emigre living in East London, who rooms with Emerson, a third generation West Indian guy in his early twenties. Waldo is a hard worker, doing anything to improve his life and make something that he can bring to his beloved Shanice, who is Emerson’s sister. Emerson, on the other hand, is a total slacker who dreams of making amazing music but does very little about it. They share a flat in a house owned by Ralph, who used to work for the BBC in the radiophonic workshop. Clearing the basement for him, Waldo finds some old tapes he gives to Emerson… A rollercoaster to success follows. But there’s one thing – what if Ralph wants royalties? How do they deal with him?

            Especially when they discover that Ralph’s Radiophonic experiments have somehow cracked time and space, giving the boys a way in which they can try out some outre get-rich-quick schemes using his inventions.

* 43

            Brady is a writer. At least she was. Once, under a number of names, she wrote paperback bestsellers that dealt with violence, sex and sleaze. Now she lies in a coma, burnt-out and drink-sodden, the victim of an accidental fire in her home. She’s almost forgotten. Except, perhaps, by the children she neglected, the men she screwed over in so many ways, and the people she hurt on her way up. As she lay between life, death, and the points in-between, her memories of the past are mixed with her lurid fictions to try and find and answer…

* Many Happy Returns.

            Andrew ‘Pinkie’ Fairweather used to be the bass player on 80’s new romantic band Copacabana. Now he is an automotive engineer – yes, he fixes cars for a living. But he’s happy… almost. He adores his wife, Rita, who is as beautiful to him as the day they met. And as thick. But as he’s not the sharpest tool in the box, that’s OK. They have Catherine to look out for them. She’s Rita’s best friend, and has pitched up at their door following the break-up of their marriage. It’s animosity between Pinkie and Cath, but unknown to him she will look out for him… if only for Rita’s sake. So when a spurious reunion idea is broached by his ex-manager, only Cath can smell trouble. Trouble spelt ‘f-i-n-a-n-c-i-n-g’…

* Zap’t.

            Charlie Brooker is a council estate kid who has wandered through dead-end jobs supported by his girlfriend, Elise. He’s the smart one, but she’s diligent, and has worked her way up the corporate ladder. Paying his bills and hoping he’ll shape up is getting to her, and when she agrees to finance his club nights, he doesn’t realise it’s her last throw of the dice. He’s been doing OK at it, but the cash injection to run your own set-up is draining her, and when Charlie’s brother Si offers to help, she reluctantly agrees. Reluctantly as he has a dubious history of borderline criminal activity, and the money may not be clean. Throw her freeloading best friend Elise into the mix, and there’s a volatile situation waiting to catch fire.

* Something Strange.

            Jonathan Strange is a writer with an intelligence background. Married to the younger Kaye, they are responsible for the RoadRat kids series. But Jon is at the mercy of Jess, his ex-controller and ex-lover, and keeps getting dragged into anomalous mysteries. He also has a son with baggage – his wife was killed by mysterious men when they were travellers, and there may be intelligence work at the back of this. Kaye’s grandfather Lionel ‘Marksy’ Marks is an ex-coroner and fount of all gossip that they can turn to.

* Double Jeopardy.

            Danny Sugarman, ex-northern soul DJ and failed security man is a PI with his partner Justin Stamp, and ex-music journalist who got a taste for snooping. Danny is married to Steph, a primary school headmistress, and his nemesis is DCI Frank Gaunt. London-based, specifically the east. Steph hates Danny’s job, and as a fully-paid-up coward, he’s not too keen at times. But Justin’s nose for truth, which led him to Danny and the PI business after a piece of investigative journalism that went too deep, tends to spur both men on: even when the odds get stacked against them.

* Department Of Dead Ends.

            Dept. C29 deals with the things that go nowhere. Headed by Terry Stamp, whose disability would otherwise earn him retirement, they cover the cases no-one else wants or can make sense of. Dept C29 includes permanently pregnant Lorna whose speciality is listening and deduction; Andy Peters who is fat, scruffy and moans; Allison Hathaway, who is divorced and partnered with Peters – she holds a torch for Stamp, and has a problem (mostly) with authority; Viv Woolf, big, bearded and a seventies throwback who looks more like a biker than a policeman.

* Varney The Vampire Vs Springheel Jack.

            A penny dreadful and shilling shocker turned steampunk. Sir Francis Varney is responsible, amongst other things, for the death of Jack’s great love. A wealthy industrialist, Jack uses his money to research the paranormal and the criminal underworld, utilising cutting edge science to track his prey. William Edward Haining is responsible for mechanical marvels as head of Haining Industries, at the forefront of manufacturing and transport engineering. However, the money he makes is used to finance his private researches – to find a cure for Maria, his fiancee, who he keeps frozen until he can find a cure for vampirism; and the machinery with which he hopes to crush the undead bastard Varney. On his journey, he encounters the aged Sweeney Todd, Ambrosius the Monk, the Wandering Jew, and several contenders for Jack The Ripper as he scours the criminal and occult depths of Victorian England.

* William Blake: Temporal Detective.

            In this, the visionary Blake of history is a consulting detective. Not for money, but to assist those around him in London who are consumed by anomalous mystery. He has a familiar who is an angel that he talks to in his garden, and with whom he can travel in time so that he can see what has happened in the past and future, although he cannot intervene. But this knowledge can be used to deduct what is happening to those who need his aid. Given to exclamation – ‘Jerusalem!’ – he is an eccentric, though not comical, figure. In effect, he is part visionary of history and legend, part Poirot and Holmes.

 

* The Mysterious Adventures Of Red Setter.

            Red is a dapper dog who investigates psychic phenomena and strange happenings, dressed in a white suit. A keen scientist, he knows that such things exist as he is assisted by Greybeard, the ghost of a pirate ancestor with a tendency to make a mess of affairs… and also by his Aunt Ethel, who keeps the business side going, makes clients pay, and wishes Greybeard could remember where the family treasure is buried.

* Magnoman.

            Angela Morley is a misfit at school. Worse, Ian Selly is in love with her. But as he’s the only friend she’s got, she puts up with him. And his dad is a research scientist at the cutting edge of VR. His mum – a novelist – is OK, too. Problem is, they’ve been working on a little project. A game about Magnoman, a superhero. Ian’s keen to show this off to comic geek Angela. But something goes a bit wrong, and Magnoman jumps out of VR and into plain old R…

* Anon Y. Mouse.

            Down every mean street a mouse must walk. Especially if he thinks he’s a forties movie PI. Except that he’s useless. Not that he knows this, as his girlfriend Dilys, under the guise of being merely his secretary, rescues him from danger while he firmly believes he’s solved the case. Throw in his nemesis – Inspector Hercules Parrot – and Dilys’ wiseass brother Egbert, and you have problems for the harassed Dilys.

* Pip And Me.

            Pip is a ginger and white cat. A stroppy one. He firmly believes he’s human. Enchanted in the eighteenth century, and really a member of the nobility. His ‘owner’ (“No-one owns an Earl, dear boy”) is fourteen year old Marina Zoni. She knows this is how Pip thinks as he appears to her as a walking, talking… well, like a kid in a cat suit! How can she extricate herself from the problems he causes without explaining this and seeming like she has problems…

* Castle D’Uh.

            The King of D’Uh hold sway over his lands because he has harnessed the mystic powers of the Cup Ah’Tee. In charge of this object of power are Milo the Mystic and his assistant, the lovely Amanda. Trouble is, Milo is a failed stage magician, not a real wizard. And Amanda wants to sing… at any opportunity… and badly. So it should be simple for the evil Dr Ferretstein and his shambling assistant Spronk to steal the Cup. Well, it would be if not for the fact that Schrodinger, the Mage’s cat, is smarter than a bag of monkeys, and has a little help from Lucien and Demelza, the punk rabbits in charge of the local pizza parlour, who harbour secret superhero identities…

* The Keepsake Of Pulman Manor.

            Pulman Manor is in the heart of England. The Eighteenth Earl is broke, and under pressure to sell the Manor for a developer to build an industrial estate. If only he could find the Gold Train Set hidden by his father – a train fanatic – then he could settle his debts and save the manor. The seventeenth Earl is trying to come back as a ghost, but no-one can see him! Until, that is, Kai and Emma arrive from America, long-lost distant relatives. And able to see the seventeenth Earl…