Asmodee Entertainment is creating its own fiction imprint. Called Aconyte, it will publish novels based on many of Asmodee’s best-selling game properties.
Aconyte is also actively pursuing licenses for third-party tie-in fiction, with the first of these at the contract stage. Aconyte will start a monthly publication schedule from early summer 2020, producing paperbacks and ebooks for the U.S., UK, and export trade.
To helm the imprint, Asmodee has appointed Marc Gascoigne, who most recently served as publisher and managing director of the award-winning global sci-fi imprint Angry Robot. He’s hired assistant editor, Lottie Llewelyn-Wells, and publishing coordinator, Nick Tyler, to join him in the new offices in Nottingham.
“Asmodee’s stated mission is to bring the world ‘Great Games, Amazing Stories’. Aconyte is another key milestone along that path, literally creating those amazing stories and bringing further depth, intrigue, characters, and narrative to some of the best game worlds ever created,” says Andy Jones, head of Asmodee Entertainment.
Asmodee is a leading global games publisher and distributor. Among its most famous and imaginative game brands are Catan, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, Arkham Horror, and Legend of the Five Rings. More recent hits have included the fantasy card game KeyForge and the co-operative zombie survival missions of Dead of Winter.
Asmodee’s Entertainment platform was formed in 2018 to focus on taking Asmodee’s wealth of intellectual properties into formats as varied as films and TV, comic books, location-based entertainment, merchandise, and novels.