This week brings some big changes to Toys for the Sandbox. Let’s start with the bad news. The price is going up, from 99 cents to $1.99. Not the biggest price jump, but still we feel we owe you an explanation.

When we launched Toys at the beginning of the year we were cranking out 4 pages a week and selling it for 99 cents. A few issues in I realized that was not enough space to contain the stories I had to tell, so over the last few months the page count has crept up and up. For more than a few weeks now the page count has hit 8, double where we were when we started. Some would say that is enough of a reason to raise the price. We don’t.

However, we do have other projects we want to bring you, more games, more adventures and more supplements. To do this we need a bigger team, and we need those people we already have to be able to work at the things they do best. This is what motivated the increase. By raising the price we can attract more artists to work for us and bring on a cartographer to do the maps. This in turn frees me to work on more writing and layout projects.

So let’s take a look at what you are getting for the money – there’s twice the content and a larger creative team. Sure, it’s  good for us, but Michael and I do not feel it is good enough for you so we decided to do something about it. Starting with issue 19 we are upping the page count to 10, which is more than double where we started.

We still are not satisfied with the awesome to cost ratio. One complaint we have heard since we launched is that we do not have a printer friendly version. Today that changes. We are now including not one, but two printer friendly versions.  The first version is both human and printer friendly, all ten pages laid out for normal portrait style printing. The second is a bit less user friendly, but it only takes up 5 sheets of paper, prints double sided and folds into a 20 page booklet.

So there you go –  more pages, more options and in the future more products from Occult Moon. I think there is enough value and enough awesome there for all of us. In case you are still on the bubble, however, we are adding one more perk for those who pick up Toys for the Sandbox the day it hits the digital shelf. First day orders of Issue 19 come with a coupon for a free copy of The Secret Library.