Review Fix chats with author Todd Friedman, who discusses his newest book, “Walter Day’s Gaming Superstars: Volume Two.â€
Review Fix: What makes this one better than the first?
Todd Friedman: It’s hard to compare the two books as they are so different based on the gamers on the trading card themselves, but for me personally, this one is better as I created it on my own and it was designed all by me. The layout, the pictures, the interviews. I took a lot of my own time to design the book and my publisher did the rest to get it submitted to Amazon. What I also like about this book is the many different genres of gaming. The first book was heavy on retro arcade and console gaming. Volume 2 has gamers from pinball, arcade, console and PC and a wide variety of gaming developers as well. I learned a lot in this book about what to do and not to do for creating an image driven book. The first book I did not have much say in the layout so I was doing this book from scratch. I really enjoyed it.
Review Fix: What were some of the challenges?
Friedman: The major challenge for me was getting a publisher to get the book printed. I was searching far and wide to get a publisher to have this book published.A few publishers that were interested backed out and then another publisher was halfway through editing the book to get published and backed out as well due to the complexity of the card images. Another challenge was getting the high definition images of the front and back of cards.These cards were created andorinted in 2012/2013 so to have the images and to get them from Walter was hard. I wanted to make sure I covered every card that was printed from numbers 201-400. Even the error cards and misprint cards.
Review Fix: What could you do via self publishing that you couldn’t do with a publisher?
Friedman: I had a lot more flexibility doing a self-published book. I could change things as many times as I wanted, as well as make sure the book looked exactly as I envisioned. Since this book is heavily focused on the trading cards, I wanted to make sure that the stories from the card holders were matched up with their cards in the book. TO some that seems simple, but to me it was like a puzzle making sure each page had 4 to 5 cards on it and stories on the opposite page that matched the cards.
Review Fix: What’s your favorite part of this book?
Friedman: My favorite part of the book is the images of me with the card holders. I have traveled around a lot in the last 13 years and have met some pretty cool gamers and developers in my time. I devoted a couple pages to showing the images of me with them. It’s really the only place I could think to display these memories. I also am pretty proud of the interview answers I received from the card holders. I got responses from people like Howard Sctoo Warshaw of Atari, Ed Fried of Microsoft, and hall of famer pinball designer George Gomez, among dozens more.
Review Fix: How do you want it to be remembered?
Friedman: I want this book to be a historical piece of gaming history. It was not meant to be a word focussed book where you read from start to finish. It was more of many historical documents rolled into one book so that years from now it can be referenced and remembered. I think it is a good book to travel to gaming events as well, to try to get autographs of the card holders. This is a great way to keep all your signed autographs in one place.
Review Fix: What’s next?
Friedman: Honestly, I am going to take a little break with the books. Next would be Volume 3, cards 401-600 but I have many other projects in 2022 I want to focus on. This book took a good 2 years, and a pandemic, to get to where it is today. I want to sit back and learn from what I did with this book and one day repeat it with new cards, images and stories.
Review Fix: Where can people go to find out more?
Friedman: The book is only available on Amazon at the link below. You can also find out more about Walter Day and the trading cards by going to https://thewalterdaycollection.com/. This website has over 250 interviews from gamers outside the two books I have created.
To order the Book…
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