Misleading Marketing of IC Percy Jackson Lighting Thief
I thought I saw a post about this, but I can’t seem to find it now. From what I was able to read before, the replies mostly said something about “even the first print had the same design” so technically “it’s not flawed”. The friend who has the set and sent me the close ups I’m sharing had mentioned to me she contacted Illumicrate about it so it caught my attention seeing someone else post about it. But other posts too made me look into it and when I checked myself, I don’t blame her for her and the other people for having the same conclusion. I would have… because in all honesty, if this is not a mistake, then there is an issue because it’s 100% misleading marketing by IC to hide it.
The gray marks are not subtle at all. It looks like paint scraps and really aren’t even uniformly spread all over the design to say that that it goes along evenly with it. I’m not surprised people flagged it. None of the other dust jackets have anything similar. (Also have to tell her there are multiple mistakes in the gold foil edges)
Which brings me to the point that when marketing the reprint of these, apparently Illumicrate made the extra effort to blur, edit, filter, hide these gray specks behind the rest and even go as far as to cut out the top part of LT from pictures. The pictures who kind of show it, you’d actually would have to look for it which shows a much lighter blended grey and you have to pull a Sherlock and zoom in on certain pictures to even notice it. And only if you’re actually LOOKING for it. Vs in hand when you have a clear picture of it and it appears immediately noticeable.
Whatever excuse of the pictures being just the art, go out the window with the edited versions posted of the actual books they shared in their page since it’s the second print. And if they had gotten complaints about it before, wouldn’t it be more transparent to make sure to have better images of it for clients to know what they are receiving?
You can click the pictures to see the whole image and where I got them from, I think Reddit crops out some edges in the post view.
Edit: I want to emphasize again that the issue addressed in this post is not about how much anyone likes the book/design. This is to point out that many people/first time buyers were misled multiple times and in multiple posts by Illumicrate about an issue that had already been brought up during the first print.