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That’s it for book 2

2013/09/23 12:00 AM

Holy crap that was intense. I think I’m going to take a break from Unity for a while.

The book itself is almost done, too; the chapter title pages are coming along great, the bonus content is complete (aside from any additional fanart people want to submit, hint hint), and all that’s left for me to do is to design a cover and get the dang thing proofed (proved? proven?). Which reminds me, I really ought to figure out a timetable for the printing process itself.

Also, very soon I will hopefully be able to start taking presales on Amazon!

Book delays, comic delays

2013/11/18 12:00 AM

So, today’s picture isn’t a comic per se, but the most recent reason why book 2 has been delayed for a few more weeks. The printer had trouble with my PDF, and thanks to a series of miscommunications they ended up converting it to a bunch of RGB images to print out instead of trying to fix the PDF structure (or get a better structured PDF from me). The end result is that the text is all speckled and fuzzy and it’s definitely not to my standards (it basically looks like it was printed out on a cheap inkjet printer).

Part of this is my fault for using LaTeX for my book production process; it’s known to generate sub-optimal PDFs, and last time around I think Ken had used Acrobat’s optimizer to work around the issues (but this time that knowledge wasn’t transferred on to the person doing the actual printing — the business has gotten a lot larger and as a result, Ken has had to delegate a lot of stuff to less-knowledgeable employees). Also, Ken’s been completely professional and way more patient with me than I deserve through all this, so don’t take any of this as a mark against Keness.

In any case, my timetable was somewhat optimistic before and was based on them being able to stick to their schedule and us only having to go through one full proofing cycle; now it’ll take a minimum of two but I’ll probably need to do three.

The end result is that book 2 won’t be coming out until sometime in December at least. Sorry about that.

As always, if you’ve preordered through Amazon, your credit card won’t be charged until it actually ships. (And this is why I’m still happy about my decision to not do a Kickstarter this time around.)

Note that after preorders ship I will be setting up my own web store and handling fulfillment myself due to some inefficiencies with Amazon fulfillment that I’d rather not get into a rant about at this time but suffice it to say that unless you sell a few copies per week you’re better off just doing your own PayPal cart or whatever.

Anyway, now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, the other unpleasantness is that I’m not really into doing comics for now. I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility at work lately, which is good for my career but not so good for my free time. I’ve also been filling up what free time I have with working on music, both doing soundtrack work for others and working on a third Sockpuppet album. So, my attention is diverted elsewhere and I’m just not really in a comic-making mood these days.

Books are on the way to me

2013/12/11 12:43 AM

Copies of Book 2 are finally en route to me. It’s been a frustrating experience with way more delays than should have happened, and I’m sorry that it’s unlikely that preorders will get to people by Christmas, but at least they’ll be arriving soon.

Book status

2013/12/20 10:31 AM

I neglected to mention earlier but the books finally came from the printer, and the preorder batch is en route to Amazon right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like people will be receiving it until after Christmas (since it won’t reach the warehouse until the 24th), so if you were planning on getting it for that purpose, I apologize. But considering that pretty much everything that could go wrong did, I’m just happy to have actually gotten the book out this year (primarily for tax reasons).

When I get back to Seattle I can also start doing direct sales to people, which I think works out better for everyone. I can also start on the ebook version, which I will probably sell via my Gumroad store, perhaps with an ebook+physical copy bundle option if Gumroad supports that.

Books are shipping!

2013/12/29 10:10 PM

As of a few days ago, Amazon is actually shipping out the books. So, if you were waiting for it to be really real before buying it, you can do so.