Update on CSP books · 4:20pm Dec 14th, 2022
In handy image format! And speaking of hands...
The books were on my doorstep when I got back from Anime Frontier.
Each book weighs almost two and a half pounds. It's a brick of a book and no question.
It's 776 pages, each page chock full of text (as you see here) but not so tiny as to be unreadable without a magnifier. If I do say so myself, it turned out really well.
This is what one of the illustrations looks like. I checked into making the book illustrations color, but the only way I could do that would have been to have them in a cluster as an insert, not spaced out through the book. Also, I could only have a maximum of 16 color illustrations. So, grayscale it is. (And the single biggest problem with the first proofs was that all the illustrations printed far too dark, so that had to be fixed.)
Here's the 54-page mini-artbook. This went to print first and got to me quite some time back. It's the same 6X9 as the main book, but (obviously!) much thinner.
This is what the full-color looks like. I also put in screen cap pages from KSP into the mini-artbook. (Those did NOT make it into the main book, mostly because there was just no way they'd look good in grayscale.)
And one final picture:
This is the first batch of books getting mailed out, mostly via media mail. The second batch will go out towards the end of the week. (I live way the hell out in the boonies, so printing my own postage and having a pickup done doesn't really work. That means I can only ship stuff about 45 pounds at a time.) I'm starting this now, shipping what I can now, to get stuff cleared out of the way before the hardcovers arrive.
One final note: yes, I printed some extra artbooks and hardcovers, because accidents happen in shipping. But the extra copies won't be released for sale until I satisfy everybody I can who pre-ordered either. That, after all, is the whole point of extra copies. But when the dust settles, there might- MIGHT- be one last chance for those who missed out- but that won't be any time soon. Springtime at earliest.
And that's how things stand at the moment.
Congratulations! Now the word of your writing genius will spread far and wide beyond the borders of our little community!
Hey, you actually got footnotes to work right. I fought that for a few days in Word before I just To-Heck-With-It and stuck them right under the paragraph they occurred in. (Word *hated* everything being in the same typeface also, and don't get me started on indenting or justification.)
Beautiful.
5703296 Because Word was never intended to do complex page setups. I'd used Adobe Pagemaker in the 1990s, so I knew the basics. I learned Microsoft Publisher for laying out the CSP book. (I'm still not happy that I wasn't able to be consistent on whether or not the numbers in the footnotes were italicized, but I couldn't control that without repeatedly undoing and redoing each footnote, so I let it go.)
5703296 Also, there are cases where the footnote start reference occurs too close to the bottom of a page for the footnote to fit underneath. In such cases I put the footnote at the bottom of the page following.
It's always satisfying to heft your brick.
Those turned out really well. Excellent work and congrats!
There they are!
I would be interested in getting a hard cover if you have one. I didn't know there was a physical book for this story.
They look fantastic! I can't wait!
5703370 We'll see what's left after the Kickstarter/preorders are all shipped. It'll depend on what got damaged. (You can't see it in the pic, but the back of that book in the photos got crushed in one place because the box failed in that location. That sort of thing happens all the time, hence extra copies.)
Looks awesome, still wish I could get one
So excited.
I really wish I could get a hardcover The Maretian to go with it.
Wow, a solid kilo-plus of BUG-PONES. IN. SPAAAACE!
Congrats man!
Ponies needing a big old bag for their tail never ceases to amuse me.
My copy came today!
5704121 Hope it was everything you wanted (within the limits of paperback printing)!
2.5 pounds of pony words received and no damage. Now regretting not ordering the art book.
Just got my copy in the mail
*whistles*
Lookin' good, Kris!