Where We Stand

A quick Kickstarter status update this Memorial Day.

The Dragon Heresy is at 283 pages of a 288 page allowance. That means that there’s room to play with things if I have to, and if we come down to the final moment and I still have that left, I may well add a few backgrounds to the existing list to pad it out.

I chose a printer and will be sending them their initial payment this week, probably tomorrow, but there’s no rush here. We’re doing GREAT for schedule thus far; I’d love to keep it that way.

Note that “the home stretch” is something like three months long, due to shipping schedules. Still – it is the home stretch. It’s just a long one.

Art Status

I have seen sketches for many of the items, and several final items have been submitted. That’s not bad considering there are still two weeks until the art deadline. Right now the monster section is still in need of some pieces.

Layout and Editing Status

The indexing and ToC are complete and reasonably sensible. Some of the entries suffer from an excess of vagueness. Etera is followed by dozens of page references with no context, for example. I’m not sure that’s terribly useful. I’d rather look for the two or three IMPORTANT subtopics and hit those explicitly than just two dozen page numbers.

For editing, the page count and subject matter is done with the first pass. Now it’s a massive spell-check, typo-check, and grammar check. Ensuring that all sentences make sense, no missing words or phrases, etc. This is a word-for-word read with an eye for detail.

The last thing that really needs doing is putting in hyperlinks for references. I’m a bit bummed that there doesn’t SEEM to be a way of automatically linking the index pages as bookmarks, but I’m not done looking yet. The ToC bookmarks work fine. I suppose if you’re in Interactive mode you can just search or go to the right page. So really it’s the cross-references that need doing. I’ll take care of that.

The only other layout task is style unification That should really take care of it. Other than art, proofing, and the index topic tweak – especially proofreading – we’re ready to go to print. If we can get the layering and the hyperlinks/references in place, we’re ready for final PDF distribution.

As I noted: things are looking strong. I will push a penultimate file next week – probably next Sunday. Since I will be ordering 1,500 books, and only shipping out 250 of them or so, it’s important to me to catch all the typos I can, and as backers, you can help me with that. Digital files are easy to update with typo fixes. Print copies . . . not so much.

Shields

Six backers pledged for shields. One has his already. Two more are in the final stages, and may well be finished today, certainly by the end of the week. The final three I’ll start on soon; I need to get the proper size poplar for one of the shields, and the other is already laid up as a blank. Those were promised in October along with the print books; safe to say that they’ll be in everyone’s hands by the end of June.

Finishing Up

That’s really looking like it. I pushed through the Backerkit closure yesterday, as promised. there are still about 3-4 folks pending settlement of funds/cards, and I’ll gently ping you privately over the next few days.

The remainder is really just following through with finalization of the PDF and getting the print files – cover and interior – off to the printer. Then y’all won’t see/hear much for a few weeks at a time, as the QC process goes through a few stages of proofing and approvals, with the process designed to have the books “on the boat” six weeks after I submit the files, which I’m targeting for June 16. They’re designed to show up in MN five or six weeks after THAT, which will be the week of Sept 3-7 if things go well.

US Media Mail usually takes about two weeks after that, maximum. So print copies should be in folks’ hands by Sept 22.

International Backers will follow a slightly different path. When the books are done, a few 10-book boxes will be shipped to Korea. That’ll take about a week. Then the fine folks at Dice Latte will put them in the post to all of the “not-the-USA” destinations. Depending on the speed of that method, it’s possible that they’ll arrive before the US books even show up on my doorstop. We shall see – this is a bit of an adventure for me as well.