After making a few final adjustments and corrections, the files for The Littlest Shoggoth have been sent to the printer! And so the waiting begins. For those who have never been involved with publishing, here’s an idea of what we have ahead of us.
The printer will put the job in the queue, and when its turn comes up, their experts will review the files to make sure they are up to spec. If not, it’ll get booted back to me to makes changes . . . but let’s presume that everything will be fine. In that case, they will print off a complete set of proofs.
Proofs are single-sheet print-outs of each page of the book. Once completed, those will be sent to me for approval. Sounds simple, but the printer is in China, so that makes any exchange of physical goods a step or two more complicated . . . not to mention time consuming. If all is good with the proofs, I can give approval via email. If any changes have to be made, I either need to rework the pages, or send the marked-up proofs back overseas, or BOTH.
Once the proofs are approved, printing of the book itself begins. The printer will use some of those first pages to create a hand-assembled version of the completed book, and send that to me for inspection and approval. Again, the difficulties of trans-Pacific business will cause some amount of delay, but by this point the expectation is that all will be fine … and I’ll actually have the very first copy of the finished book in my hands for keeps!
Manufacturing and assembling of the final books then occurs in earnest, and the whole print run begins to be amassed. The first 2 or 3 cases will be sent to me immediately (publishers do this so that they can use them for promotion), but shortly afterwards, the whole print run will be on its long, slow way across the waves via freighter.
In addition to the delays caused by trans-oceanic exchanges, since the work is being done in China, an additional delay will be introduced in early February when the Lunar New Year celebration will mean that all production is shut down for a week (or more).
Still, little milestones will keep occurring over the next handful of months and, if all goes according to plan, the books will arrive in Seattle by mid-May . . . and we should be able to get them out to all the Kickstarter backers in June, as promised.
In the meanwhile, work is underway to send out the post cards and PDFs to the backers who are owed them. If all goes well, both of those things will be accomplished in the next 10 days or so.
