Kickstarter

First! IF YOU HAVE MOVED OR WILL BE MOVING: no worries! We haven't sent out the backer survey yet. We'll be doing that when we're closer to shipping, so we'll have everyone's most up-to-date addresses.  Move as much as you want up until that point!

So. YOU GUYS.

This evening, in a printing press in Indiana, the book-binding process will begin. This continues over the weekend (there's a lot of books!) and then they get shipped to the distributor in Texas on Monday. Giving a generous two weeks for the shipping (large loads travel slow) that puts us at June 26th when the books arrive at the warehouse. Shortly after that I'll be flying down to sign them thousands and thousands of times, and shortly after that, we'll start shipping out everyone's packages. This puts us in the beginning of July, but MAN it looks like these will be out the door soon. These books will live in your house soon. You guys. It's going to be so great.

You know what else will be arriving at the same time?

YORICK SKULLS. Those will be arriving at another warehouse around the first week of July too. Are they the cutest? They are. They are the softest and the cutest. They are the best way to contemplate your mortality ever. Here is me and Yorick, both smiling a toothy grin. The Yorick skulls are big so they'll be shipping separately, direct from Squishable in NYC! So if you're getting a Yorick skull, good news: you get to open two packages in the mail! One will have a plush human skull inside it!

AHHHH

Also! Here's a reminder that if you missed the Kickstarter, you can still preorder the book here! You get 728 pages of PURE FREEBASED FUN for only $28.95! We had originally thought we'd be able to sell these books at the $20 price point, but that was when we thought the book would be 300 pages shorter and not printed in full colour. The extra $8.95 is still totally worth it, I PROMISE. It's the prettiest book. THE PRETTIEST.

If you missed the poster, that's available for preorder too, and we'll see about getting the Yorick skulls available soon!

tl;dr: books are being bound, skulls are being shipped, ahhhhhh

KAPOW:

What you're looking at is a stack of unbound signatures for proofing. In other words: the first printing of the book, ready for its final check before we print out thousands and thousands of these bad boys.

Also of course I dedicated the book to Bea. I wasn't going to dedicate it not to Bea! I don't know any Beas yet but I'm sure I'll eventually meet one that'll be cool enough to live up to this dedication.

Included in the package was a proof of the hard covers, which means I can combine the two and form a VIRTUAL BOOK:

AW YES Y'ALL

Here's a video of me flipping through the first few pages! I took these photos and videos with my cell phone camera so they're not the greatest, but MAN this book is going to be pretty. My plan this weekend is to go through the book and make sure there's no printing mistakes, and then we're off to the printer! YOU GUYS WE'RE SO CLOSE.

We're still aiming for a late June release on this, but (depending on the printer) it may slip to early July. When they're ready, we'll send out the backer survey to get everyone's most up-to-date addresses!

As an apology for this taking longer than I'd anticipated, here is a SPECIAL TREAT: an excerpt from the audiobook!

You're listening to Matt Yantha read, and this was recorded at Wavepulse Studios in Toronto. This is a rough cut (no touch-ups yet) but I really like it!

FINALLY: if you missed the Kickstarter, the book is now available for preorder (and the poster is too!). More soon!

tl;dr: I am VERY EXCITED, AHHHHHH

AHHHHH

I just sent back the approved proofs for the dustjacket and the softcover, um, cover. As you can see, even though I found them gorgeous and approved them right away, Chompsky found them boring.

I even wrapped one around a comparatively-sized book to make myself feel like we had shipped the book, and it felt great. In reality, we have not yet shipped the books! But we are getting closer every day.

Last update I mentioned the music and was asked where it's being added. It's not everywhere (that would be insanely expensive and also insanely annoying), but it does show up in some special places. There's:

• 20 seconds of theme music at the start, echoing a theme that shows up later in a special place


• 1:34 of TRAINING MONTAGE MUSIC for our TRAINING MONTAGE


• and about 6-7 minutes (depending on what path you take) of PIRATE BATTLE MUSIC playing during a CLIMACTIC PIRATE BATTLE SCENE :0

This music is all being composed right now and it is really exciting. Are you excited? You probably are. That's good. YOU SHOULD BE.

More updates soon! And for those asking: there's no way to upgrade your pledge to the hardcover now - I'm sorry! We're only printing so many. But after the packages are sent out (and we've handled any packages that got lost or misdirected) there will PROBABLY be a few left over and we'll put those up for sale. When that happens I'll be giving you guys first crack at them!

Hi everyone!

Again, a reminder: if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out the backer's survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get the address you want your stuff shipped to then!

So it's been two weeks since the book has been at the printer. We've gotten proofs of certain pages (they look so pretty, they were approved because they were so pretty) and things are moving nicely. Not quite as quickly as I would like, but not too slowly either. As soon as we have a delivery date I will share it here (and then book a flight to the States so I can start signing those bad boys!) The hardcover's being printed at the same place, so I can give you some HARDCOVER NEWS:

Here is some HARDCOVER NEWS:

• reversible dustjacket will look amazing


• BENEATH that dustjacket will be a faux-leather cover with gold foil printing: remove the dustjacket, and this book will look NOT UNLIKE a straight-up classy volume of Shakespeare you might've gotten if you hadn't spent your money on this crazy adventure instead!


• here is the dustjacket design that faces outward by default: what you're seeing is rear flap, back cover, spine, front cover, and front flap

• here is the other side of that dustjacket, a riff on the softcover cover:

Here is some AUDIOBOOK NEWS:

• final recording session is DONE. It's being edited together AS WE SPEAK.


• part of this editing is adding an original theme song (BECAUSE WHY NOT) and a few other cool audio cues (BECAUSE WHY NOT)

Beyond that, there's not much to report! I realized the other week that I still have one Kickstarter pledge unfulfilled (besides writing a sequel, for which RESEARCH AND PREPARATION WORK HAS BEGUN and I dare promise IT WILL BE TOTALLY NUTS) - I promised I'd make a pizza that looks like Hamlet!

This is exciting. I get to eat pizza in the future, you guys.

I'll post pictures.

Hi everyone!

A reminder: if you have moved or are moving, NO WORRIES. We're going to send out the backer's survey when everything's ready, so we'll be able to get your most current address then!

Yesterday we submitted the final version of To Be or Not To Be to the printer. The paper had already been ordered and the books are being printed in the States, so printing will be as fast as possible, but we're looking more at June than May for delivery. I'm sorry it could not be sooner! The delay was in laying the book out: we wanted it to be perfect and that took some time.

But this is going to be a gorgeous book.

Since the Kickstarter did so well, we could afford to make this book a little decadent. Every node gets its own page, and each ending gets a two-page spread:

(That image is by Alex Culang and Ray Castro (the artists behind Buttersafe and Katamari! It's an ending that appears if you play as King Hamlet and decide not to become a ghost. SPOILER ALERT??)

This will be a solid little book: the final page count is 764 pages, and 113 of those contain illustrations. Not bad. Not bad at all. It's such a pretty book, you guys.

The manuscript itself has been copyedited twice and gone over in great detail when we did the audiobook, but when it was laid out there was the chance of errors being introduced. The only option was to go over the manuscript AGAIN in even greater detail, and to double-check that every single page linked to the correct pages every single time. We didn't want "turn to page 45" and have 45 be the wrong place!

So I wrote a program that took the book text, transformed it into a graph, and checked that this graph was the same as the graph it also generated from the original manuscript. Or, to put it another more futuristic way, I brought a computer intelligence into the world, designed specifically to play my book and run through every possible game. The book was now COMPUTER-APPROVED. That took few hours.

But then I realized that while I thought the program worked, I only had the one test case, and I didn't want to risk an undetected bug in my whipped-together program making the book turn out less then amazing. So I went through the entire book manually, marking down node and link numbers, and making sure they were all consistent. That took an entire day. At the end, I'd produced this, which looks a lot like my notes on unraveling the conspiracy about how dogs are mind-controlling the world's leaders but actually represents a lot of hard work:

All this to say that yesterday was really exciting and this bad boy is going to be a REAL THING. We're now at the printers! We've still got to lay out Poor Yorick and get that printed, but it's a much smaller job that we're starting on first thing next week, and shouldn't take more than a few days.

Other news is that we're doing a final day of re-recording on Monday - this is clean-up work on the audiobook, redoing any line that sounded a bit off!

IN CONCLUSION, WHEELS ARE IN MOTION AND SOON BOOKS WILL BE COMING OUT OF THE WHEELS