Wow. How humbling!!!
What a great uptake, and we thank you all very much for your trust in the production by pre-ordering as you have. This lets us gather the funds necessary to go to the printers, and pay for the numbers required beforehand. Otherwise, we would never have a hope of doing this at all - so again, thank you!
Where we're at:
Proofs of random pages are being produced on the digital press during this week - to the actual final paper stock. A complete proof, end to end, is also being run off as a single proof sheet, allowing us to see the general look of the colour which will indicate whether the colour separation (RGB to CMYK) parameters are in the ball park. Typically, CMYK separation leaves colours a little flat if not tweaked accordingly. Please be aware that I've left most of your images basically as you supplied them to me, and for some I've upped the saturation level a few percent to compensate. A good thing is that for those who have not been published before, you'll have a good idea of how your images perform on press for next time.
I've yet to complete the covers, front/back and inside (intro and indexes), so they will go during this week as well.
Given that this is all OK, we're expecting to wait until the end of September (Thursday 1st October, 2009) to see what our final order numbers are - and this number will be used to create our official order quantity from.
Printing should take around 10-12 days, and the books should be ready for shipping during the third or last week of October depending on workload at the printers. It's approaching Christmas, so they're pretty busy.
All in all - you should have them in your hot little hands during that last week in October! Overseas buyers may have to wait an extra few days - sorry! (Shoe's on the other foot now that you're buying from us here in Oz! LOL!)
Once again - thanks so much for all the support and encouragement! Hopefully we'll be doing a much larger one next year (maybe 200 pages if we can negotiate a good price!), so for those that missed out this year - keep your best for the next one! The best part about doing this was talking to the contributors via plenty of both email and PM's, and I feel that I know all of you just a little better than before. I'm keen to meet you at IISAC or other great star parties coming up and say a very warm "Hi"!
