Greetings,

After much difficulty with the latest batch of covers, an issue with a graphic, and a small issue regarding wire transfer fees, we are just about ready to ship the next 5 volumes!  Once the payment is transferred for the second half of the current 5 books, they will be sent to the warehouse/shipping department at Transcontinental and shipped out to you.

The cover of Letters 1 was a hassle.  The digital version of the icon looked like this:

The black area is where the gold foil is stamped.  However, the stamping process tends to spread or bleed, leading to :

Which is mostly a gold blob.  I spent several hours trying to clean up the digital so that the negative space was increased such that the gold wouldn't over run too much of it leading to distortion.

Clearer right?  Well, the gold stamping was resilient so the printing company just decided to invert the image:

And hurrah! you can tell it is a face, but it is supposed to match:

So I had to half invert the image so that the scalloped edge was gold not the space around it:

This is the final icon, it just took us days to get there.

So as it stands these books are finished printing and should ship from the warehouse to you around the 16th of September.

The remaining 5 books are as follows:

Vol 41 - Letters 3 - final edits to be applied, followed by quality check, then to printer

Vol 43 - Tramp Royale - final edits to be applied, followed by quality check, then to printer

Vol 44 - ScreenPlay 1 - undergoing 2nd proofread here, then same as above

Vol 45 - ScreenPlay 2 - undergoing 1st proofread with some work being done on the last pages at                            Windhaven, edits to be applied, 

Vol 46 - Requiem - to be set (but it should be fast)

Order of events:

Right now SP 1 and SP 2 are in proofreaders hands and WH is working on the end of SP 2.

Following that WH will apply the edits to L 3 and send is here for a control check, it goes back to WH for polish then off to the printer.

While we have L 3 WH will set Req and send it out to its 1st proofreader.

Then WH will apply they last round of edits to Tramp and send it here.

(During this time both SPs should be turned back into WH with comments, at which point I will try and schedule the remaining 3 for the next set of passing back and forth.)

Publishing is a chaotic business.