Book project update: ebook available for free, print coming soon, final proofreading needed.

Published on 03 august 2020

Cover and backcover plates for the four books, ready for print.

On the last episode of my long print quest, I solved complex color printing issues thanks to a long study. It was in February. Then two things happened: the COVID19 worldwide pandemic (postal services frozen, bad time for new tests or release) and I wasn't happy with the 200 pages big book format anymore. I thought this big anthology of episodes would push me into a situation where it would be near to impossible to produce a "book 2" within the next 5 years.

So, I spent full July refactoring the project into three thinner books and I also discovered on the way I could collect sketches, speedpainting and illustration and do an Artbook. This one would use the cover I designed for the previous 200 pages big book. But to make this refactor and integrate the methods I learned from Minibooks, it was a lot of work to keep everything versioned, open-sources, dynamic (to switch language), automated by scripts, standardized with a fixed page numbers/prices for all and release all of that in both softcover and hardcover...a long long TODO list and a lot of data (20GB!).

The free ebooks

Yesterday, I reached one of the main milestone: I finished the work with Scribus, exported, launched my script and rendered four lightweight PDF 'ebook' (~17MB for each). I'm really happy about them. So I decided it was good time to party and share them with you, so you can take them with you on holidays if you have a tablet or anything that reads PDF:

Book1: B01_inside_72pages_8.5x11_final.pdf
Book2: B02_inside_72pages_8.5x11_final.pdf
Book3: B03_inside_72pages_8.5x11_final.pdf
Artbook: B04_inside_72pages_8.5x11_final.pdf

(Links were updated, previous versions are all archived here.)

Printed book coming soon

First, the printed version is not ready yet. I even don't have one in my hands right now. The books should appear on the e-Shop page by the end of next month, September, if everything goes as planned. I still have a lot of work to receive the final printed proof, validate it, refactor the website eshop page, produce a video to show you the printed final and setup every product pages. Talking about the product page, the final price planned for any books will be the same:

Hardcover: 16.50$ per book.
Softcover: 11.95$ per book.

Both version will have same page count (72 pages), premium quality paper, glossy colorful cover and large size 8.5x11 inch size (~ 21,60x28 cm). Compared to all the time invested in it, I would probably need to sell over than 2500 books to start talking about benefits. So, I'll try to launch a sort of campaign for it to ask to break this number, with a meter I'll update and weekly blog-post to keep news. It will not be a crowdfunding nor a pre-sale campaign, just a regular sale with what-you-pay-is-whay-you-get. I hope you'll like this simple concept that I prefer over a classic crowdfunding. I'll give more details about it on next update.

Proofreading contribution

A last TODO before receiving the printed proof from my printer: I need a proofreading pass over these PDFs. I know my English is full of mistakes and that's why I'll need your help to proofread and report issues before I send this work to the printer. It's not about proofreading the webcomic pages (they have already a dedicated team working since years on that) but more for the other parts of the books: the intro, the ending notes, the descriptions of the artbook, etc... I'm planning to send the final files on mid-August, then receive the proof via postal way, validate it for production and then start the e-Shop page during September. So, thank you if you can help at improving the quality of this books! I opened yesterday a thread to collect and centralize your future feedbacks.

That's all! To finish, here are Scribus screenshot of the Artbook:

The double page about Hippiah school