Hello for the second time! Quiet as this site has been over the last six months (???) much has happened in the interim. I’m here with you now, dear reader, to speak on those developments.
In a nutshell: Save for the half of payment due on delivery of the hardcovers, everyone involved with MOONCALVES has been paid in full for their hard work. McNoughton & Gunn have been contracted for the printing – white linen, blue foil stamping beneath the dust jacket – but with that industry in a bit of a state due to supply chain issues, there is a pretty significant delay. There’s just no getting around it.
This puts the delivery of the books at approximately 12/29/22. People far more seasoned than me in the publishing business have advised me to provide a cushion between product delivery and initial sale. Ergo, I’m moving the release date, such as it is, from March 31 to July 2023.
I’m hoping to be at Readercon in Quincy, Massachusetts from July 13 to 16, 2023. The plan would be to hawk in person there (keeping in reserve however many preorders this thing gets) and maybe hold some kind of event. We’ll see!
That pushing of the date will also give extra time for promo readers / potential blurb writers. One of the lessons I’ve learned winging my first project as a publisher is that the workflows involved can clash with one another… I elected to have the stories in Mooncalves copyedited a la carte as they were accepted, which left us with a more or less fully proofed manuscript when the final acceptance was confirmed (some of my slips were caught after that point by beta readers Adam Golaski and Chris O’Halloran, to whom I owe a debt).
Still, this meant that the inclusion of blurbs and the introduction I had arranged in the printed product became complicated. With the printer requiring finalized material before I could secure a spot on the calendar, and delays already significant, I elected to leave out those elements from the hardcover. They will be present in the digital version.
I contracted a smaller printing service with extremely quick turnaround to crank out 25 softcover galleys. They arrived over my August vacation. The cover turned out just a tad darker in shade than it should have, but they couldn’t avoid being pretty, given HR Hegnauer’s design work. Contra the cover warning, the text in it is final:
Of the 25 copies, a good half have already been sent out to reviewers, writers, and blurbing folk who prefer paper to digital print. I’d like to hold some copies for annual best-of consideration come 2023. The work in Mooncalves is certainly worthy. People who’ve read it already have their favorites.
As to what happens after July 2023, I have some idea of what I’d like to publish – I have already read some very exciting things – but there’s nothing else to announce just yet. Soon.
I really cannot wait for you to read these stories.