It seems that February has been very good for many of my online friends. I know people who’ve landed deals for novels, people who are getting editorial letters, people who are having twins, people whose novels are selling really well, and people whose first ARCs have gone out. I also know some people for whom February has been truly sucktastic, but on the whole most of my friends seem bursting with good news. We here at the Tayler house fully intend to add to the good news side of the scale.
1. We signed the contract with our printer for The Scrapyard of Insufferable Arrogance. We’re due to deliver files to them by February 20th. This is past our hoped for Valentine’s finish date, but it is still awesome to be so close to being done. We’re also going to create slipcases which hold the first five Schlock Mercenary books. This means that we’ll be able to sell boxed sets. We’ll also be selling the boxes separately for folks who already have the books and want a shiny box to keep them in.
2. We have new posters in the store. These include a special edition print on translucent Cell paper which is beautiful. Also a new Rule 35 poster “That which does not kill me has made a tactical error”. We intend to make the rule posters available as 8 x 10 prints when we open book preordering.
3. Last Monday a very nice reporter for our local paper came and interviewed Howard for an hour or so. The result showed up on the front page of our local paper this morning. We now know which of our neighbors takes the paper because we can track who has emailed or called to congratulate us. You can read the article online. I’m in the article too.
4. This is the big one, and it is news that we’ve been sitting on since last August. Baen Books will be selling electronic versions of the first four Schlock Mercenary books. We hope to have these available in March. All of the cartoon archives will remain online, we’ll still be selling print books, but this opens up the e-reader market for Schlock Mercenary. It also provides a way for fans outside of North America to buy the books and bonus material without having to pay to ship paper across the ocean. We’re very excited to be working with the good folks at Baen. They’ve been marvelous to us.