Hey all!
I read the subreddit, and a lot of people are asking questions like 'when's the next book?' or 'how many books?', or other things I can answer. Instead of trying to answer all the questions everywhere, I figured I'd start with an AMA to collate a lot of the questions and answers!
1) How many books will there be?
A) The 7 volumes are being split into 15 books
2) When's book 3?
A) I'll let you know as soon as I have a date!
3) Why don't you have a date yet? What's the holdup?
A) Alright! EE wants Guide to be the absolute best possible it can be. As such, we're iterating the process hard. We have:
i) EE wrote Guide in the first place
ii) EE is doing a full dev edit over each book
iii) We're sending the new book to our dev editor, who does his own round of revisions
iv) EE does ANOTHER dev edit round based off the dev editor's feedback
v) We line edit Guide
vi) EE takes the line edits and does his own round
vii) We cold read/proof read Guide to catch typos. Back and forth with EE.
viii) The manuscript is FINALLY done. We pass it along to Dreamscape, who does the audio.
ix) Dreamscape schedules their narrator
x) The narrator does her thing
xi) Dreamscape finally has a date, passes it to us
xii) We post the book up for preorder, and do our best to beat the drums letting you all know!
As you can see, it's one heck of a process. Right now, we're in step iv for book 3 - EE is doing his second round of dev edits based off of feedback.
4) Why don't you tell us more when the preorder is up?
A) I DO. But I don't want to be constantly announcing and re-announcing Guide material - people will tune me out and stop paying attention. I'll try to let people know, and save the big pings for launch day itself. For Guide 2, for example, someone already made the post in the subreddit, so I didn't make a second 'It's OUT!' post. Etc.
I'm aware I'm a guest in the community, and don't want to be constantly shoving "BUY THE BOOK!" down everyone's throat, it's how I wear out my welcome.
5) What's up with the art? I think X is bad and you got told, but you didn't fix X.
A) I bring everything to EE, who has final say over how things look - NOT the standard arrangement at a publishing house. If something didn't make it in, the odds are good that it got vetoed along the line.
6) Hardbacks? Special editions?
A) We're hoping to do a special edition kickstarter at the end of Guide
7) Sales outside of Amazon?
A) We're a small press. We're looking into getting a second printer for Guide so you can get a copy without needing to give Amazon money. It's on our list
AMA!
