First of all - thank you! Thanks to anyone who's bought a book, shared my post, sent me a message, or said nice words since putting the pre order site live on Tuesday night.
I've had the site ready to go for a month or so (or so I thought), with a socials posted ready to go, and after putting my photos up at Daydream Espresso (go get a coffee there), it felt right to bring the project to life, as opposed to a bunch of pdf's and back-and-forth emails with the printers.
The reception has been epic, so far we've raised over $2000 for The Waterboy, with orders continually rolling in. Some teething issues initially (with the site being a public dummy site, not a live live site, and then not having international markets set up), but after some frantic messaging with the Shopify help centre we're back on track.
This week i'm finalising the book design and hopefully putting the book to print next week. The zine's will be ready pretty soon as they're going through a simple digital printing process, thought the hardcovers will take a little longer as they require having a custom embossing press made for the cover and spine details to be pressed into the cloth cover - but like any good things, this'll be worth the wait.
With that, i've got a slight dilemma. When I created the book, I originally only planned on making the zine so didn't bother designing any variation. But since the inception and creation of the hardcover version, it's irked me having two books of the same internal content. I wrote in a bunch of diaries for the 18-odd months leading up to the games, and am contemplating transcribing some of those into blank pages to add more depth to the special edition version, though this addition would contradict my original philosophy of creating the book in MIQ, and it being a timestamp of sort of that period of my life. I also really want this book to be accessible, and a digestible thing that everyone can enjoy, and not make it more self-centred than it has to be - though maybe thats on me to be considered in my selection of what entries to transcribe.
I think because those entries reflect that time period, their edition in the book wouldn't be out-of-place, so perhaps this weekend i'll work away and see if they fit, and add to the story i'm trying to tell with this book.
As always, cheers for the support. I'll use these blogs and the emails as a means of keeping you all updated as things progress.
Cal