Exciting news!! I had a great two hour meeting with the artist Eva Byrne this morning, going through the whole of The Terrified Troll (my first ever picture book for younger readers), tweaking where we felt the text could do with a few improvements, checking for errors and typos, agreeing some slight changes to a few of the images, etc. Because, YES!!! we ARE at that stage!!! Woo-hoo!!!!
Eva finished the final page of the book last week. I won't share that image with you -- I don't want to give away our ending! -- but here's a page from very near to the finishing line. The joke with the vampires in the top left is one of my favourite bits from the entire book!!
Now, while all of the pages of the story have been completed (bar a bit of tinkering to ensure everything ties together neatly and that characters are wearing the same clothes and have the same hairstyles throughout the book), Eva still has a bit of work to put in, to compose the front and back cover, and the credits page (we're trying to do something a bit different with that, rather than just serve up the normal boring credits page that you find in most books). That should all take a month or so, we reckon, at which point we'll have to send the files off to our printer, and wait for them to send proof copies back to us. If we find any problems with the proofs, we might have to make further tweaks and order another set of proofs (though we're hoping that won't be the case, and everything is fine with the first set). Once we're sure the book is rock solid, and looks exactly the way we want it to look, we will then place our order, and start shipping them out as soon as they reach us.
I'm guessing we're a couple of months or so away from that point, meaning we should start shipping by the second half of May or first half of June, in perfect time for the summer!! Although, if we hit any unforeseen last-minute snags, and it ends up being a bit later than that, please don't hate us too much!! We're doing everything we can to get this to you as swiftly as possible, but, hey, perfection takes time!!!! :-)
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