In short, I’ve been working with our printer to make sure you’ll get a good product in your hands, and I’m not confident that’s going to happen yet with Knee-deep in Grit, so I’ve pushed back the publication date by a fortnight so we can get that right. This does not effect the ebook, which will publish on time.
What happened?
This happened.
If you haven’t spotted it, you can see a thin light blue line along the left-hand side of the spine, and thin black line along the left hand side of the front cover. That’s happened because the cover print on the paperback has been misaligned.
I checked our electronic proof: perfectly aligned on the spine. Checked in with the designer: again it was all perfectly aligned. Bleed: perfect. My eyeballs: both pointing in the right direction and moving in unison. We should have been sweet as a nut.
Finally, I checked back with the printer and after spending days working my way through their customer service (I honestly would have had better luck finding an answer if I stuck my head in a bag of sweaty dicks and fished for a piece of paper with the answer written on it), I finally found someone helpful, have it figured out, and have put in corrective actions to resolve it and mitigate the printer’s practices.
Now that I’ve read your whinge, what have you actually done to get me my book?
We’ve updated the spine colour for the Knee-deep in Grit paperback and hardcover books to make sure you get a product of the quality I feel will meet your expectations. This colour change will offset any future slight misalignments by the printer by not being as stark as the black spine. It’ll look like the below (hardcover dust jacket shown) with a light blue spine the model lightly imposed on the back cover.
I have new proofs on the way just to triple check that we’re all good this time, and then we’ll pull the trigger on this release and get them in the mail to you all.
Thank you
Thank you all, for being patient with us with another project while I make sure you’re getting what you paid for. If you have any concerns or complaints, please contact me directly via email: adrian@grimdarkmagazine.com.
Adrian.
