With five days and and an uncomfortable 43% of its funding left to go, I’ve posted a new update at the Kickstarter project page for The Lair of the Clockwork Book‘s limited, hardcover print edition.

Just as this update sank in, one Kickstarter backer who is not confined to an asylum* has offered to increase his pledge to $1000 – but only if we raise $1000 today.

So if the total reaches $5358 by the end of the day, he’ll bump it up to $6358 – which is 81% of the total we need to raise. Go, Internet!

*I don’t actually know this.

I’ve posted my third project update over at Kickstarter, in which I draw some comparisons with my last fundraiser over there, and then muse a little about things done, right and wrong.

And while we’re nearly two thirds of the way toward the end of the Kickstarter drive I’m working on as planned. With just eight illustrations left to go for the book, I’m also working on the paperback edition’s cover. I’ve caught up the book design to include the most recent pages and I’m thinking about the other bits and bobs, like a frontispiece and a bookplate design – not a separate bookplate, but one that’s printed on the endpapers.

As I mention in the update I’ve seen a dramatic increase in traffic over at the Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual web site. A lot of those new readers are coming back for the new pages as they appear. So I’m starting to wonder whether I was wise to plan a brief hiatus before my next serial. After all, I’d like for those people to keep coming back; but I also need to make much better progress on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS before the next serial begins.

It’s a puzzle, and no mistake.

 
I posted my first project update at Kickstarter yesterday; briefly, though I’d hoped for a slightly busier first week the Clockwork Book project is still outperforming my last promotion over there. So, you know, mixed feelings of relative triumph.

The project’s picked up some attention from Dark Roasted Blend, Super Punch, Raypunk.org, Iron Mammoth, and a few other scattered mentions on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. My ongoing mission is to seek out new avenues for promotion, drive them before me, and listen to the lamentation of their… no, sorry. Wrong idiom there.

Anyway, though, that’s nearly correct: I’ll be looking for more ways to spread the word about the Clockwork Book project so I can build on its early momentum. Most of the action on Kickstarter projects comes in the final week – so I want to make sure that the news has spread as far as possible before we get there. Or then. Whatever.

As always, feel free to Tell Everyone. You can embed the project widget (as I did here) or even the project video through links on the Kickstarter page.

There’s another embeddable video over at Vimeo. I hate what YouTube does to my videos so I won’t point you at that one.

In other news, I mentioned a couple of days back that new Clockwork Book desktop wallpapers and a screensaver are up at the Thrilling Tales downloads page. Go forth and use bandwidth!

In the meantime I’m splitting my days between the last ten illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book and a CD design project. Busy, busy days this month.

These just in: desktop wallpapers and a screen saver from The Lair of the Clockwork Book, on the Downloads page at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

Because after all these many months I’m down to the final stretch on the story’s illustrations, and I finally have enough pictures to pick and choose for the freebies!

The Lair of the Clockwork Book will be reaching its conclusion in April. Like Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves, the whole story will be available then as a paperback book (in full color!)

But I’m hoping to release a limited edition hardcover version of The Lair of the Clockwork Book, too.

The hardcover edition will be printed on heavy weight archival paper. It’ll be bound in linen-covered boards with foil stamping on the spine and front cover, a handsome dust jacket and – just like the paperback version – it’ll have 126 full color illustrations in its 130 or so pages.

It’ll be pretty much the bees knees, with its retro bookbinding, a lot like a the kind of beautiful book that was an everyday thing a few decades ago – in those days when we were dreaming about The Future That Never Was. The first time around, I mean.

But this is a Kickstarter funded project: if enough people don’t sign up for the book in advance, it simply won’t happen. We’ve got to raise the whole amount before anyone can get their limited edition copy.

So I’m counting on you, your friends, and even that guy you always avoid at the laundromat to Tell Everybody, and I do mean Everybody, about this spectacular little book that won’t exist unless we make it happen.

I think that it would be just plain tragic if we fell short, and the limited edition hardcover did not happen. If you’re inclined to agree then I hope you’ll rush on over to my Kickstarter page and think about reserving a copy of your very own.

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Once upon a time, some books were sold by subscription – in fact the Direct Market for comics works just about exactly that way now. A book would be solicited, and interested readers could sign up to buy one in advance.

Of course the way this differs from the Direct Market is that you’re not reserving a copy from a dealer. Kickstarter’s fundraising engine has become the middleman – but that doesn’t really affect the outcome. If enough of you reserve a copy, the edition will exist. If you don’t, it’ll remain an imaginary, though beautiful, book.

Bits that look a lot like this have been dominating the screens of two – no, it’s three now! – computers here in the Secret Laboratory for the past week and a half, as I try to work hard on the book (and Kickstarter) trailer for The Lair of the Clockwork Book‘s just-maybe hardcover edition; but in spite of my all my trying I’ve spent far too much time beating my head against dynamic microphones, USB microphones, Windows 2000, Windows XP 64 and 32 bit, buggy audio drivers, mysterious clicking noises, mysterious crashes, and – it seems – everything except making the spiffiest trailer I can get out of myself, because my entire computing universe would really rather blow up right about now, thank you, and then have a quick melt down after.

No, wait: that last part was me.

It really has been like that, especially over the past three days. But I think I’ve managed to mollify Premiere to the point where it will now crash after exporting a movie instead of while exporting a movie, and as annoying as that still is it’s just so very much better that way, isn’t it? I mean, you actually get the file you were trying to make before the great big explosion happens, so, you know, whew.

Except that Premiere just crashed again. Okay, sorry, gotta go.

 
 
So The Lair of the Clockwork Book is due to finish its run at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual sometime in April, if I can do the math – which I’ve often shown I can’t – and so this week I’m thinking about its print version.

In fact, I’m working on the print version. I’ve got over 50 pages laid out more or less beautifully, so far.

This is a real joy, compared to the layout for Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves. The interactive stories have a lot of constraints on page layouts so there’s very little room for the words to breathe. When its sequel is ready, I will probably do a second edition of Brain Thieves because I can see now how I can make some improvements.

But back to The Lair of the Clockwork Book. It is shaping up so very nicely that I’m thinking again about a Kickstarter promotion for a limited edition hardcover, in addition to the softcover book I’ve been planning all along. I think it’d make a very nice little book, with a foil stamped spine and front cover under its stylish dust jacket. The idea’s really growing on me. It would be quite expensive, which is why I mentioned Kickstarter just above.

One ingredient for a successful Kickstarter campaign is an attainable goal. Realistically I can’t be said to have a large, enthusiastic crowd of fans. (No, you’re not in Doctor Cyclops territory or anything, but… you know.) So what I’m thinking about is a very small limited edition hardcover – probably just 100 copies – with any excess funding going to a larger, unnumbered version of the same hardcover book.

There’s even more math involved in planning a Kickstarter campaign and its rewards… so who knows exactly how this would pan out. But that’s what I’m considering.

If I go forward with this it’ll need to start pretty soon. I don’t want to slow down the launch of the softcover book (in March?) if I can help it. Still, the Kickstarter campaign would need its own video, promotions, and a surprising amount of time and attention – judging by my last one.

Time? Attention? I’m not sure where I left those, come to think of it. But it would be so cool…..

Yes. There will be tentacles.

The CD packaging project I mentioned earlier has been on hiatus through the holidays – until all its text has been massaged and tickled to perfection – so in the meantime I’ve been working away at the future illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. By the time I have to switch back to the CD I hope to have lots of pages ready for you in the buffer. Well, I say lots; there are already enough illustrations done to see you through sometime in February, but I want as many done as I can manage by the time I have to switch projects again because that Clockwork Book buffer is an unforgiving beast… and these are mostly pretty challenging illustrations.

With all of that on my plate I haven’t had a chance to work on the serial that will follow The Lair of the Clockwork Book. In fact I’m so disappointed with my progress on the other story – Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS – that I’m certain that something is going to have to change in the near future; I’m just not positive exactly what is going to change, and how, or when. It’s a mystery.

I’m sure we’ll all find out what that means, eventually. But until then… at least we have tentacles.

You may not have any trouble believing it but I’m still amazed that with this picture – completed a couple of days ago – I’ve finished 100 illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. Just twenty-five more to go!

And neither one of us should be surprised that this is also pretty much the way I feel about that. Click it to embiggify.

Yep, I shifted the gears of my brain almost on time to return to the final illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book.

I skinned my fourteen new semi-generic characters – very few of whom turned out to be generic – to their skeletons. I wish I had thirty or forty of them, but when all’s said and done it’s just me here in the Secret Laboratory and, well, I sleep sometimes. I’m not sure what’s causing that.

To further complicate things I’m now working on a CD packaging project for Leslie Fish‘s upcoming Avalon is Risen, from Prometheus Music. I’m happy to be doing some Celtic knotwork on the side again but it’s also a pleasure to do because it’s been twenty-five years, somehow, since I did the cover and illustrated songbook for Leslie’s Cold Iron. It’s nice to see the old neighborhood again.

But as you might expect that makes my schedule for the next month or so even more exciting than it was before.

I’ll be finishing the last couple of dozen Clockwork Book illustrations in this phase. Once those are done I really do have to do some re-evaluation of how Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual is running my life – I love working on the stories, and a serial is a necessary part of the site, but the serial’s inflexible schedule has made it very hard for me to complete Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS which – for those of you who remember – was the main focus of Thrilling Tales in the beginnning.

I wouldn’t want to have a hiatus before the next serial starts; but that’s one of several things that could happen once The Lair of the Clockwork Book concludes. And I have some format changes in mind for the next serial.

It may have longer updates that come just once a week, for example, and what I have planned for those updates won’t fit so well into the existing layout of the site. So whatever happens I’ll have a lot to do before you even see the final page of the Clockwork Book. One way or another I just have to be able to set aside the time to work on TWO BRAINS, not to mention any other freelance jobs that come in. And somewhere in there I’ll be laying out the print version of The Clockwork Book, too.

So the short version (too late!) is that The Lair of the Clockwork Book is headed toward completion, although it’s sharing my days with the CD project; that I’ll have at least as much to do while those pages play out for you; and that my serial schedule has been playing hell with TWO BRAINS and everything else. Film at eleven.