I’ve been thinking about these books a lot lately, and spending the holiday weekend in the garden meant I had lots more time to ponder the possibilities. I’ve made a couple of choices so here’s the latest.

There will be the big fat omnibus with the gold foil accents on the dust jacket, the foil on the case laminate and 17 colour pages inside. This is the one we’ve been talking about, that will be available during the Kickstarter campaign in June and from my online store sometime in the fall. It’s 6.1″ by 9.2″ and 780 pages, so one chonky book. This book will be printed in the UK, then shipped to me in Canada and then shipped to backers. It will ship with the campaign swag. 🙂

There will be another version of this book with the same dust jacket design and case laminate design BUT no gold foil or colour pages inside. This book will print on creme stock and will go into distribution at the retail portals in October. It’s 6 x 9″ and 790 pages, so another chonky book. It will also be available in the Kickstarter campaign, drop-shipped directly to you from the printer, and later from retail portals and my online store. This option will save you some money on the price of the book and some of the shipping costs. If you want the campaign swag, you’ll be able to order that on the campaign and just have that bit mailed to you from Canada (instead of a 2 lb. book.)

(There will also be an ebook omnibus with this blue and gold cover. I’m not sure how many of the illustrations will be included as I don’t want the book file to become unwieldy. I’ll know by the KS launch. The ebook omnibus will be available at KS and later in my online store.)

The thing with big chonky books is that they’re hard to hold for reading. I pondered this as I dug out weeds and planted my beans. I haven’t created trade paperbacks for the individual books in the Dragon Diaries series since the rights reverted to me – there were used copies of the NAL editions out there in the marketplace – but I’m doing that now. They’ll look like the ebooks on the front cover, shown below, with the illustrations by Juliana Kolasova on each book:

These trade paperbacks will be 5.5″ x 8.5″. They each come out to about 300 pages, printed on cream stock, without any images inside. You’ll be able to order them drop-shipped as well from the Kickstarter campaign, then add on the swag from the sparkly new chonky book if you like. They’ll also be going into retail distribution and will be available at retail portals in the fall, as well as from my online store. Ordering them at KS will ensure you get them sooner.

In fact, I hope to have the pre-orders go live on the plainer omnibus and these three trade paperbacks shortly, so the links can populate at the portals – maybe even before the Kickstarter campaign launches.

My other tweak was that I ordered the plainer omnibus with both a matte dust jacket and a glossy one. I wasn’t sure which finish would look better, so this will let me compare and contrast. I do love the matte finish (it’s very velvety) but the glass finish usually gives crisper colours and more definition. We’ll see when they both arrive.

So, that’s the revised plan. It seems so obvious now, but took me some pondering to get to it. 🙂

Follow the Kickstarter campaign for the Dragon Diaries omnibus here.