The first sample book has arrived!

This is the hard cover omnibus that will be distributed to retailers and online portals. It’s simpler than the special edition, but a really nice book. I love this cover! Let’s have a look.

It’s a big book. You can see that I can hardly hold it in one hand. It has 790 pages. This one has a dust jacket with a matte finish – I’ve ordered an alternate version of the dust jacket with a gloss finish to see if I like it better. I do love the velvety feel of the matte covers but it never hurts to double check.

It is a BIG fat book. 🙂 The page trim size, btw, is 6″ x 9″ and the case is a bit bigger than that. The spine is just over 2″.

This is the case laminate – it’s what’s actually on the case of the book, underneath the dust jacket shown above. There’s a mirror image of that dragon on the back. I love the subtley of the blue dragon scales. 🙂

The interior of the book is black ink on cream stock. This edition doesn’t have colour images or illustrations. It does have the lovely dragon line drawings as chapter headers. There are five different ones in total, but here’s one. It also has dragons flanking the page numbers, as all the editions do.

I’ll make a video of this book once the gloss dust jacket arrives, so you can see the interior of the book better.

So, this one will be available during the Kickstarter campaign to be drop-shipped to you. You’ll be able to get it earlier via Kickstarter and also order the campaign swag.

There will be two other print versions of the series, too.

First, the Special Edition is similar to this book but with bling. It has gold foil accents on the dust jacket, everyone on the case laminate is in gold foil, and there are colour pages and illustrations inside. That one will be available during the Kickstarter campaign in June and from my online store in the fall. It’s 6.1″ by 9.2″ so a teensy bit bigger than this one, and 780 pages, so pretty much the same page count. This special edition will be printed in the UK, shipped to me in Canada to be signed and packed, then then shipped to backers with the campaign swag.

There are also individual trade paperbacks on their way to me. They 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. They are also retail editions that will be available at the portals in the fall. You’ll be able to order them drop-shipped as well from the Kickstarter campaign, then add on the swag if you like. Ordering them at KS will ensure you get them sooner.

I’ll show them to you when they arrive, hopefully next week. The blingy special edition will be the last one over the threshold, probably June 12 or so.

Follow the Kickstarter campaign for the Dragon Diaries omnibus here.