Good News, Bad News, and Good News
Just an update on the printing of my colored RUNNERS Volume 1 book: there’s good news, bad news, and good news again.
The Good News: about a week ago, the printed books were delivered!
The Bad News: Upon reviewing the books, I was super disappointed to see that a lot of pages were oversaturated, throwing the look of the characters off and making those pages too dark overall. I’m not crazy-nitpicky, but it was certainly something that made the art less than it should be, especially as the volume that’s supposed to launch the entire series. And for a year of coloring work and as the book that I’ll be selling for years to come, I just wasn’t happy with the results. For the past week, I’ve been waiting as the printer reviewed their files to see if it was a problem on their end or mine (although I already knew it was not mine).
The Good News: I talked to the printer today and they did acknowledge that it was a saturation setting on their end. We discussed options, but ultimately I want to have the run reprinted with the correct color settings. Unfortunately, since they’re schedule is pretty packed, the new run won’t be until June. They suggested that I could fulfill current orders with the books in hand and they’d reprint the remaining, but this didn’t seem fair. I didn’t want the earliest supporters (Kickstarter backers and pre-sale buyers) to get the “inferior” version now, just to have a better version later. So I guess we all wait.
I feel terrible about this on many fronts. I really hate the idea of pulping an entire run of books, but they really fall short of my expectations for the art. I really hate the idea of making people wait even longer to get the books. But I hope everyone will be understanding and find the wait worth it. I want to get people the best possible version of the book, and I hope this next print run will make that possible.
On the plus side, the printer has been nice to work with. They also printed my Vol 2 color book a number of years ago, and that was spot-on perfect. I don’t know what happened with this one, but they have been willing to make it right, which is great.
More updates to come…
What a rough decision, but ultimately it’s the right call–after all this time and energy, I wouldn’t want an inferior version of my creation out there either, even if a better one comes later. Especially for book 1, this will be many people’s first impression of your series!
Exactly my thinking. Especially about it being the intro for the series. I actually had originally planned to start Vol 3 last year but decided that, in order to open up the series to as many readers as possible, if made sense to go back and re-do Vol 1 in color first. So yeah, it meant a lot to me that the intro series be as good as possible!