In the category of "live and learn," we have discovered that packing shirts with the image right up against the packing slip is a problem. In some of the cow shirts we shipped out over the last two weeks some of the (black) ink from the packing slips leaked onto the (white) image. Making for a muddy cow.

If this happened to you we'd be happy to provide a full refund. Or we'll be happy to replace it with any of our other shirts. And we'll pack them more carefully.

Sigh.

This week I am putting together the second printing of our first book, Unshelved Volume 1. This would normally be straightforward - just call up the printer and say "have at it, boys!" - but for three things.

1. We are moving to a new printer. WestCan did a fabulous job with our first two books, but they are simply outpriced by the industry giant Quebecor. Every penny counts, and there are quite a few pennies involved. Anyway, Quebecor has different print requirements and so we need to reformat a little.
2. I had a hard-drive crash in May of last year, right before the first book was to go to press. We lost about six months of scanned strips. I had already formatted the art for the book, so we were able to go to press. But now, needing reformatting, I need to go over those (rescanned) strips and make all the little corrections I made the first time around. Fortunately my erstwhile assistant Emily did much of this work, so I'm hoping it won't take me too long. This is work that had to happen eventually, and now it's happening.
3. And, yeah, I'm making a few changes. Fixing some errors here and there, adjusting the back cover so the text isn't so frightfully near the edges. All the stuff I kicked myself for not doing the first time.

Side note: we knew months ago that we were going to have to do a second printing, but have waited until now because we wanted to see how many orders came in from Diamond Previews. As a result we have cut things too close. Even with finding another box of Unshelved Volume 1s in my garage we only have about 90 left for website sales and Diamond is already backordered. Hopefully everyone will be patient - ETA is about six weeks, give or take.

The only question now is, how many to print? The more we print the cheaper it gets per copy, but of course the more expensive it get overall. It's a little scarier than the first time around when we had all those preorders. This time we're printing for the future, not to meet an existing demand. We will not make our money back right away as we have on previous book printing and that will cause a cash flow crunch of a high degree. We'll survive, but like I said, scary.

Check out these ceramic cups which mimic a ubiquitous coffee cup familiar to those of us from New York City. I must have one.