June. Actual June. 2025 as well… wild. It’s been a topsy turvy month all told. There is a LOT going on at the moment, and I mean A LOT. The good news is I have put an offer to an assistant I’m looking to hire, which they have gratefully accepted. They won’t start until the end of next month, but when they do start, they will hopefully take a good portion of the admin work from my desk and give me more time to lovingly design and lay out your books. I’ll do a proper introduction once they’ve started, so you all know who you’re talking to on the info@ email.
It’s been quieter than usual on the newsletter and socials this month. I spent a week away with the family (which was lovely) and have been snowed under with all things CK. The office is basically where it needs to be at the moment, and I’d share a picture, but I’d get a hundred emails asking to buy X copy of Y title, and I really don’t need that in my life at the moment (sorry!).
We’re obviously getting closer to our next book release (Assassin’s Apprentice) which is very exciting and I haven’t set an exact date for the reveal, as yet. I’m going to need some more concrete updates on the prototypes from Ludlow Bookbinders before I do that I’m afraid, but please stay tuned, it’s coming!
I think we’re very close to releasing phase 1 of the new website as well (I’ve been saying this for some time now…) but it’s looking good and has a lot more information and content than the previous site. Which is what you all deserve of course!
Anything else? Actually, yes! I’ll be at Dragonsteel Nexus 2025 in December this year it turns out. I haven’t been to many/any conventions over the last couple of years, so I’m quite excited to get across for this one. There will be a small CK stand displaying some of our books of course. Might even do a limited print to sell at the convention as well!
On that note, onto the titles/releases!
Prints
We have a limited run of prints going live today at 20:00BST (17/06/25) for the recreated cover of “Adventure” on the Atari 2600 by Susan Jaekel. These are the original prints we were going to include in the Ready Player One release, but they were printed the wrong size, so we had to print them again.
They have been hand-signed and numbered by Susan Jaekel and are giclee printed roughly A4 size on 240gsm paper.
Priced at £55 plus postage and 26 in total going up for sale, check out the website later if this sort of thing interests you!
These will go up as normal on the front page of the site to add to cart!
Pre-Orders
We’re changing the way we pre-order going forward due to the issues on The Martian. It appears that the issue was due to using an embedded Shopify “add to cart” button within WordPress. So, we’ll be moving to a new system that hosts the product page on Shopify directly rather than require a button click on our wordpress site.
This means we will email out the correct link to each tier of book’s product page ahead of release. You won’t be able to purchase until the release date/time, but rather than click through on our website, you will have a link/page you can refresh around the time which should have no issues when adding to cart. Those who try and purchase using the original method may still have similar issues to The Martian, so we implore everyone to follow the new method of pre-ordering on a public release.
We will put a more detailed explanation on the run up to Assassin’s Apprentice as we will be utilising this method for that release. Hopefully this will be on the new website, but if not, we’ll still utilise this method for the pre-order.
Legend
We’re nail-bitingly close to these starting to ship! Frustratingly the reprint done by Hand & Eye didn’t actually include all of the required pages for the reprint, so these are being done this week. Not what anyone wants to hear at this stage, so I can only apologise profusely about this as it does have a knock-on effect to shipping… We’re estimating early July now for the Standards to start shipping, then onto Deluxe and Lettered. Ludlow Bookbinders are of course progressing with everything they can at this stage (which is a lot), but thought I’d let you all know what’s happening.
There will be some copies of the Standard Edition and potentially one or two Deluxe Editions going up on the website once shipping has started, so for those who missed out there will be another chance still! We’ll keep everyone informed of date/time via newsletter and social media.
The Fall of Hyperion
Printing well underway at Nomad Letterpress currently! We’ve been sent some little videos of the printing in progress which we’ll try and stitch together and put out on the socials (when I have time to get around to it…). For now though, here’s a couple of spreads from the interior document they’re printing from.
The leather is in at Ludlow ready for binding and the changes to the title have been made in preparation. We’re expecting the rest of the colours from Jaime Jones any minute now! Once we have them signed off by Mr Simmons we’ll start sharing some of them on our socials on the run up to shipping.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Coming on nicely. We’ve printed the signing sheets and these are in transit to Mark Wing-Davey and then onto the illustrator Gary Gianni! Here’s a picture of the sheets on the press for all who want to see.
