Author Archives: mrcoconut

Book of the week at Victoria Park Books

So we’re very pleased that Victoria Park Books in Hackney, London have made Mr Coconut their book of the week this week. (We especially like Victoria Park Books as they’ve sold more copies of Mr Coconut than any other bookshop.)

Advance copies arrive… & our market stall book launch

So this is a day we’ve been waiting for in trepidation for a few weeks now. Our advance copies of the book have arrived. Here’s the package, not yet opened.

The nerve-wracking part is that we were not able to see an example proof before the printers went ahead and did the whole print run. When a large publisher prints a full-colour book such as this, they get proofs ahead of the actual print-run, and the chance to change the colours and correct tiny mistakes. An expensive extra step, which is fine if you’re printing thousands of copies, but which would have added loads to our costs. We just sent some test prints to the printers, asked them to match the colours to those, and then crossed our fingers.

So if, when we open these, the colours are all wrong, that’s tough. Because there are another 994 of them on their way to us, on a boat somewhere right now.

Okay. 3… 2… 1…

They’re okay! Thank god… the colours look great, as good as we could have expected. (If they hadn’t been that might have been the end of this post whilst I went off to weep in the corner).

Here’s Catherine and Mr C having the first read…

So now you’ve had a first glimpse of the cover. Here’s a proper look:

But that’s all you’re going to see. We don’t want to spoil the surprise of the actual book. If you want to see the whole book I’m afraid you’re going to just have to pre-order one.

The other exciting piece of Mr C news is that we have arranged a book launch: we are having a stall in Brighton’s refurbished Open Market on Saturday 13 December. We’re going to decorate the stall with all the props we used to make the book, and Mr Coconut himself will be there – inside the actual coconut where he lives, naturally. (His puppet that we used to make the book will make an appearance as well.)

If you live in or near Brighton and can make it to the Open Market that day, we’d be delighted to see you, and show you some of how we made the book. And introduce you to Mr Coconut himself. We’ll have a big stack of books for sale if you’d like one.

Studio visits and the boring parts of making a book…

So in the weeks since our last Mr Coconut update about the here’s what has been happening:

A couple of weeks ago we had Elizabeth visit us in the studio for a day as part of the Self-Publishers Kickstarter reward – she helped with the photography for one of the book’s illustrations, patiently blowing snow into Mr C’s face with a fan whilst we photographed him in a snowstorm. Unfortunately we forgot to take any photographs, though Elizabeth more efficiently took some herself. Which means this is now a photograph of us rather than her, which is a bit of a shame.

We have also organised the boring parts of making a book. We bought the ISBN barcode (some great info on the process for buying ISBNs on Christopher Shevlin’s blog about self-publishing… in fact all his self-publishing posts are very useful) so that the book is catalogued for the shops and online, and have finalised the schedule with the printers. We now know we need to have all the artwork finished by 19 September, in order to receive the books back on 10 December.

Which isn’t, er, quite by the time we promised on Kickstarter, as we said we would send the books out for the end of November. We must apologise for that – the printing is taking slightly longer than the first estimate we were given. If we can bring the schedule forward we will. But we promise that anyone who pre-orders the book will have it in time for Christmas (Christmas 2014, that is).

We’ve also finished the cover. I was going to post it up here to show you, but Catherine won’t let me, she says it should be a surprise.

More on the second of our studio visits soon…