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…