Book 18, Mandatory Failure, has arrived from the printer. I’ve signed about 2500 copies, and we’ve begun queueing those up for sketches.
A few stacks of MANDATORY FAILURE awaiting sketches from Howard
My stamina is not what it used to be. I’m as fast as ever, but I wear out pretty quickly. Slow and steady, then. If you’ve ordered a sketch edition, it’s in one of these boxes stacked against the wall, and it might be waiting there for a while…
Twelve hundred books. It’s a good thing the sub-floor in this room is solid concrete. Books are heavy.
I’m also doing sketch cards for some of you. I’ve finished about 200 of those already, and another 270 remain to be done. Those take longer, but I can work on them from my zero-gravity recliner, which lets me work for much longer stretches.
How long will you be waiting for your sketched book? I do not know! One thing that I learned in 2024 is that I need to recalibrate my estimates. I promise you this, though: I’ll work on these every day, and I’ll pace myself carefully.
I can personally vouch for the principles and practices presented in this book, but that’s probably kind of obvious. Sandra has worked with many other people and organizations over the last decade, so this book is far, far more than just (!) the life experience of someone who wrangled a single cartoonist into profitability while managing her own career writing children’s books and short stories.
Follow the links above to read more about the project. It has funded, and just yesterday Sandra crossed the “we get to make an audiobook” stretch goal. The project closes in two days, though, so if you want to throw some momentum into it on the home stretch, now’s the time.
As part of this project I’m designing two posters, both of which will have all seventy maxims on them. Yesterday I spent a few hours tweaking various text attributes like kerning and quote height, and finished up the two-column version of the poster. It’ll be a 16″x20″ thing, and will look something like this…
If you want to get your hands on one of these posters, perhaps for the wall of your office, or maybe the local kindergarten, jump in on the Backerkit project today. We’ll be printing extras, of course, but backing the project is the only way to ensure that we set one aside for you.
And speaking of Backerkit… this project is an experiment, a stress-test of a new soup-to-nuts crowdfunding service, an alternative to Kickstarter. For several projects we’ve used Backerkit in conjunction with Kickstarter, because Backerkit makes fulfilment easier for complex projects. They’ve been around for a while, and we love working with them.
We still like working with Kickstarter, but it’s good to have an alternative—especially since Kickstarter briefly flirted with adding NFTs to their blockchain infrastructure, sending much of their community scrambling for other options. They’ve backed away from that ledge, at least for now, which makes us happy. Also, we are happy to be trying out a different service. We like having options.
Unsurprisingly, there are a couple of maxims that may apply here:
50: If it only works in exactly the way the manufacturer intended, it is defective. 30: A little trust goes a long way. The less you use, the further you’ll go.
(You, too, can cite maxims as if from memory… all you need is one of these fancy new posters on a wall where you can see it.)
