All right guys, here’s the status report so far. First of all: The Current Status of the Manuscript.

Colony is going into Copy-Edit phase today. This is the point where I sit down and covert the word document I had been working with into an ebook compatible format for the first time! Woo! The purpose of this phase is to go over it again looking for both formatting mistakes and any lingering errors that made it through the Beta stage … though my checks thus far show that to be a very small number.

Oh, and because I can, here are some fun stats that accrued during the beta:

Colony contained 10,003 apostrophes. Each one of these had to be individually checked. 4 were accidental uses in place of a quote. Colony now contains 9,999 apostrophes (yup, exactly that number).

Colony also had 754 uses of an ellipsis (the “…” you see in places), as well as six cases of that ellipsis not being such but instead being three period. Those have all been fixed. There were also two cases of there being four periods, and a small scattering of doubled punctuation (comma-period, period-comma, etc). There were six instances of two spaces back to back. One case of an improperly placed quotation sign.

If any of that sounds incredibly tedious to find and fix: It was. That’s the editing process for you.

Here are some other Colony statistics for the curious:
333,349 words, or 1.836 million characters including spaces. 1.5 million without spaces.
8,069 paragraphs.
42 chapters in total.

Anyway, onto other news, such as The Status of the Cover!

I actually have nothing to show you guys here yet. I’ve found the image I want to use, and am in the process of working with the artist to secure permission to use it as a cover. This is actually proving a little difficult since the artist doesn’t have any means by which to be compensated financially and frankly doesn’t seem that interested in financial compensation anyway (which boggles my mind). Either way, I’m still haggling/trying to come to an agreement, because it is a dang sweet image that is exactly what I wanted for the cover of Colony. Nothing else has come close.

Now, I’ve got some other information for everyone. Still Colony related, but with a bit of a relation to the rest of my works as well. I’m talking about Pricing.

Yeah, in the past I’ve talked about several methods of pricing I was considering. Splitting the book, offering combos, etc. And I’ve finally chosen. The conclusion I’ve arrived at, over much deliberation, is …

None of them.

No, I’ve decided to go the classic route. When Colony goes up for pre-order, it will be for one volume (in other words, the whole book) at one price: $7.99. The same price as Unusual Events.

In addition, some of my other titles will be dropping in price around the same time. I’m going the Steam route here. One Drink will take a second price reduction, dropping down to $0.99, while Dead Silver will see a price reduction to $3.99. They’re older books, they’ve been out awhile … it’s about time to lower the price on them.

Right, other stuff! Like Patreon Rewards for supporters! Patreon supporters will find in this month’s thank-you post an ebook preview of Colony! It’ll be about six or so chapters, generic e-book format taken from the Copy Edit copy for your kindle, nook, or what have you. Enjoy the preview. It’ll be up in a few days!

Anyway, that’s the update! Keep an eye out for the Cover and pre-order information! It’s coming soon!