J'ai reçu ce mail ce matin, à props de Two Hearts et compagnie... Ah, les turpitudes de l'imprimerie...
Hello!This is a blanket email to all of our customers. I've been trying to call asmany of you as possible, in order to personally update you on the status ofboth the LAST UNICORN audiobook and the limited edition TWO HEARTShardcover. But while a noble idea -- and a lot of fun, getting to chat withyou -- there just isn't enough time to call ALL of you AND keep themanufacturing on track.So I'm writing. I hope that will be sufficient.As some of you have already found out, through my calls, we ran into majordelays with the vendors doing our manufacturing.Some of those delays have to do with our being a small company doingbusiness with the same manufacturers used by the major media businesses. Thegood part of that is it means we'll get great quality. The bad part is thatwhen Disney or Warner Brothers or some similar company calls themanufacturer to say they need 50,000 extra copies of something, right away,it isn't the other big companies that end up getting shuffled to make itwork -- just little companies like ours. This is immensely frustrating, butthere isn't anything we can do about it except work hard and eventually getso big we have more clout.Some of the delays have been purely technical -- graphic designs that lookgreat on the computer screen don't always look good on the printed mockup,and making sure audio and graphic files are configured to the manufacturer'spreferred formats is a complex process with lots of back and forth forcorrection.And some of the delays are just plain irksome. At the beginning of thisprocess our preferred bindery for TWO HEARTS completely abandoned all bookprinting that wasn't full color, forcing us to pick another company. And*that* company threw us a curve a few weeks ago by suddenly announcing thatthe cloth we chose for the cover wasn't available after all. They were happyto offer several alternatives...but the ones that didn't change the budgetlooked and felt bad, and the ones that were good would have added $3-4 PERBOOK to our manufacturing costs. Since we are giving TWO HEARTS away forfree, and there are going to be 3000 copies, we couldn't afford having thebudget suddenly leap by $9-12,000 dollars. So we've had to shift gears andgo with yet a different bindery in order to get the quality we wanted at aprice the budget would support.So please accept my apologies and the apologies of everyone involved withConlan. We're working our tails off to get everything back on track and outthe door, and we hope you can be patient with us while we solve all theproblems and make things work.The irony in this, of course, is that the high-tech stuff we thought wouldbe difficult, back when we started, has been fairly easy to debug. It's theold-technology stuff like printing boxes and books and inserts that has beenthe big headache. Astonishing!As for the current schedule, barring further surprises... ...we expect the MP3-On-CD audiobook edition to start shipping in 3-4weeks (though we're pushing hard to make that sooner). ...we expect the 8-CD audiobook edition to start shipping in 6-7 weeks. ...and we expect TWO HEARTS to start shipping in 7-8 weeks (here, too,we are pushing to speed things up if possible).For those of you who ordered signed Peter S. Beagle books like THE LASTUNICORN, TAMSIN, UNICORN SONATA, etc., Peter is now back from an author'stour of Slovenia and will be signing all the stacked-up orders at thebeginning of next week.That's the news. Thanks for your patience, your understanding, and above allyour support of Peter's work. We're doing this for him.
) et les changements imposés par les fournisseurs, il y a de quoi s'arracher les cheveux! 
Thys
En attendant, pour la "vraie" suite dans un ou deux ans, j'espère qu'il n'y aura pas de problème de ce type...
Jusqu'à présent, on aurait dit un club pour filles, en dehors de Gillo mais son avis ne compte pas parce qu'il n'avait pas aimé. 
Ca devrait pas être permis de plumer les gens comme ça; il y en a qui devrait être vermillon de honte 
Avec donc "Two Hearts" à l'intérieur ! Il faut absolument que je puisse l'emprunter en attendant mieux. 
:arrow: