The Fate of The Green Skies!

The final page count on The Green Skies book was just under 500pp after editing. The original intention was the publish thefinal part of the trilogy in one stand alone volume -like The Return of the Gods: Twilight of the Super Heroes and The Cross Earths Caper but certain factors have come into play that changes the original plan.

I had toyed with the idea of breaking the final part of the trilogy up and publishing as short parts in Black Tower Super Heroes but that might stretch out to 20 plus installments. That would mean anyone interesrted spending a good chunk of cash -far more than if they purchased the stand alone book.

Return is 331pp and the absolute minimum cost it has been on sale at -£20 UK- has not resulted in any sales even though ioty got great write ups from reviewers inb Germany, France, Finland and other countries. Which is disappointing but that is publishing for you. It does mean that I had to seriously think about the possibility of another big book sitting on the virtual store shelf.

What finally decided the fate of the book were the scans.  I am currently working ion what we might call a "clapped out" old PC since the laptop I had was far too hit-and-miss when it came to doing what it was supposed to do. Like starting.  However, I scanned all 500 A3 pages and stored them on USB devices so if the laptop died at least I had the work saved (I mean, I have all the hand drawn pages but I need the computer for lettering since my hands are fairly useless when it comes to that).

When I opened the files on the larger monitor I saw the problem straight away.  On a laptop screen it was not noticeable but on the bigger screen I could see that the scans wwere far, far from clean. I tried cleaning up a few of the pages but it made no difference. Five days of scanning were wasted. Not a lot I can do about it but take a deep breath and start again.

This caused problems since the next step should have been lettering the pages in Microsoft Publisher but I was now faced with days of scanning work before I could get on to lettering -another week's work.

I did contemplate just not bothering but since this story was supposed to appear in 2014 before a health crisis and I wanted the story to finally be completed (in 2014 the idea of a mysterious virus ravaging mankind seemed novel idea as a side plot!!).

What I have decided to do is split the final story into 5(?) separate volumes of just over 100pp each and that makes the lettering easier.  Comic Bits magazine is 80pp per issue and retails at £6.00 a copy which is cheap. Therefore the price for each Green Skies volume will be low.

I want to see the first volume out by August 2020 so that may mean things going quiet here. Green Skies, I hope, might see some extras in each volume such as how others put their take on characters or simply extra splash art pages.

Wonder whether I can force Mr Dilworth into some cover art? :-) :-)

But decision made.  More info to follow.

Stay healthy!