More About 'The Book of Horrible Stories'

It looks like a photo that I used in other posts on this blog, but this is actually a shot of the last copy of The Book of Horrible Stories that I made with the materials I originally bought. It went out in the mail a couple of weeks ago, which left me a little sad, oddly. I imagined myself feeling a little bit like a mother watching her youngest child graduate: "You go out into the world and shine, now!" *sniffle*

I guess it's funny, in a way. When I began making the physical copies last year, I really didn't think I'd sell enough of them to use up all the materials I had selected. And that was good, because one piece of the puzzle was something I had purchased off the clearance shelf at the local craft store.

The last copy that you see above was sold through the Open Books bookstore; much to my surprise, a customer requested it. When Lizzy, the store's super-fantastic assistant manager, contacted me about getting that for her customer, she also suggested that I should make a few more copies for their "Local Authors" shelf, to which I said, "Yeah! Awesome!" or something similar.

Then I checked what materials I still had left and said, "Oops." It had been a while since last I made any, and... oops.

So below you see the second edition? printing? incarnation? of The Book of Horrible Stories.

Pretty much the same, just with a slightly different green strip on the cover. Seems like it should have been radically different, now that I've typed out that whole explanation, but there it is.

And there it is on the shelf.

They've got all four of the copies I made last week; according to Lizzy, I'm next to Gillian Flynn in the alphabetical list of local authors and on the shelf below, which is bewildering. I'm not Gillian Flynn; I'm nowhere near Gillian Flynn (except on this shelf). But I am at Open Books, which is a wonderful bookstore, no matter whose book you're buying. Hope you can see it for yourself sometime!