***placeholder for embarrassing pun***

I am really bad at coming up with relevant titles for blog posts.

 

For some reason, no matter the topic, I always end up reaching for the most obvious, groan-inducing pun. Maybe, somewhere deep inside me, there lives a frustrated tabloid journalist. Example: I came very close to calling this post 'The Proof of the Pudding', because it's about me receiving the bound proofs of The Killing Season.

 

Get it?

 

So from now on, I'm going to try really hard not to attempt punning titles in this blog. Apart from the name of the blog itself, which is a bad pun. If you catch me doing it, please feel free to slap me.

 

Anyway, now that I've got that awkward confession out of the way, I'll get to the point. The bound proof is basically the prototype. It's the version of a book publishers use to make sure it hangs together as a physical object; that the design, colour and any special enhancements on the cover work; that the typesetting for the interior pages is right. It's also a great way to spot any remaining typos or glitches in the text before it's too late. Finally, it's something the publishers can send out to advance reviewers that's a bit more manageable than a giant stack of paper, and a bit more special than an e-book.

 

The marketing team at Orion have really outdone themselves on these. As a complete newbie to all this, I'd assumed the proofs would be a rough mockup, thrown together as a fairly basic package. What I didn't expect was an exclusive promotional cover design, high-quality die-cut card and embossed foil... actually, I think it's technically debossed. (I only know the terminology because I bought a lot of comics in the 1990s.)

 

So we have a teaser promotional cover...

 

 

 

...underneath which is a secondary cover with lots of lovely quotes about the book...

 

 



 ...and then we get inside the book and... it's an actual book. Which I wrote. Wow...

 



Finally, the back cover of the proof displays the awesome cover art that will go on the real hardback when it comes out in April. I've gushed previously about how much I love this cover, so I don't need to do that again here, but suffice to say I'm very pleased with it.

 

 

The first thing I did after pawing the book for a few hours was to slot it into an actual bookcase. (I have a lot of work to do before I really belong among any of those names).

 

 



So that's it. It may be a dry-run for the real thing, but it sure feels a lot more like I'm a real author now. I can't get over how cool the experience of flicking through an actual, physical book and seeing pages and pages of stuff you made up is. 

 

Which reminds me, I still have pages and pages of stuff to make up for Carter Blake book two...