Well, I’m very happy to report that, despite the fact that shipping took a bit longer than I was anticipating, I reached my goal. I completed revision C1 and version 7 of the cover in time to order a proof last week.

And on Thursday, it arrived.

Obviously, it was amazing to finally hold my own novel in my hands. Yet that excitement was muted a bit when I realized that CreateSpace had gotten the top margins a bit wrong, had flip-flopped two numbers on the ISBN, and had some ink bleed problems on the first page.

However, after talking to them yesterday and taking some pictures of the issues, it sounds like they’re going to give me a free replacement. When that replacement arrives, I’ll be sure to photograph it for you all. (And thankfully, they did to a stellar job with the cover. The blues are replicated very well, and it looks much better than the previous design shown in the previous post. Since then I’ve rendered the galaxy as a 3D element, consisting of roughly 8 million polygons.)

Also coming up soon is a free novel preview. Things are really coming together now, so subscribe and stay tuned!