Folks, your enormous patience will soon pay off! 

Hey everybody, Matt Colville at your service. We’re getting close to the release of DRAW STEEL and we figured now was a good time for an update to give you some idea how things are going to go, and what state everything is in. Plus a little exclusive sneak peak of some art….

Draw Steel Heroes has been edited, Draw Steel Monsters will be out of editing soon. The layout has been designed and temp passes on each chapter are complete. This is a process whereby the layout artist drops the non-final version of the text into the finished layout template, and starts figuring out where all the art should go. Because the non-final text isn’t that different from the final text, when the final text is finished, the books can be reflowed quickly with only minor tweaks to make everything work.

That’s happening now! Which means we are very close to the end. Or, depending on how you view Draw Steel, very close to the beginning! 😀

Once both hardcovers have finished, edited text, and all art and text have been flowed into the layout, we have a Release Candidate (RC). The RC goes to the testers in June and they’re going to look over it and find all sorts of little bits of nonsense we missed. I can’t speak for others but in my experience with any sufficiently large project, the number of typos increases to fill however much time you spend looking for them.

So the testers and patrons will find all (not all) of the stuff we missed, we’ll fix those typos and then YOU will get the finished, polished, complete PDFs for both Draw Steel Heroes and Draw Steel Monsters. We are targeting July 17th for that release.

The physical books then go to preflight, which is just the process of ingesting the PDF for print and reviewing what it should look like in a preview before pressing the big red button at which point the books start printing! We already ordered the paper and ink!

That should happen in August. We do not know when those books will start shipping, it’s a complicated process, but we’ll know more when we get closer to the date. We’ll be printing books in both the US and Italy. Viva l’Italia! 

We’ll run any outstanding credit card charges for folks who backed only the PDFs when the PDFs are released. So for instance if your credit card failed, we try again, or if you preordered the PDFs after the backerkit campaign closed, all y’all will get charged when the PDFs drop on July 17th. (If you need help email [email protected].)

We will wait until the last possible moment (within reason) to charge for shipping & taxes because we want to avoid a scenario where shipping is $10 on the 1st of the month, we charge everyone, and when we go to ship on the 25th of the month, shipping is now more expensive! That may seem like a ridiculous scenario but it’s happened before!

So once the books are really well and truly ready to ship, then everyone gets charged for shipping & handling. We think that will happen around August, but it could be September. We’ll see!

If you ordered the Limited Edition or the AJAX EDITION, you’ll get the PDF at the same time as everyone else, but your physical order will ship after the normal hardcovers. We are doing everything in our power to get you your Cool Version of the books as fast as possible, but especially with the Ajax Edition, there are a lot of different companies working on this and they need to get all their cool stuff into the same warehouse at the same time so it can all be assembled and shipped to you.

Things can still slip, all kinds of problems could rear their ugly heads, but the fact that we got to this point and everything’s basically on time? Is a bit of a minor miracle I think. I’ll save my praise for when things actually go out, but a LOT of people worked incredibly hard just to get us to this point. Fingers crossed!

As always if you have ANY questions about any of this, we strongly urge you to contact us at [email protected]. You’ll get a personal email response pretty quickly, often in less than a day. Folks sometimes have an issue and they go into the comments somewhere to raise it, or jump in the community discord, but the actual, official, way to get a real answer is: email [email protected]. 

I think that’s it folks! As a thanks for your patience, here’s an exclusive look at the final covers for the books! :squee:

Cover Art by Nino Vecia and Billy Christian.