The book is out! Well, nearly!

The book is basically out. Officially, it’s out. You can buy it and everything. But if you want it just a bit cheaper and much better, it’s out in, oh, a couple of days, as soon as UPS comes through.

Here’s the situation. If you go here, right now, you can order a paperback copy of the first volume of Masks. All 32 chapters, plus four nifty special features:

1. A “secret origin” essay explaining how this rather odd book came to be;

2. A feature showing how the illustrations were produced, from the initial pencil sketch to the final printed form;

3. Copies of the Hawkins Foundation’s secret files on Rae, Trevor, Tammy, Soleil, Moon, and Golem; and

4. “The Missing,” a short story that bridges the gap between Volumes 1 and 2, featuring 4 new illustrations by Nicole Le.

That’s 412 pages of Masks goodness, all for the low, low price of $19.48 plus shipping.

But wait! There’s more!

Right now, there are two boxes of copies winging my way (well, rolling my way via UPS Ground) from Lulu, the POD service I’m using to produce the books. (There are a lot of arguments for and against POD, but I went with Lulu because they’ll keep producing copies on demand, for anyone who wants to buy them, even if I can’t keep a lot of stock on hand myself—and at times, I won’t be able to do that.) It’s not a big shipment, and a few of the books will be belated Christmas gifts or thank-yous to beta readers—but the rest are for sale, right here, while supplies last. And there are two things you should know about the books in these two boxes.

Every one of these books comes autographed by the author.

And they’re all cheaper than the un-autographed versions.

Here’s the thing: for arcane reasons known only to Lulu, they insist on charging $19.48 per book. My best guess is that this is so Amazon can eventually take a big chunk out of the price and make you think you’re getting a good deal, but I’m not totally sure about that. Anyway, the cover price is $19.48, so the official selling price on my website, in solidarity, is $19.48.

But, well … even with the cost of shipping the books to my house, I’m paying a good bit less than $19.48 per book. And I can give you a significantly better price than that while still making a reasonable profit on my effort. So if you use the coupon code COYOTE at checkout, you’ll get $3 off the cover price of the book. Buy the book from me, and it’s $16.48—my little thank-you for supporting independent publishing. Plus I’ll sign it for you.

I can’t do anything about the shipping costs, of course. Priority Mail charges $4.95 flat to ship via a padded envelope. I think I can get two books into one envelope; if that’s the case, and you order two books, I’ll refund you the cost of shipping the second book. I don’t know yet whether that will work, though.

This whole operation is still in its infancy, of course, so I appreciate your patience as I wait for the shipment to appear on my doorstep. If you order a book today, I’ll sign it and toss it in the mail as soon as the actual boxes arrive.

Oh, and if you include a note with your purchase (there’s a little box at checkout to let you do that), you can get the book personalized. That means that if you want me to write, “Happy birthday, Bob!” or something in there—include your name and/or a brief, inoffensive message with my signature—I’ll do it. Just make sure you spell everything right (I have no way of knowing how most of you spell your names, after all) and don’t make your message anything that’s likely to get me sued, arrested, or punched in the face. “Happy birthday” is fine, but I’m not going to write “I’m really Stephen King,” or “I shot JFK”, or “You suck, Bob!” If I think your message is likely to get me in trouble, you’ll just get a signature and maybe a happy face with too many eyes. My mother didn’t raise any stupid kids.

And now I think I’ll go sit in a corner, quietly making happy “eeeeeeee!” noises and trying not to watch the street for a big brown truck. And maybe get that ebook version up and running …