Happy Labor Day!

Classy. Refined. Laminated.

Volume III hit the stands September 1st and from the feedback we're getting from our retailers, it's a smash hit! It seems that with our new gloss laminate cover, people are mistaking us less and less for the Old Farmer's Almanac. That's a good thing, I think. If you haven't yet ordered your copy, get it now while we still have it in stock.

Folks have been asking me about something that we haven't really brought up before in public. I figured it was time to address it. I got an irate email from a reader in Des Moines who wanted to know why her cousin in Vermont got a signed and numbered version of Volume III while hers was the standard non-numbered edition. She felt as though she had been slighted.

BWAAHHH! You no send me limited edition! BWAAAAHHHH!

The explanation is really quite simple. See, most small printers have a batch number of printings per day that they do for each client, that way every customer's project moves along at a comparable rate. If I order 5,000 copies of The Ephemeris to be printed up, it usually takes a week to complete my order because they only print up between 500-1,000 copies a day. (Another reason for this is that if a flaw is discovered in one batch, it's a lot easier to toss out 1,000 copies than it is to toss out the entire order.)

Because of my OCD, I'm usually on hand in the print shop while the first batch is being printed. This leaves me with nothing to do for several hours except watch the print guy putt around back and forth touching machinery and answering phone calls. Usually the covers are printed first and later married to the rest of the manuscript. While I'm waiting for the interior pages to be printed and bound, I keep my sanity by numbering and/or signing each cover from the first batch before it goes back into the bindery.

We call these copies "First Day Printings", and they're limited to 500 copies and sent out to our first 500 pre-ordering customers. All copies are shipped out in the order in which they were received, so if you placed your pre-order as soon as it went up for sale on our site, you stand a much better chance of getting a Limited Edition copy than someone who places their order on the day before it hits stores. And that's exactly what happened to the lady in Des Moines. She placed her order August 31st while her cousin placed an order earlier in the month. The early bird got the worm, so the saying goes.

To answer another question, the copies aren't sent out sequentially. Just because you got issue number 49 doesn't mean that you were the 49th person to order that Volume, it just means that number 49 happened to be sitting on the top of the stack when Jasper stuffed your envelope. It could have just as easily been number 499 or 94, it really all depends on how that case was filled at the printer. (I do have Jasper set aside a few copies when he finds them. #1 and #500 go to me, and Mick usually gets #2,3 and 4. Other than that, every number is fair game).

So there you go, the inside scoop on our limited edition copies. We've never publicized these limited editions, even though we've done them since Volume One. We just thought it would be a nice Easter Egg for our faithful customers, and we appreciate everyone who places early orders. It helps us protect our bottom line and in the case of Volume III, it allowed us to add the last-minute laminated cover upgrade. This was something I wanted to do in the first place, but it wasn't in our budget until we had a massive wave of pre-ordering customers. (We could have very easily pocketed the money and gone to the strip club like Mick wanted to do, but common sense won out and we stayed home watching Breaking Bad.)

In non-related news, Chad and C.Nash have started their own forum. It's called gosmokeless.org and I think (though I'm not positive) that it has something to do with smokeless tobacco. Go find out.

Chad (left) and Nash (right) urge you to visit their most excellent new forum.

Till next time!

Volume III Pre-release party!

View all the behind the scenes footage from our recent party! Many of our staff writers and editorial department make a cameo. Then come over to our site and pre-order Volume III! In stores September 1st.

Volume Three up for Pre-Order

Woo-hoo! We have our third action-packed issue up for pre-order now.

You may have noticed that we're also offering DIGITAL EDITIONS of all three issues. There's several reasons why you should consider an E-copy:

• Eco-friendly. Save the trees!
• Portable and convenient.
• Instant gratification! Your copy will be emailed to you within 24 hours. (Pre-orders still have to wait until newsstand street release date.)
• Free shipping!
• Guaranteed to always be in stock. When our printed inventory of a particular issue sells out, you'll always have the digital alternative. 
• High-res PDF format means you can zoom and enlarge to your heart's content!

Of course, there's always the drawbacks to consider:

• It's not a "real" book, so it inherently sucks.
• If you wish to pass it on to your grandkids one day, you'll need to make sure that your method of storage is not obsolete in forty years. 
• Staring at a computer screen is lame. You're probably doing it right now and you don't even realize it. You should be ashamed. 

As you can see, I'm kind of skeptical of e-books in general. I believe that a book should be printed on paper and I'll never understand the digital book revolution. But it's not my decision; we've always said from the start that The Ephemeris is your book and we give our readers what they want. Many of you wanted an e-copy, and we listened. And we guarantee that this digital version is packed with the same amount of quality and attention to detail that we put into our printed edition. We hope you'll enjoy it!

21st Century Digital Boy

You might have heard that we recently conducted an informal poll of sorts to determine whether or not our fans wanted to see a digital edition of The Ephemeris. The response was near unanimous- "Keep the print edition, but produce a digital edition for the folks that can't be bothered to read a real book." So we took the advice and ran with it.

However, there's good news and bad news. The good news is for folks that want to read their digital copy on a laptop, desktop or smartphone. The .pdf edition of The Snuff Taker's Ephemeris looks great! It's the next best thing to owning the printed edition. It will be offered for sale side-by-side with our print edition when Volume Three launches, which is still weeks away.

The bad news is for folks that wanted to see The Ephemeris in an ebook format. It's simply not going to happen anytime soon. The reasons are plenty. Mainly it's because the technology just isn't suited for our magazine.

E-readers: no longer "just for douchebags".

See, we tried to produce a .mobi and .epub version in-house, but it just wasn't happening. Those two standards simply don't mesh with our style. We use several proprietary fonts and some special formatting, which are completely impossible to reproduce in mobi/epub. So we decided to send Volume 1 and 2 to some professionals to sort out.

Volume One was sent to Conversion House A in California, Volume Two was sent to Conversion House B in Michigan. Conversion House A didn't even bother trying to convert it. The guy on the phone told me that it would be impossible to duplicate in an ebook format. Then he tried to charge me 62.00 for the "consultation". I lol'd in my pants.

Converter B was much more professional in their demeanor. The lady there sent me a couple of translated pages and told me that it was the best they could come up with. I didn't even recognize it, it was so different. All of the font, layout, formatting, etc was changed and it looked atrocious. Most of our photographs and captions had to be dropped. All of the color has to be converted to greyscale. And to top it off, the page-by-page cost of conversion was more than I paid to have it printed!

The lady on the phone could tell I wasn't impressed with the end result, and she was very honest in her assessment. "Magazines and comics simply don't work on e-readers. The technology isn't there yet, and until they make one that can read .pdf files in full color, they're never going to be more than a niche product." You got that right.

This looks like GARBAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, we tried very hard to accommodate the gaggle of Kindle and Nook people that wanted to be able to read the STE on their e-readers, but it just isn't possible at this time. There's no way we can sink a small fortune into producing a truncated, bastardized and watered-down ebook edition after we've spent so much time and effort into making a deluxe, quality product. It would be a sin.  

Update on the Canada Post Situation

The strike ended last week and we sent out all of our Canadian orders. We're getting word back that some of them have arrived already, so if you're still waiting on your order it should be there shortly. Or not. Canada Post still sucks.

Attention Canadian Customers

Suggested new slogan for Canada Post : "We suck, and everyone knows it. But what can you do?"

I honestly thought you guys had your postal strike under wraps by now. Imagine my surprise when all of our Canadian orders were returned to us this morning! Apparently your country isn't accepting any US mail at this time, so we're going to hold them until the "Worst Postal System In The World" gets its act together. If you would rather have a refund, just contact us at distribution@STephemeris.com.

Lotsa News This Week

A lot has been going on recently.

First, a group of us flew out to Sweden last month. Most of you know about that. We got to hang out with the guys from Swedish Match and we took an in-depth tour of the Tobacco and Matchstick Museum. A fun time was had by all- expect a detailed virtual tour of the Tobacco Museum in an upcoming issue. You can see a tour video here at our new Youtube page.

Hello from Sweden! Pardon my chesthair.

That brings us to the second bit of news. We are now on Youtube!

It's Friday, Friday, Jason Voorhees knows it's Friday...

Just like Rebecca Black, we payed thousands of dollars to a shady talent promoter who promised to make us stars. Instead, we ended up with these videos. And just like Rebecca Black, everyone hates us.

Feel free to subscribe to us. We're not going to do tobacco reviews or anything like that. We're just going to make stupid commercials every now and then. Check us out!




Thirdly, we've revamped our website. Gone are the pale, earthy soft tones and in its place we've gone with a moody red on black vampirish goth girl getup.
 

I wish the Ephemeris dressed like me. Sigh. 

 

 

I personally like the new color scheme. It reminds me of my coffin. What I don't like about it is that our crappy server takes forever to load the page. Maybe when we win the lottery we'll upgrade to a better package.



And fourthly and probably most importantly, we started shipping out Volume One (Redux) and Volume Two yesterday. We should have all orders filled by Friday (Saturday at the latest). As usual, earliest orders ship first.

"Shh! I reading teh haunted snuff mill article."

The new printer we're using is decent. There are a number of tiny flaws in the new run that I wish didn't exist, but our budget prevents us from being too picky in our choice of companies. Overall, it's livable I guess, but it would be great if we could finally get The Ephemeris looking perfect as it comes off the line.

The problem we have with our publication is that magazine printers don't want to handle us because we're book-sized. Book printers don't want to handle us because we're a periodical. That leaves us two options: a Kinko's-style chain print shop that specializes in restaurant menus and concert flyers; or an independent print shop that does a little bit of everything. We always choose the latter.

These small independent printers often have little to no experience with a publication of our size, and so they make a lot of mistakes. Sometimes the pages are printed at a slight angle. Sometimes the color isn't quite correct. Sometimes the toner arm jams or bleeds, leaving a blotchy or faded print on some pages. Sometimes the mechanical paper feeder jams up and creases or miscuts the page.

Here's your books! Whaddya mean they're ‘unreadable’?

Then there's the binding. The Ephemeris currently uses an expensive (but necessary, in my opinion) three-stage binding process. First, the manuscript pages are sidestiched (stapled down the edge). Then the spine is bound using archival-grade hot glue. Finally, the cover is glued on, down the center of the spine. This triple stage binding is an old technique that was used on paperback books before they came to be considered "disposable." Back then, paperbacks were built to last, and if you have a quality softcover from the twenties or thirties, chances are all the pages are still intact.  

But we don't do this just for nostalgia's sake. We do it for readability and durability. The cheapest publications get a single stage binding that basically means the spine pages are glued directly to the cover. Grab a digest sized publication like TV Guide or Reader's Digest, and you'll notice this type of binding. You'll probably also note how easily the pages can be torn out. This is why I don't use the cover melt binding.

Then, there's the two stage glue process, which is what we used for the "first day" printing of Volume II. This process involves (A) gluing the spine pages together and then (B) gluing the bound pages to the cover. This is a pretty decent method that allows for durability in modern magazines. (National Geographic comes to mind, as do most mass-market paperback books). What went wrong with this process for us is when the aforementioned printing errors cropped up and slightly miscut pages were bound together. When one or two pages are cut short (meaning they're not as wide as they should be), the glue doesn't reach the edge like it should and so the page becomes loose over time (or worse, not attached at all). This isn't a problem for bigtime printers who use computer controlled machinery and ultra-tight specifications. But for a mom and pop print house that uses machinery that hasn't changed much since in the last two centuries; well- let's just say it's very common and very noticeable.  

I asked our new printer if there was any way to prevent this problem by first stapling the seam and then doing the two-stage glue bind. "Sure," he exclaimed, "we can totally do that! But we have to do it by hand- we don't have the machinery to do it automated." (Translation= "Yeah, we'll do it, but it will cost you. Cha-ching.") But the results look allright so far, so we'll stick with it.

So there's most of the errors that occur in the printing and binding process. Then there's the final stage, which is edge trimming. A big stack of books (25-100 at a time, depending on the shop and machine) is placed in this monster and the edges are all cut evenly.

Sounds simple right? It usually is, until you come across a shop that doesn't (or can't afford) to keep their machinery perfectly calibrated and properly maintained. (In my experience, this applies to 99% of the independent print shops out there). That's when you end up with miscut edges, or pages trimmed too close to the text, or a stack of books that isn't tightened down properly and ends up shifting during the cutting process, etc. Your copy of the Ephemeris can go through the entire print/bind process without a flaw, and then end up a victim of the cutting block.

One reason I use a real-life human being to hand-mail all the subscriber copies is because I want someone with a brain to be able to spot huge glaring mistakes and discard the worst offenders. Jasper usually catches all the really bad copies, but even he misses one every now and then. Even still, I would estimate that 90% of our final print run contains at least a few minor cosmetic flaws. It's not because we're lazy, or because our standards aren't high enough- we really wish we could control the entire print process, but we can't. And I've learned the hard way that it's pretty much the same all over. Every printer in our budget produces about the same results.

So we're probably always going to be a little rough around the edges, aesthetically. Some of our more forgiving readers claim that this is part of our charm. We'll buy that. Even better, one of our hardcore fans said that the guerrilla-publishing look of the Ephemeris was "sexy!" (We were flattered.)

In a scientific study to determine the precise amount of sexy contained in each issue, a copy of The Ephemeris was secretly placed in a crowded library. Everyone instantly started making out and touching each other. When the copy was removed, the library patrons put their clothes back on and continued searching for the latest Deepak Chopra opus. 

And finally, in non-Ephemeris news, Swedish Match has released two new American-styled snuses for the convenience store market. We usually don't print information like this in our blog, but SM flew us out to Chicago and bought us dinner, so we felt obligated to throw them a bone. (Just kidding Swedish Match! Don't forget to get back to us on that advertising thing...) But anyway, if you want to find out more about these products, check out Mick and Larry's articles on Snuscentral.com or Anthony Haddad's writeup on Drsnus.com.

Till next time,
RW Hubbard