As I sit here on the floor at the Kansai International Airport (they've got to get more outlets near actual chairs here), I just heard from my publisher that the books have left the warehouse in Indiana, though I am not sure how long it takes for Amazon, etc. to receive and process the books. Several are already on their way to the house at the beach where we'll be staying in Oregon (one book was sent by FedEx and is already there). If you pre-ordered the book you may have received a reply that says to expect shipping in February. This can't be right. I love Amazon—they are a miracle of sorts—but I have found that they often get the dates wrong for new books. My hope is that pre-orders will be shipped during the holiday break sometime. I'll keep you updated when I hear some news about this. Two of the people who have seen the entire book are my editor Michael Nolan and cool blogger Pam Slim. Checkout what they say about the book. Their words are very kind, but they are not exactly unbiased in this case either.

The final push
The pictures below are from the night of November 20, the night we uploaded the entire book after final checks to the production people in the US. The 2GB InDesign file (a bit smaller compressed) was uploaded from Japan to the server in the USA after we made sure all the images and links were OK (very time consuming). After the publisher had all the files in late November there were still a few typos, etc. that were caught and corrected there before the files were sent to the printer.


Working at home on the cover before heading over to Mayumi's design studio a few blocks away.

Checking (again) for typos as design consultant Mayumi Nakamoto spends hours checking all the images and links.


Mayumi goes through every page checking images to make sure they are CMYK, etc.


Sample prints of the covers. Cover file was done in Illustrator.

Getting ready to get on the plane to work on tomorrow's presentation at the Stanford Alumni Center, then over to Duarte Design after that. So who needs sleep?

Update
Unbelievably, I have not slept yet (almost two days now...). But a great day. Stanford was wonderful and the Duarte event was fantastic. I was shocked: Just as I entered the party area of Duarte the publisher was there holding up my book--the actual book!--announcing to everyone that "Garr has not seen this yet" and how excited they are about the book, etc....then I walk in. Bam! I was shocked. A lot of presentation vips were there including two lead managers from Microsoft (PowerPoint), Slideshare, etc. Great people (more later including some awesome and funny pictures with the cool guys from Microsoft). Read about the night in a post here by communications guru Bert Decker.