Tournelle du Soleil will return in January 2024! (Patreon)

Hello my strange and wonderful patrons!

I interrupt your Tournelle du Soleil instalments for a brief week to finish this homestretch push for the SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE hardcover artist's book pre-order...! 

A short pause on full-blown storytelling is in order until I wrap the pre-order on December 31st.

THANK YOU everyone who has placed your order for a copy! 

And if you haven't placed an order for your copy yet, don't forget that as my patrons you get a special discount code on top of the discounted pre-order price. Use T24Q6PU for $10 more off at checkout!

Here's what's going on for me in this final stretch of 2023:

There are only FIVE days left (and so much to do 😅) until I end the pre-order. It was my plan to keep your Tournelle du Soleil instalments rolling right through until the new year and straight on, but I'm finding myself (predictably) a bit overwhelmed with keeping an eye on those each evening before they roll out and handling all the moving pieces of the SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE pre-order.

Life is a perfect storm of deadlines for me from now until the third day of January: while this is exactly what I did three years ago for Slow Circus: VACUUM (2020), three years is long enough for me to forget that it is inadvisable to sync up ...

(1) pouring over each square millimeter and finalizing the InDesign proof for a beautiful large format artist's book so that it's submitted to the printer and approved in time for the Spring production projection; with

(2) the requisite PR / online marketing pushes to promote the pre-order for said book, so that

(3) you can place a large-enough  order for said books that the unit price doesn't skyrocket.

Ah, and, in my end-of-year fog, I've also managed to have these tasks correspond with needing to write a big Final Report for my Canada Council grant and complete a 2-year retrospective budget for submission to close the project.

Whoops / wheeeee ... !!! 😬

Oh, and I'm performing a straps number at the Birdhaus NYE party, but it's a secret still 🤫 (If you're in Toronto and want to see what I've whipped up for a short Moulin-Rouge themed event at a relatively low-ceiling, fixed-height venue, I'd love to see you there! 😘)

Double whoops, double wheeee ... 😬 😬

Your January mornings will be graced with a returning tide of Tournelle du Soleil unfoldings. Thank you all immensely for your kind words and feedback on the instalments so far! I love reading all your comments (especially on the scarier-to-share posts).

For any patrons who are keeping an eye on this with half a mind to print & publish their own books one day...

I'll be doing short daily updates with you folks this week on how the pre-order goes in this final stretch.

I thought it might be nice to do some transparency on this final pre-order push as I reach the homestretch. I'll post where the pre-order numbers are at from here until closing time on December 31st at 6pm EST, and after Tournelle du Soleil wraps up I think I'll do a big overview retrospective with whatever data I can share on the numbers-games involved in all of this (per-unit book prices, customs and import taxes, shipping calculations from printer to my living room to reader, costing out shipping supplies, correlations I can see between frequency and type of PR / Marketing and any sales that I make for pre-orders, etc). I learned a LOT the first time I did this in 2020, and I'm learning just as much again this time. Whether you'd like to document your own performance art in this way, or print some of your writing or paintings or illustrations or anything else, I figured it's helpful somewhere along the line to be able to witness someone else's failures or successes with some numbers thrown into the mix.

I was ambitiously hopeful at the outset of all this that I might be able to recreate the same kind of interest that I had for SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM in 2020, but these final five days will be the deciding factor to see if that's possible or not. I don't know that I'll be able to manage that this time: I didn't think about how there would be at least 2 'lost days' of pre-orders for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

When I ran the pre-order for my first SLOW CIRCUS three year ago, the timing of it was January 1st to January 25th, roughly. I had set a goal for myself that I needed to hit 200 pre-sales in order to go to print for that first book, and I hit it. This wasn't just an arbitrary number or ego-driven: the more pre-orders I got, the better able I was to calculate the backstock copies I could afford, the less financial risk I took on in delivering the project, etc.

Currently, I'm sitting at 90 pre-orders.

I can't imagine a world where I'm going to move 110 more pre-orders in the next 5 days (unless someone reposts it to a big audience somewhere online, or places a big order for multiple books – two factors that helped my pre-orders for the 2020 SLOW CIRCUS: VACUUM), BUT I'm in okay-shape to move forward with printing no matter what: this time, I've found a new printer who not only can keep the per-unit cost to create each book lower than the first company I went with, but can do so at an even better print quality than my first printer (offset printing instead of digital, yay)

Most folks place orders for things like this in the final days before a cut-off ... we'll just have to see what that shapes up to look like this round 👀

Alright –

That's it from me for now! Let's see what happens!
Stay strange & wonderful,

XOXO ess

P.S. For any of you who are on Instagram, I'm running a giveaway contest for one copy of SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE -- It's really helping bring some eyeballs to the pre-order, and if you are on that platform you are MOST WELCOME and HEARTILY encouraged to enter too! All you have to do is re-share any of my posts about SLOW CIRCUS: BARBETTE to your story, or comment on the post and tag a friend who you think would enjoy reading it too.