“Oh, by the way, you’ll get something for your hard work. We were totally planning this all along. It’s just a coincidence that we never mentioned this until after people complained about it and after many of our contributors paid $50 because they had been led to believe this was the only way to get a book.” -My interpretation.
Bah. I shouldn’t complain about things turning out how I’d hoped. (Well, it’s the bare minimum of what I’d hoped.) I am just really grumpy today. Don’t mind me in the corner being a grumpus.
I just wanted to point out that the possibility of contributor copies was mentioned early on, after it was known the book would definitely be published. From an email sent to contributors on July 8th:
Because our initial print run is so small (400 copies [corrected to 1500 in a follow up email]), and our contributor list so large (over 140 creators), it may not be possible for us to distribute courtesy copies to you guys.
Obviously, this is something that we WANT very much to do, but we can’t *guarantee* just yet that you’ll get a courtesy copy. If you want a guaranteed, premium copy from the initial (and, so far, only guaranteed) print run of the book, you may want to pledge for one in the Kickstarter drive.
As I say, I do hope very much that we’ll be able to send out courtesy copies, but I wanted to alert you all to this possibility.
And then of course the Kickstarter went on to raise enough money to expand the print run to 5500. It hasn’t been stated if the contributors’ copies and/or the copies that will be donated to libraries and schools are coming from that total or will be further printings. I know the library/school donations have been mentioned previously on Twitter, but I think today was the first public mention of contributor copies. I just wanted to clarify that contributors had been told the intent was to provide them with copies if possible.
(Source: keiren-smith)