How do like your omnibuses?

Fictional characters (and their scribe) need to know. Plus, we talk about last week's poll results, book updates, and the fate of the foil. Read on for all the tea worth spilling!

Aug 18, 2025

Thank you for taking another poll about the tariffs in last week’s newsletter. Did you miss it? If you did, you can read it now:

🚨 Urgent Decision Needed: Foil the Covers or Avoid the new Tariffs?

Melinda Kucsera

Aug 11

Read full story

I’ll wait. This is Ran, Sarn’s son from the Curse Breaker series.

Option 2 won by an overwhelming majority. So if the tariffs do affect books, we now know that's your preference.

What was option 2?

Option 2: Switch to a US printer.

The Reward? Zero tariffs
We lose the foiled covers and the hardcover omnibuses become 2-book sets instead of 3-book sets, but the interior illustrations and edges remain as planned. We’ll need to get another cover to make that work, but that’s okay. The dragon is ready to pose for more pictures.

So what’s the plan?

August 29th is still two weeks away. So we’ll see what happens when the tariffs go into effect. We won't make any decisions until see we how things play out.

Last time we contacted the printer before the tariffs went into effect, they had no answers. So of course we contacted them again. They could have answers this time.

How will we know until we ask?

Their reply to our query was interesting and it gives us hope:

Unfortunately the only information we have at this time is that which is publicly available. As soon as we know more about how this will impact (or not impact as we suspect the case will be) books, we will communicate this.

So there's a chance that we can still do option 1, and that's exciting because that's the path we really want to take.

We want that so badly we can taste it. At least I can. I'm not sure about the rest of the cast. They haven’t commented on that yet.

What was option 1?

Option 1: Stick with the UK printer.

The Reward? Foiled covers for both the paperback and hardcover special edition books, head/tail bands for the hardcover omnibus and 3-book hardcover omnibuses.

So we’ll see how things are closer to when the Kickstarter will hopefully run and make the final decision about which printer we’ll use. We still could go with option 1 and keep the foil if the tariffs are cancelled or books are on an exempt list.

But hope isn’t a plan. So we needed to find out what you want us to do in case that doesn’t happen. At the end of the day, we just want to give you great stories and fun adventures. And to make that happen, I have to ask for your help again.

How do you like your omnibuses?

While writing up the post about the tariffs and our options, we thought about our plan to have two illustrated hardcover omnibuses that each have 3 books inside them, making them around 900 pages.

But we don’t know if that’s what you want.

900 pages is a lot of pages for a spine to hold even with the added strength from the head and tail bands, assuming we can print in the UK and get that. The spine would be almost inches wide. That’s a thick book!

But we have options. We could collect the illustrated books into 2-book omnibuses and divide up the series like this:

Omnibus 1: Catch the Scribe & Book Battles
Omnibus 2: Rogue Characters & Dragon Spells
Omnibus 3: Rogue Spells & Storm Spells

Is that something you want us to do? If we do that, then each omnibus will be between 500-600 pages or 1-2 inches wide. We have to do this for the paperback versions anyway, so I wondered if you wanted us to go this route for the hardcover books too. So that’s what I’m asking in this week’s poll.

If the tariffs force us to go with option 2 and print in the US, we’ll have to split up the hardcover omnibuses so they have no more than 600 pages. But we still hope to go with option 1 and print in the UK.

How are the books coming?

Well, Melinda found my uncle, so I can rest easy knowing he’s okay. But she’s still looking for the other characters from Rogue Spells and figuring out where they are and what they’re doing now in the sequel, Storm Spells.

Melinda still hopes the Kickstarter will launch in October, but I don’t know if that’s possible since we still need to print the proofs and figure out the tariff situation. Before we can do that, she still needs to finish Rogue Characters and Storm Spells for that to be a reality. I remind her about that daily as a good fictional character should.

She’s working on both books now since we go back in time at the end of Rogue Spells and we end up 5 months after Rogue Characters ended in the book Storm Spells. So that’s gotta be a smooth transition too. No pressure!

Okay maybe a little pressure. Melinda does better with deadlines than without them. So that’s why I keep repeating them in every newsletter. Because she reads them and gets reminded!

What about that side quest?

I didn’t get it yet, and I’m not sure I will since another character might need it more than I do to make that smooth transition possible. More on that next week since Melinda is still working that out. So it could all change between now and then.

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