In a twist of fate that could only have been heralded in by the fiery demise of Butter Jesus last week, ‘Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny!’ has been chosen as a recipient of the Xeric Grant!

The Xeric is a grant that is given to comic book self-publishers to help them with the enormous cost of printing and distributing a book. When you have a major publisher behind your work, you don’t normally see the costs associated with undertaking a print run. When you’re a small-time self-publisher, you need all the help you can get. Me and my coauthor, Anna Bratton, are extremely grateful to the Xeric Foundation Committee for giving us the opportunity to do a real printing of the first book in the ‘Francis Sharp’ series.

You may be asking yourself, “Didn’t you already print this book?!” Well, technically we did. It was a small run (50 books) that was done by an on-demand press in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, called Bookmobile. Bookmobile did an amazing job for on-demand book, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

We went with Bookmobile for the first micro-batch of ‘Francis Sharp’ because of the prohibitive costs of printing a high-volume run on an offset press. We were only able to afford to print 40-50 on-demand copies at a time, and we were depending on the revenue from those to allow us to print another 40-50 of those if the first run sold out.

With the Xeric Grant, we will be able to print a higher quality book in larger numbers, making it possible for us to distribute and sell them in stores without constantly running out of books due to our lack of cash monies.

So, in short, look for the first ‘Francis Sharp’ book to come out in August of 2010, hopefully in a bookstore near you!