Hey! Brandon here with your Weekly Update. Let’s start with the book updates.

Stormlight 5 is at, Bing! 71%. That’s right, 3% moved up this week. I am getting to the end of a sequence, and I have decided to put off doing revisions until I finish it. So, I’ll be maybe a little faster the next couple of weeks as I get that, and then we will have a dearth for a couple of weeks as I do revisions. But feeling very good about that. We’re approaching 75%, which will feel very cool to have. 

Skyward Legacy is still at, Bing! 34%.

So, let’s talk about a whole bunch of updates. I’ve got a bunch of stuff to talk to you about today, and they’re quite fun.

First off is the Warbreaker box from our Kickstarter, the Year of Sanderson. We will begin shipping this week. So, we already nearly have it fully packed. We’re beginning to print the labels today. And so, you’ll start to see them popping up in your emails as we send those off. This box should go out on time or even early. We’re very excited by that. And indeed, we have still trucks coming in for Secret Project 4. We’re anticipating that one being on time too, unless some major disruption happens where we suddenly stop getting trucks of those for some reason. But I believe our third truck just came, which puts us in pretty good shape, because we only need, like, seven to eight trucks to fulfill. Anyway, everything is looking really good for that.

A couple of things that you might be aware of. We have the preorder for the Defiant bundle going live on our store one week from today. What are the bundles? Well, I, for years, tried to get New York to pay attention to me because I thought when a video game comes out you get the nice, cool bundle you can order that comes with a cool thing. I’ve got the one for the Witcher 3 that’s got, like, you know, a statue and stuff like that. Like, why not let us on books buy the cool things. So, this is something we’ve started doing. You’ve seen us doing it over the years. So, we are selling Defiant ourselves through the Dragonsteel store. We actually buy the books from a local bookstore and then we put them in with some goodies that we’ll be announcing pretty soon. It’s a very cool bundle. I pitched what we should get. I’m very pleased with how it’s looking. So, it’ll be, basically, you know, your deluxe edition. The book is the same book, but it does come signed and it comes with some pretty cool swag. So, if you’re into the Skyward books, you may want to be looking at that next week. 

We are moving to the only way that we’re going to be selling the book signed is with these bundles. That’s because we’ve just quickly because overloaded with these, and we figure this is a nice thing we can offer with the bundle. So going forward, this is how we’re going to be doing signed books. You can also, of course, get them at the convention. Correct me if I’m wrong. They will be signed at the convention. And so, like—and they will be numbered at the convention too, and the ones in the book bundle will also be numbered. So, if you’re not coming to the convention, the book bundle is your way to get a signed, numbered edition, and it will come with cool swag. At the convention you can also—you will be getting a signed, numbered edition as part of buying your way in. Does everyone have to buy one of those? No. You can buy the ticket if you got your book somewhere else. But the book somewhere else won’t come signed and numbered. But it might be cheaper because some places do sell the books at a steep discount. So, it’s really up to you how you want to go about doing that, but that’s how we’re going to be doing it. So, brace yourself for Stormlight 5. That’s how we’ll be doing Stormlight 5, is if you want to get the signed, numbered edition, either come to the convention, or it’s part of the book bundle. Just because I can’t sign so many books. You guys want lots of signed books, and it’s kind of difficult to keep up with you all. But we’re doing our best.

Check out our social media for highlights of our awesome exhibitors at Dragonsteel 2023, speaking of our convention. Last year we had 16 attending authors, and this year we have over 50. So, it’s becoming quite the fun place to just come and see authors at their booths. This is something that I’ve always kind of wanted to do is have a really nice author featured sort of expo. So, imagine this as kind of like a ComiCon for authors. So, come and see all these authors. A BookCon? Something’s already called BookCon. Anyway, that’s what we’re doing. Watch our social media.

We have another little thing with Defiant. Barnes & Noble has a preorder sweepstakes. Link in the description. This is when a signed Defiant, a custom dice tray, and a copy of Call to Adventure Stormlight Archive, which is one of the boardgames that we’ve made, a very fun game that I like quite a bit. You can get that. This is probably my guess. They haven’t written it down, but since it’s Barnes & Noble it’s probably only US because Barnes & Noble is a US company.

Let’s see. Oh, this is fun. A lot of you have been asking about the narrator for Secret Project 4. So, the narrator for Secret Project 4 is different from the previous three. It’s not a celebrity. I did try. I posted on Reddit. I tried hard to get some celebrities to do these. But the secret projects, the timing was so tight to get them done that none of the celebrities that I talked to were able to do it. They were all very nice, but they just couldn’t quite make it work. So, it is a narrator we’ve used before but it’s not Michael and Kate. We picked someone different for this one just to have some variety. And we’ll be announcing that on this week’s Kickstarter update, which is coming out tomorrow or Thursday. So, if you’re curious about that narrator, we’ll be announcing that.

Michael Whelan, the artist, who does a lot of cool art for us, specifically for the Stormlight Archive, he’s the featured artist in an active Kickstarter campaign. Some of the art featured is from The Way of Kings, Shallan, Rhythm of War. Link in the description. Michael is awesome. He’s just so wonderful and delightful to work with that anytime he mentions, “Hey, I’ve got this thing coming up,” we want to signal boost it because Michael is my favorite illustrator. I’ve loved his illustrations on books since I was a kid, and I’m really thrilled whenever he’s doing anything that I can signal boost.

So, last thing is our podcast Week 11 winners for our brackets. Are you ready for this? This is a double upset week. That’s right. On our food heist, The Gnocchi Brothers Gnocchi Gnocchi Brothers Restaurant has been defeated by The Edelstahlkugel, which is quite surprising to me. I thought The Gnocchi Brothers Gnocchi Gnocchi Brothers Restaurant would make a nice t-shirt. But you guys have chosen The Edelstahlkugel, which I can’t fault you on. That’s a pretty good story. So that has won 53% to 47%, pretty close vote. 

The bad story is also an upset. That means that The Great British Fake-off, my favorite to win, has been defeated by Weekend at Vader’s with an Actual Zombie. I have no idea how we would make a t-shirt of Weekend at Vader’s without it being an absolute copyright problem. I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. We’d have to look into it. But anyway, 55% to 45%, you have chosen Weekend at Vader’s over The Great British Fake-off. So, maybe you just think that that one is the better bad idea. Maybe The Great British Fake-off is just too good an idea to make it.

We’ll be back next week with another Weekly Update, and I think we will have another of our results from—this is our final four, so we’re pushing toward the end of this bracket. I’ve had a lot of fun with this. Thank you all who have been voting on that. We will see you next week with another Weekly Update.