You know about the new covers for my time travel and magical romances, and also about my upcoming Kickstarter campaign to launch them. The books ordered through the campaign will have a special tipsheet inserted in the front and each backer will get a signed bookplate for each book to put on that page.

There’s also a digital reward of a downloadable copy of the Tarot de Marseilles deck, for backers to print and colour. This past weekend, I printed my deck from the PDF file, and thought I’d show you.

I printed my cards on 65lb parchment stock and trimmed them up on a paper cutter. There are six cards on each 8.5 x 11″ page. There’s also a page with images for the backs of the cards.

My inkjet printer wasn’t so very happy with the parchment paper, probably because of its weight. When I printed a test page on regular paper, it came out perfectly. The printer seemed to have some difficulty picking up the parchment, so a couple of pages printed slightly off-square. The image on the back isn’t perfectly centered on each page either, but I’m happy with it. You could probably take the PDF file to a copy shop to have it printed on heavier paper, or printed out on regular paper and copied onto heavier paper.

As you can see, there’s also a box to print, cut out and assemble. This is the final page in the PDF file, and you might want to print it on different paper stock. I used the same parchment. This one has just one tuck-flap on the front of the box lid, but I’ve added two side flaps to the lid for the final version to make it a little sturdier.

I also noticed that some of the pip cards don’t have a clear up side. Since the meaning of the cards varies – the interpretation is reversed when the card is upside down – you might want to create a convention when you colour them. I’m going to colour something red at the top of each card.

The other change is to the dates of the campaign. I was going to launch on January 28th and run through February 14, but as the campaign is part of Kickstarter’s Make-100 feature for January, it makes sense to launch sooner and take advantage of any additional visibility from that. We launch on January 15 and the campaign will run through February 7.

Click through to follow the campaign and follow it to be notified at launch.

I talked about these new covers a few weeks ago, but have more to show you now. 🙂 The pre-order links are starting to populate at the portals for October delivery, but I have more to share with you about the Kickstarter campaign.

Here are the four new covers together:

For the Kickstarter campaign, each book has a tipsheet that will be added into the front of the book when it’s printed. There’s a matching sticker for each book, which I’ll sign and mail to each backer. You order the book through Kickstarter, the book ships to you directly from the printer, then I mail you the signed bookplate and you place it in your book. This saves a lot of postage cost and also gives you a signature in your book.

Here’s what the page and bookplate for Love Potion #9 looks like:

This tipsheet is added to the front of the book at the printer and will not appear in the retail edition. Here’s what the other three look like:

Because January is Make-100 month at Kickstarter, I’m limiting these new editions to 100 copies of each title. The bookplates and tipsheets won’t be available for the retail editions coming in October.

There’s also a digital bonus for backers of the print editions – a downloadable 78-card Tarot de Marseilles deck to print and color. Here’s the higher arcana of that deck.

Why tarot cards? Lilith, the heroine of Love Potion #9 is a tarot card reader and matchmaker. She’s tired of waiting for her own true love and casts a spell to hurry things along – and there are unexpected consequences, one of which is her tarot card deck developing a mind of its own. Each chapter in the book is governed by one of the cards in the higher arcana.

The Tarot de Marseille is an older tarot deck, one that originated in what is now northern Italy. The images on the cards were woodcuts, which would then be hand-colored. I thought the deck would be familiar to Lilith, who lost her true love in the 15th century in Italy, around the same date of these cards, and that it would be fun to create your own deck.

There is also a limited tier with a vellum overlay of the original cover art for Love Potion #9 by Judy York, so you can have both the old and the new covers. There are only ten of those available, so be quick if you’d like one!

I’ve updated the interiors of the books, too, but we’ll talk about that next week. I’ve ordered proof copies of the new editions and hope I’ll be able to share them with you by then in a video. 🙂

We launch on January 28. Click through to follow the campaign and follow it to be notified at launch.