Posted March 6, 2017 at 11:01 am

The above comic is a direct link to sales, but we also have a website for the book here. Please check it out!

Now then:

Thank you everyone. THANK YOU! For real, I mean it, thank you for giving me the last 10 years to do comics full time. In some ways, this feels like the culmination of an adventure that started back in 2006 when I decided to start work on a degree in science.

For the last two years or so, Kelly and I have spent every spare moment sneaking in time to read articles, journals, and textbooks for this book. In retrospect, this was a little crazy, given that we both had full time jobs, and were raising a small kid while creating an even smaller kids! Thanks to getting very little sleep and a LOT of help from our parents, we managed to get it done.

Think of this book as a sort of optimistic skeptic’s guide to a bunch of technologies that might be important in the next century or so. We picked emergent technologies we were interested in, which we also thought were not really covered well in media. Then, we dove in, trying to learn as much as we could, reading lots of technical papers and books, and interviewing experts in these new fields.

The result is a book that, we hope, gives you a full picture of these ideas, so that you’ll know what news to be excited about and what news is missing the point. This is *not* a book offering a philosophy of the future or a prediction of life in the year 2050. It’s really just a Mary Roach style investigation of a bunch of neat stuff. Think of us as people who are really interested in the future, but who approach it with a deeply skeptical lens.

If you go to the Soonish website, you’ll note that we’re offering a bunch of pre-order incentives - signed bookplates, bonus comics, etc. It’s important to me that we’re as transparent as possible about how we run things, so here’s why we’re structuring the launch this way:

Having healthy preorders is really beneficial for us, especially as people who are new to writing pop science. Because we’re new, nobody knows how popular the book will be, so bookstores and other sellers don’t know what to buy from us. Having good preorder sales means that sales representatives have a clear picture of our audience size, and it makes it easier for us to publicize the eventual proper release.

More importantly - for the purposes of the various “bestseller lists” all preorders count as if they happened during the first week. So, having a big backlog of preorders helps our chances of getting on these lists, and then getting the media coverage that comes with it.

So, for this project more than others, it’d mean a lot to us if you’d consider buying a copy. And, if you plan to buy a copy, it’d really help us if you bought via preorder. And, if you wanna be especially nice to us, buying on day one is probably best, because it helps us run up numbers on the various online seller sites.

I usually try not to get into this inside baseball stuff, because it feels vaguely sordid to tell you about our marketing strategy, but I figure it’s best to be straight with y’all about our hopes and plans.

Also, we *are* providing a lot of incentives for early buyers! On the book page, you’ll see the Space Elevator tab. You *only* get these if you buy through the preorder. So, see, there are some benefits to participating in the preorder now.

Thanks again, everyone. Thanks to all of you, I have this fantasy career of reading and writing most of the time. I’m doing my best to earn this job every day.

With gratitude,

Zach