We thought it was time for an update on progress. An exciting thing happened at the beginning of the week - our bank account was credited with the funds from Kickstarter, minus their cut of course, and processing fees. In the spirit of openness, you might like to know how that breaks down.

You will remember that you pledged a total of £34,632.00. But sadly for nine backers, their credit card transactions failed on multiple attempts and Kickstarter finally accounted for them as dropped pledges, reducing the total by £690. Which leaves a total of £33,942.00

Kickstarter's cut is 5%, or £1,697.10 which seems remarkable value for a platform that give two lads from England access to a global market. We don't begrudge that at all.

The payment processing fees were £1,204.72. leaving £31,040.18 to be credited to our account. And not a moment to soon, because we have been looking at all the stretchgoals, totalling the wordcount and page count and reassessing the number of illustrations we need. The final page count looks more like 240 by our pre-layout estimation, and that means we need more art than we originally planned for. So for the next month, while Dave concentrates on finalising the text and getting it edited, Matthew is commissioning extra art.

Luckily the strain won't just be on the two artists we were already working with. The Kickstarter attracted the added benefit of three new artists to the team. So give a hearty welcome to Tazio Bettin (who created the picture above), Mate Cziner, and Çağdaş Demiralp.

That's the good news. The bad news is that Jordan and our sensitivity readers could not open the Googledocs we sent them for some reason and the emails telling us they had a problem disappeared into the aether. I have today sent the team a new word doc, with the text copied into it, so fingers crossed Jordan can now start work, three weeks later than we intended.

All of this still just about fits into our schedule, so you will be playing Tales of the Old West next year.