Dear Supporters
As I write this thank you letter I am painfully aware that it is rather tardy. I should have written much sooner. My best excuse is that it's been rather busy. But I needed to write, because I certainly owe you all a proper thank you -- and I owe some of you an apology too.
FIRST THE THANKS... YOUR support made this unique book possible. For those of you who put in pledges during those heady six weeks at the start of 2017 what more can I say but THANK YOU SO MUCH. I believe Britain needed this book. Trans people certainly deserved to hear some of their own community's history. They needed to hear from the people who were involved in getting to where we are today. But what we didn't know last year was the extent to which non-trans people were also going to need this book. The trans backlash was a remote-seeming thing twelve months ago. It was mainly something going on in Trump-land. I intended from the start that this should be an accessible book for non-trans people -- everything they needed to know but were unsure of how to ask. The feedback from non-trans readers shows that the contributors fulfilled that brief very well.
SOME GOOD NEWS... Last week, when the book had been on sale for just six weeks, Unbound ordered a reprint. That's because the reorders were coming in from retailers thick and fast and the original print run was running out at the warehouse. Again, that's a sign that the book is meeting a need and has been selling well. That's also the impression I've had as I toured the country during LGBT History Month, addressing various events. People were lining up to get their hands on copies.
BUT I ALSO OWE SOME PEOPLE AN APOLOGY. It is no secret that the distribution to supporters got off to a very bad start. The reason behind that was a monumental foul up by the printers. The print run to produce the trade edition, before Christmas, had gone seemingly without a glitch. That's the version destined for the shops. However, the separate process of producing the deluxe first editions for supporters went disastrously wrong. These are supposed to be high quality collector’s pieces and the flaw was so bad that the entire print run had to be binned. That coincided with the Christmas and New Year holidays and a bottleneck in production and — well, to cut a long story short — the books weren’t ready. Then I also went down with Flu. It was my hope that you’d all receive YOUR copies in advance of publication, as you fully deserved, but it didn’t happen — in spite of chasing every day for progress reports.
I'm assured that the backlog was mostly cleared very quickly. However, if you pledged and you haven't received the book(s) or higher level incentives that you were expecting then please get in touch with Unbound's customer services. They use tracked mail services to ensure they know where every book despatch has gone and they can sort things out for you.
Once again, thank you so much for your support. We REALLY couldn't have done it without you.
Best wishes
Christine Burns