Today the first boxes go out.
I have started several businesses in my life and most of them failed (mothballs, wine importing, a technology company that was five years too early, and I could go on but you have things to do). So I have learned not to make a speech on a launch day. I will just tell you what happens now.
What is in the box
The storybook and the card deck. Both physical, both shipping from today.
What is not in the box
The colouring book, 168 pages, which you download using the word printed on the last page of your storybook. The twenty-six songs. The karaoke videos. The online games. The twelve classroom activities.
None of those arrive by post, all of them are yours the moment the book does. I mention it again because it is the single thing people misread about this set, and I would rather over-explain it than have somebody open the box and count the objects.
What is still being built
I am not going to pretend everything is finished. The games are live and playable, and I keep improving them, because I keep watching children play them and finding things I got wrong. The lesson plans for teachers are being written now. Volume Two exists as a folder full of notes and a great deal of optimism.
If you buy today, all of that comes to you as it lands. Not as an upgrade, not as a paid add-on. It is one ecosystem and it grows.
The price
$49.95 during the launch, against a regular price of $59.95. I have been asked whether that is a real discount or the sort of permanent sale that certain shops run all year. It is real, and it ends. When it ends I will say so here rather than quietly changing a number.
The thing that worries me today
Not the shipping. The boxes are packed and the courier will do what couriers do.
What worries me is the households where the box arrives, gets opened, gets admired, and then sits on a shelf being a nice object. That is the way most children's books die, and a set with six parts in it can die that way six times over.
So the only instruction I have is a small one, and it is below.
What I would like from you
If you buy it, read one fable aloud in the first week. Not the whole book, one fable. The set only works if it gets used, and the households where it gets used are the ones where somebody read one on the first Tuesday.
And if it is good, say so somewhere. A book by an unknown author lives or dies on twenty people saying it was good. That is not a marketing line, it is arithmetic.
The ecosystem is here, $49.95, shipping from today.
And if today is not the day, take the twenty-six colouring posters, which are free and always will be. Tomorrow I will show you how to print them properly, because there is a right way and I got it wrong the first three times.