Please take note:

• We are not accepting any new submissions for deadlines/delivery within the month of December, 2011.  Yes, we ARE accepting new intake titles, we simply are not slating delivery dates prior to Dec. 24th at this time; we are out to January 4th.  If you have a title you wish to submit during this month, that's fine, but we are not committing to complete any new titles, in addition to  the 152 we already have in production, in time for the Christmas holiday.  We are currently slating completion dates in January for everything in intake starting today.  If you are one of the two existing client imprints/authors that previously advised me that you would be delivering a title around the 10th, we are holding those two slots open for you. 
• It is my intention to CLOSE the office for the period starting at midnight, December 24th through Tuesday, January 3rd.  We will not be answering phones or responding to emails during that period. 
• We are currently running some days two days behind on our delivery dates.  Unfortunately, of the 152 titles we took in since the last week of October, it turns out that more than 135 of them had more than 20-30 copyedits each.  When I intake a title, we slate it for the number of hours that we expect it to take; and when authors tell us that their manuscripts are "final, proofed copies," that is the amount of time we schedule; not X plus 1 or 2 hours for copyedits.  This does not sound like a lot of extra work, but 30 copyedits, simply in an ePUB, amounts to 45-60 minutes of work; if a Kindle must also be amended, that's another 30-45 minutes of time.  If you multiply an hour of time by 135 books, that's 135 manhours that we did not schedule, and have had to somehow "cram in" to our existing schedule--just over 3 man-weeks of time.  That's a lot of hours, and somewhere between 30-45 books that did not get done by that team during that time period.  So we apologize to those of you who have had to wait an extra day--sometimes 3 extra days--for your books this month.  We are practically hot-bunking computers around here; we're running all three shifts; we've called in every designer we have, we're even dragging out old laptops so folks can work on the floor--we're going as fast as we can.  It is due to this unexpected three weeks of manhours that we're no longer intaking titles for December delivery, as we already have more than enough books queued up to be delivered by the 24th at the latest.
• We'll be happy to continue to intake books for January delivery dates, thank you.
• For all two of you that noticed that the  Newsletter was not sent this month, no, it wasn't; but I simply have not had time to create it this month.  If we are successful in closing the doors during the Christmas week, I'll try to do a special issue then.  Thank you for understanding.