I have a confession to make: Every time I see other authors getting cool book stuff made, I think to myself, I want that.

But, you know, for my own books.

I’m also a prolific crafter. Creative person. You know. I do a lot of stuff “in house” as it were–I have a grossly well-stocked craft room, a nice printer (that decided not to be nice this time) and decent proficiency with Photoshop.

I also draw a little, so most of the time, if there’s some kind of book swag I want? I can probably make it.

One of those things I saw and wanted was vellum overlays. If you haven’t seen overlays before, they’re an image printed on vellum paper, small enough to fit in the pages of your book. They’re often made with illustrations of specific scenes in a book. Vellum is semitransparent, so when you put the printed overlay in your book, you can (sort of) see the text through the image. They’re pretty neat.

So when the campaign for The Assassin’s Bride started, one of the stretch goals was a no-brainer: I’d finally get a chance to do a page overlay for a book. I knew of a local print shop that could handle vellum, which is great, since it’s hard to print on a regular inkjet printer, even if you have a really nice one like mine. The slick surface of vellum means the images often smudge as the paper moves through the print rollers. It can take up to 15 minutes for a vellum print to fully dry, which means if you want good results, you need a laser printer with good image quality. The print shop had one, the images were nice and clear, and the price per page was affordable. The only catch was I needed to get my own vellum.

So I got it, and a few days later, when I had a dentist appointment, I knew I’d be on that side of town and could stop by to get my vellum overlays printed. I’d illustrated a sweet (and heavily highlighted by readers) scene where Thea is mending Gil’s shirt while they have a heart to heart, discuss hard things, and he comforts her. It’s probably my favorite part of the whole book. My sister colored it for me, since I was really tight on time, and I pulled up to the shop with my flash drive in my pocket and my pack of vellum in the passenger seat.

Only one problem.

The print shop was gone.

They’d removed the flowers from the front garden. The windows were covered up. The sign was gone.

The print shop was closed.

I sat there panicking for a moment. There were other print shops, sure, but the pricing was well outside my budget, and I’d already paid for the vellum, and not everyone is willing to use papers brought in from outside. I knew of a few places online that could do the job, but the wait times were as painful as the price. I’d already run well over budget for the project due to a lot of dropped pledges that ultimately ate up whatever padding was left from previous goals, which was a hard learning experience that will help shape future campaigns. But the vellum overlays were already promised, so I sat in my car, racking my brain and trying to think of where on earth I could go that might have a nice printer.

That’s when I thought… you know what? Maybe the library.
The library has a lot of great services they offer, and a nice quality printer is one thing that’s available for public use, though they limit the number of pages one can print each day to ensure nobody can monopolize it for huge jobs. And as it happened, the library was just a few blocks away.

So I took my paper with me and went to the desk, explaining my plight. I need 60 overlays. I need them in color. I have the image on my phone and on my flash drive. Is there any chance your good color printer can handle vellum?
The librarian I spoke to first wasn’t sure what vellum was. I pulled out a sheet to show him, and the other librarians clustered around. Eventually they all concluded there was only one way to find out. The first printed page of the day is free, so they loaded it into the printer and asked me queue up a print job for my illustration.

And see, it’s funny–I felt really good about the drawing I’d done until this shirtless man in my art was displayed on a huge monitor in the middle of the entire library for everyone in the place to see.

All of a sudden, I was just a little self-conscious about my latest creative endeavor. And everyone was looking.

With a little help getting the printer loaded, we discovered it would print, and the image turned out beautifully. The only problem was the printer could only manage one page of vellum at a time, or it would jam. For a commercial grade printer designed for speed, that was a problem: Not only did we have to feed it one page at a time, we needed break points between each sheet so we could reload the tray.

Which meant queuing 60 vellum overlays, one at a time.

Loading the sheets of vellum in, one at a time.

Approving the prints, one at a time.

The task took two computers and multiple people manning the printer. But the system only lets library patrons use a computer for 60 minutes a day, so I had to get each page printed in less than a minute. And while I’m pretty long-legged and still sprightly enough to run across the library from computer A to computer B to keep the queue going, it was a lot.

Librarians stepped in to help. One to load the sheets of vellum. One to approve each print job at the second computer. Someone else had to constantly un-jam the printer, which proved to struggle with even one sheet of vellum. And I had to keep putting prints in the queue.

And so the library turned into a factory, pumping out page after page of my shirtless man drawings on ultra-thin paper while everyone stared.

I apologized to the nearest librarian. “I’m your weird one today, I guess,” I told him.
He sighed. “Not even in the top five.”

In the end, we finished within the hour allotted, but a system issue meant the print jobs hadn’t been logged and no receipt had been generated. So last of all, I toted my stack of overlays up to the circulation desk, where me and a librarian worked together to count all these slick pages with my shirtless man on them and confirm how much I owed.

They charged me a convenience fee.

By that point, I think it was more than fair.

Anyway, the overlays turned out great. But if I’m ever foolish enough to make them again, I’m buying my own printer and doing it at home.

Not pictured in The Assassin’s Bride this time, by the way. After all that, going upstairs to get a copy was asking too much.