Hey, everyone! Weekly Update time. This is a big one. All right? I’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about today.

Very briefly, Wax and Wayne 4 going very well, 2.0 draft. I am somewhere around, bing!, 70% on that. But we’re going to move off of that very quickly because I’ve got a lot of stuff to talk about today.

First is, this week is FanX, and I’m going to be at FanX. This is Salt Lake’s used-to-be-called Comi-Con until they got sued. So now it is basically still Comi-Con. But Adam is going to put up my schedule for you right here. One thing I wanted to highlight is normally we do something we call the Dan and Brandon Show, where Dan and Brandon sit around and talk about cool stuff. People tend to really like that panel. That became Intentionally Blank, my podcast. We’re going to do a live version of that, which is basically the same panel, except we’ll record it and make an episode of the podcast out of it. So live Intentionally Blank. But also, we have lots of fun stuff for you to see and our booth will be there. You’ll be able to go there and be able to buy all kinds of cool merchandise and whatnot. So please, if you’re going to FanX, stop by and see us.

Speaking of conventions, it is now time to announce something very big. We are holding our own convention because we’re crazy. So our book releases, my book releases, have kind of burgeoned. They’ve gotten bigger and bigger and bigger over the years, to the point that we’re having thousands of people come to the book releases. And we thought why not take it a step further and make a convention out of it. So we are announcing what we’re calling Dragonsteel Mini-Con, which is a miniature Comi-Con basically, though we wouldn’t call it Comi-Con because we don’t want to be sued. But it is basically a convention centered around a book release, in this case Cytonic.

The first thing you need to know is the same thing that we’ve always done, in that the Tuesday night there will be a reading, Q&A, and speech by me. And that will be open to the public. And so as part of the con, there is that part that we’ve always done. We are adding on top of it quite a bit. We are adding on authors that are coming who are going to do readings and signings. We are adding on booths from artists that are going to be joining us. I am going to do more. My focus will be on the evening, so if you can’t go during the days, you can still come, like, on Monday night and still get quite a bit of interesting Brandon content. We’ll probably be doing, like, a spoiler Q&A as part of that, where the other part won’t have a spoiler Q&A. We’ll be doing a lot of fun things, and it is going to be a Monday and a Tuesday.

Now this is not the best time, I understand, for a lot of you for a convention. But it is Thanksgiving week. I think a lot of people might have those days off or might be looking at taking them off. Plus, book launches are on Tuesdays, and we can’t change that. That’s something that the publisher determines, and the entire industry releases books on Tuesday. So we’re going to try this on Monday and Tuesday. We have rented a real convention center to hold this in, in Provo, the Provo Convention Center. It is going to be a big deal. We hope that it will be a lot of fun. And I am going to talk you through how you can go to that, even if you don’t live locally, and how you can participate and how you can get signed copies of Cytonic.

We are going to go to some graphics now. The first thing that I want to explain is, we have bundles that come with the book and an event pass. And we have three of these. The basic one is the Book Event Pass. The Book Event Pass comes with your hardcover signed, numbered, and stamped. You have to pick this up at the event. These don’t ship. There will be a shipping option later on. These don’t ship. And it comes with a two-day badge to Dragonsteel Mini-Con. And it includes a seat at my speech and Q&A. The free open up the next day may not involve a seat. We’ll see. You may have standing room only. If you have a ticket to the event, you get to come and actually have a chair, for sure. There might be extra chairs. But we’ll see how that all plays out. This is a new thing for us.

One thing that I have to admit as an aspect of this is that I cannot personalize everyone’s books anymore. I have resisted making this change. I have talked about it before on this channel, that there are just too many of you. We would do it until 5:00 AM and 6:00 AM, and it’s just gotten to be too much. So instead what we are doing is we are doing a *drawing* for coming and getting your book personalized. They’ll all come signed already. If your name gets chosen, then you may bring one other person, and you may get a couple of books personalized, and you may meet me. We’re kind of hoping that as we do this over the years, if you’ve already had one of these that you might let other people have a chance in the future. But really, it’s just up to you. Everyone who comes to the con gets a ticket for the drawing. If you aren’t part of the convention, this is not something we are offering right now. We just have too many people and too many things to coordinate. So while we’re going to open the doors to come to the speech and the Q&A and all of that and whatnot, you cannot be part of that drawing.

So bundle number one, Book and Event Pass.

Number two is our Swag. We’re going to cut back to me and I’m going to show you some of this swag. This comes with our t-shirt for this event. We’ve been doing a new t-shirt for every book release. You get your kind of exclusive t-shirt, in your size. You also get this swag bag, which has a cool—we’ve got this bookmark that we’re trying something new. It’s sparkly this time, rather than–. We’re trying to make our epic bookmarks epic in different ways. It has a scene from the book. It comes with a sticker bundle for your water bottles, or whatever it is, that’s got a whole pack of cool stickers that we have designed. It comes with a pin. We have an M-Bot pin. And the Doomslug plushie. You get your own Doomslug. And this is along with all the stuff that was in the other one.

And then we have the VIP Pass. The VIP Pass is basically all of this stuff except some cool VIP stuff. VIP includes VIP exclusive swag. It includes reserved seating. It includes all the cool stuff that we put in. We are hoping that these things together will pay for us to have this cool convention, and that’s how we can accommodate everybody coming to the speech. Because in the past we just have not been able to find a way that the number of people that want to come that we can actually hold them all. And this has been the big issue that we’ve had is we’ve outgrown bookstores. We’ve outgrown high schools. We’ve outgrown most things except for true convention spaces, and they are expensive. So we’re holding the con in part to fund being able to have the actual free signing.

So if you are not interested in these things, or you don’t live locally, let’s talk about the second rung here of options for you. First is the Free Pass. We talked about this already. It’s to come to my speech, reading, and Q&A, just like I always do. There is also an Event Only Pass if you happen to be getting your book somewhere else. And if you’re coming to the event and you’re like, “I want the Doomslug plushie but not the sticker pack,” or whatever, these things will be for sale there as long as supplies last that you can just kind of pick them all up, à la carte, so to speak.

The last one is probably of interest to a ton of you who are watching this right now, which is, how do I get my signed book if I am not living in Utah and not able to fly there or wanting to fly there. Well, we are doing the same thing we always do. All the other books need to be picked up at the event. If you want a book shipped to your house, you do it this way. It is the same way we’ve always done it. It is a signed, numbered, stamped, shipped, not available for pickup book. We have to divide these to keep our numbering system working. These ones don’t include entrance, but we will give online access to my speech and Q&A, and you’ll be able to get a code to come watch that whole thing on Tuesday night.

And we will have the charity option for personalizations that we’ve done in the past, where you pay a little bit more and this money goes to charity. We usually give it to Worldbuilders. And you can have your book lined and dated. You can make me draw a little picture in it. These sorts of things you can do. We will continue to do this as long as it is not crazy for me to do it. We’re on the cusp of not being able to do this anymore, but we’re still going to try to keep doing it. It is for a good cause. So if you want one of those, and you want to come to the convention, you will want to order this thing and have it shipped to you, and you’ll want to buy an Event Only Pass without the book. This is the way that we are doing it to just make things easy for everyone.

This all is live on a website that you can go browse that has all six of these options for you that you can look at. I know it’s a little complicated, but I think it’ll make sense once you go and look at it. This is going to be on November 22^nd and 23^rd for the release of the book Cytonic on the 23^rd. And we look forward to seeing a whole bunch of you there with your Doomslugs. And we are so grateful for everyone in the fandom who supports us doing these weird things, such as holding our own convention. If this is successful, we will continue to do it for Mistborn next year and Stormlight the year after. If you are interested in those things happening, support our little convention here.

Thank you, guys, so much.