"Creating Origami" to premiere at the OUSA convention this week -- and some stats

Hey all... just another quick update from backstage here at "Lapin". Pardon the "chattiness" of this one but there's lots of exciting and important information to convey.

1) Data Collection: We've gotten back responses from the questionnaires from about 95% of the contributors and as soon as all the data's in we can start the process of ordering the materials for fulfillment and unfortunately, we can't really proceed until we've got stats from everyone.  So if anyone out there is totally swamped or overwhelmed with all the questions please feel free to drop me a message so we can get things finalized. 

2) "Creating Origami" to debut at OUSA convention June 22!

Thanks to Meenakshi Mukerji and Hank Simon and Mike Hamilton at "The Source" (the OUSA bookstore) we will be debuting the book at the 2012 OUSA convention in New York this week.

The book will be available to preview and preorder at The Source and several of the teachers at the convention will also have preview copies with them at the convention (Meenakshi Mukerji, Marc Kirschenbaum and Doug Caine) for people to check out. Additionally, Meenakshi will be teaching a class on the SIP and Koustubh Oka will be teaching Andrea's Rose and Natasha's Dragon informally and I've provided color diagrams for everyone they work with.

3) Some statistics: If any of you out there are like me you LOVE to see how all the data in something like this sorts out.  So to help determine what colors of paper, tee shirts, etc had to be ordered I created a little database in PHP/MySQL to compile the stats and dumped some graphs into Excel.  Here's a few of the most interesting ones:

PDF Downloads - Of the various diagrams that we made available during the campaign, there was a whopping 8916 downloads!  Of those by far the most popular were the SIP and Andrea's Rose with Natasha's Dragon and Koh's Ankylosaurus neck in neck for a distant third place. 

An interesting side effect of the campaign that I noticed yesterday while doing research on the upcoming Crawford book and SIP article I'll be writing for "The Fold" (OUSA's online newsletter) is that the campaign generated so much buzz that's it's now a lot harder to research these models on the web as the creatingorigami.com, the Kickstarter Campaign and the pinterest page are all now coming up in the top of the search queries for those models. 

Countries Contributing - All in all there were 420 contributors, 33% of which were international.  Of those, UK, Australia, Canada and Germany were the most highly represented with a sprinkling of other countries throughout Asia and Europe.

Unicorn Choices - Of the 43 unicorns we've heard aback about, there was a clear preference for the two unicorns featured in the video and on the campaign (Sparky and Yoshi) , with Candy running a close third.  The plain unicorn (Samui) was also popular, with the white and black as the chosen colors.  Gus (who just happens to be my favorite) didn't fair as well but still had a good standing.

4) Confusion on version of the book/timing on delivery - It seems that I manged to open a real can of worms in the questionnaires that I sent out with regard to the possibly of "two versions" of the book.  After analyzing your responses I've decided that the proper thing to do is only have one version of the book with regard to changes. 

I've had the time to take a longer look at the possible variations that I might make and have found them to be minor.  So good news is that the version that goes out will be less likely to have any of the small errors that escaped into the first printings of the book. 

The bad news is that I'm going to need a bit more time to get the first version out since it will go through a full cycle of editing.  It was my goal to have it out by the end of June, but it's looking more like the middle of July at this point. 

Anyone who answered their questionnaires wanting the "Limited Edition" or "Don't Know" will get the "limited edition" since it's likely to be near identical to the later.  People who requested the later one I'll be pinging independently to clarify which version you want.