Today is the third anniversary of the day we first published Unshelved (then called Overdue) on the web, and as has become a hallowed tradition we are taking a moment to reflect on past glories (and not-so-glories), anticipate future ones, and express our gratitude.

Looking back I think we'll remember our third year as the one where Unshelved took off. We posted our thousandth strip, gained thousands of new readers, published our second book and reprinted our first, signed with Diamond Book Distributors, sold thousands of books and even more merchandise, showed at five conferences, registered our trademark, and gave our talk "A Funny Thing Happened at the Way to the Library" in half a dozen cities across the USA.

At the same time, we experienced some humility. We learned that 14,000 readers sounds like a lot (and it is!) but we'll need a lot more to support ourselves and our families without working day jobs, jobs that are inconveniently impeding our ability to execute on our plans for world domination.

But we still have a few tricks up our sleeves. In a few weeks we'll announce our third book. We have lots of laugh-out-loud merchandise lined up for this year. Requests for speaking engagements have been coming in fast and fierce, so there's a good chance we'll get to meet in you in person. We are finally making headway on an important and much-requested website feature, one we think will warm the hearts of many of our fans. Most importantly, we have lots of new twists and turns planned for Dewey and company. And some snappy answers to stupid questions, we'll have those too.

Because Unshelved doesn't come in your morning paper, because you can easily unsubscribe from our email delivery, remove our RSS feed, or stop visiting our website, we recognize how truly optional our little comic strip is in your life. Because you keep choosing to read it, to support us by buying our books and merchandise, to invite us to speak to your conferences, meetings, and schools, to tell your friends, families, and coworkers about Unshelved, to send us emails telling us true stories or that today's strip was especially funny (it was, wasn't it?), we are deeply grateful to you. Thanks for being our fans.

--Bill and Gene