Cartoon of the Word now in print, vol. 1

[Spud]

Shameless plug department:



John Ambrosavage, the artist otherwise known as Mad Dog, has a new book out

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/c ... 1/17990210

This is, of course, related to his cartoon feature at http://www.cartoonoftheword.com

There you go. Don't say I didn't tell you.

SPUD

[Billy's Little Trip]

Wow, cartoon of the word and now a book. Mad Dog is really serious about this venture. Right on! Hope this makes him perversely rich. Because a poor perv is creepy.

....tell John he can use that joke. My gift to him.

[Lunkhead]

That's awesome!

[fluffy]

Out of curiosity, did you look into CreateSpace as well as Lulu? It has the advantage of things being listed on Amazon.com and being available on Kindle and so on, although I have no idea how their print quality is. (But their CD printing process is fantastic.)

[Spud]

No, I had not considered CreateSpace. I have had very good results with lulu publishing these books: http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/cocaseattle on lulu, and I am very familiar with their process. CreateSpace looks like it MIGHT be a big cheaper. I am not sure that either the Amazon option (also available through lulu) or the Kindle conversion (you have to pay) are really much better on CreateSpace, it's hard to tell because their website is a tangled mess.

I think if you could work the margins, i.e. base price for a 24-108 page book is 3.66, while base price for a 110-828 page book is 1.50 a book (wonder how many 108 page books they publish), you might be able to save more money. But they call these "fixed charges" rather than prices, so I am still not sure I am reading it right. I will keep looking at it until it starts to make sense.

[fluffy]

Okay, I hadn't looked at CreateSpace's book publishing stuff but yeah their stuff can be a bit of a mess when it comes to getting any concrete information about pricing.

Oh, and if you have enough capital to do an up-front print run, check out keness.com - they're a San Francisco based print shop that has really good rates, even in full color, although their minimum run is 100 copies. I've seen their output, though, and it's really high-quality.

[Spud]

I did look in to keness when you first suggested them, and yes, their prices look good, but we have not yet established a market that would support 100 copies. The nice thing is that we could get color in bulk at the same price we are getting black and white on a one-off basis.

Continuing to look at CreateSpace and another downside is that they don't seem to have a standard comic book size as one of their options, and I prefer to keep all of our books in one place...

[fluffy]

Ah, I don't remember mentioning them to you, but that's good.

I just looked at Lulu for publishing my own comics but it seems that book 1 of Unity will cost $55/copy in paperback, which is just SLIGHTLY prohibitive. (Keness quotes it at more like $7, but of course that means a much larger up-front cost and commitment to me.)

[Spud]

Lulu ain't cheap, but they've got what I want. I just put up Cartoon of the Word Vol. 1 Full Color version at lulu, with a retail price of $33. The cost was about $27. I put the same dollar amount (not percentage) of markup on it as on the black and white version to keep the price within reality.

Another CreateSpace snafu: As with lulu, sometimes it's hard to see all the options until you are actually making a book. At lulu, I will often run a book through a "test" build just to see what all the options, pricing, etc. come out to. At CreateSpace, the FIRST thing they do is assign an ISBN. If you get to a point where the project is not working for you (I tried to put up the Octo comic, but no appropriate page size was availaible, so I bailed), I can't figure out any way to delete the project. I can retire it, but it still stays active as an unfinished, unavailable ISBN.

[fluffy]

Strange. I don't know about for books but for music they can use an existing UPC and ISRC codes and whatever. I'm surprised they don't let you use an already-assigned ISBN.

[Spud]

They do. We don't have one.

[fluffy]

Oh, Lulu didn't give you one?

[Spud]

Oh, Lulu didn't give you one?

Lulu will give me one, but then I can't use it with any other publisher. It's publisher-specific. I usually buy my own, so that I can move the printing/fulfillment if I have to. It is the same with CreateSpace. You can not use the code that they give you with Lulu, or anyone else. I have not bothered to get one for either the comic book or Mad Dog's book yet.

[fluffy]

Oh. The way I read CreateSpace's UPC requirement for CDs (which could be different for ISBNs, of course) is that you can use the UPC on other manufacturers' renditions of the product, just as long as the product is still available via CreateSpace for as long as you use it. But I guess ISBNs are different, because they also include the edition as part of it, and a CreateSpace edition would be a different one than a Lulu edition even with the same print setup and such.

Although it looks like they will sell you a semi-portable ISBN for $10 or a completely-portable one for $99.

[Spud]

You are kind of missing my point, which is that the easiest way to see what the options and pricing really are is to go ahead and create a test version of the book, but you need to assign it an ISBN as the very first step in that process. I certainly don't want to buy one, assign it to a specific book, and then bail when I find out that they can't do what I want. On the other hand, I DID figure out how to delete the book with the CreateSpace-assigned ISBN, so all is well again, just a little time wasted.

[fluffy]

Oh, yeah, I had an internal topic drift.

[Spud]

On fluffy's advice, I have started a kickstarter project to get the book printed in color so that it can be afforable AND John can make a few bucks:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/408 ... word-vol-1

Feel free to jump in. SPUD

[fluffy]

You should probably advertise it on the site too. It's certainly more important than linking to the Lulu page.

[Spud]

I agree. It's just that I used up my quota of Cartoon of the Word time today filling out the paperwork for Kickstarter. Geez. You would think I was buying a house.

[fluffy]

Yeah, they're kinda crazy about it. It's amazing how much work you have to do for them to prove that you're willing to do other work that you've already done.

How did they let you do a project without doing a video for it? I thought that was required.

[Spud]

Video is strongly recommended. However, with John in Sacramento and me in Seattle, that wasn't going to happen. I went with a couple of animations instead.

[fluffy]

I ended up making a video for mine which was fun to do but jeeze, lots of work for something that had nothing to do with the project itself.