Try THE NOT .99 METHOD: How to roll-your-own e-payment and delivery system for selling your books & comics so quick and reliable that not even Apple can take it away.
British independent comics distributor Smallzone – also the team behind Scar Comics – has just announced a UK-based Print on Demand service for all UK comic publishers.
“Now – finally – there is a true POD option for UK publishers,” enthuses Smallzone’s Shane Chebsey, “which means no more expensive shipping from the US and no more having to spend a fortune in big runs of comics just to get a reasonable price per copy… It also means that small publishers will no long be restricted to black and white interior art. Colour printing is now affordable on lower runs.
Near Future Laboratory » Blog Archive » Hint Fiction — Short Evocations of Larger Stories
I found this story on NPR that I heard this morning on this topic of “Hint Fiction” — fictional stories done in 25 words or less — to be quite intriguing. It’s less because it seems like the evolution of story telling in the era of 140 character Tweets and all that. That angle is quite boring, but it seems that this was not the motivation. These are like compelling little provocations that are small moments suggestive of a larger narrative.
The reasons I think I’m drawn to this idea is because it appears to be a provocative form — one that requires speculation about what surrounds the the larger context. Small moments that are incomplete but nonetheless highly suggestive.
I, and several other artists in a growing list, were asked to provide some images that would work in a sketchbook style artbook. The clever bit is that you get to browse the full range of images available and then pick and choose a customised art book! You can do this for any of the artists in the CBSignature programme and I suspect the list will grow!
I introduced myself as a traditional publisher who has spent some time experimenting with the form of the physical book. Projects like the DIY Classic Notebooks and the My Life In Tweets led to a few key realisations. Lulu, and in fact any manufacturing process hooked up to the internet, has made the creation of physical things really rather simple. If you can think of it, you can probably get it made to your own designs in a way that used to be limited to specialised craftspeople – what I call the Internet as Cornucopia Machine. Real things in the real world have a different (different, not +ve or -ve) value to digital assets, and have a different capacity to surprise and delight. And physical instantiations of the digital can be both archives and souvenirs (you can’t really have digital souvenirs – a thought I’m going to unpack a bit more at a later date) (via Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media Design at SXSW | booktwo.org )
![This Is My Letter To The World
The Omikuji Project is a crowdfunded experiment in short fiction by award-winning novelist Catherynne M. Valente. Each month, she sends out an original story and personal letter to a list of subscribers all over the world. For the first time, these stories have been collected into a single [POD] volume, representing the first two years of the project.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l3o20y3bmz1qb1ixgo1_250.jpg "This Is My Letter To The World
The Omikuji Project is a crowdfunded experiment in short fiction by award-winning novelist Catherynne M. Valente. Each month, she sends out an original story and personal letter to a list of subscribers all over the world. For the first time, these stories have been collected into a single [POD] volume, representing the first two years of the project.")
This Is My Letter To The World
The Omikuji Project is a crowdfunded experiment in short fiction by award-winning novelist Catherynne M. Valente. Each month, she sends out an original story and personal letter to a list of subscribers all over the world. For the first time, these stories have been collected into a single [POD] volume, representing the first two years of the project.
(1) Make a story available world-wide simultaneously in all major languages. (2) In a digital format. (3) With perks for pre-orders.
(4) And goodies that digital pirates can’t reproduce. (And yes, that’s possible. Goodies they can’t compete with, like author chats.)
(5) Rip off business model 4 pirate sites & one-up them. They offer a Wii raffle for a subscription to a d/l site, u offer author-signed Wii
Use the assets YOU have that pirates CAN’T have to compete with free.
Audrey Taylor, former creative director of Go! Comi (via Robot 6)
Let’s run an experiment and see if piracy is harmful to sales.
…
Will giving the ebook away for free hurt sales? Will it help sales? Will I gain readers? Will people donate money? Will people who take the free ebook buy my other ebooks?
Arcade Fire delivered a handwritten note via the Web yesterday…
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Music — Latest News — Arcade Fire Tell Fans to Expect 12” Release in Coming Weeks — RollingStone.com (via deltamualpha)
I love this sentence. Makes me think of the introduction on the PaperComp 2010 website:
Paper is not dead. Books, magazines and other printed materials can now be connected to the digital world, enriched with additional content and even transformed into interactive interfaces. Conversely, some of the screen-based interfaces we currently use to interact with digital data could benefit from being paper-based or make use of specially designed material as light and flexible as paper. In a near future, printed documents could become new ubiquitous interfaces for our everyday interactions with digital information. This is the dawn of paper computing.
(Hat tip to Warren Ellis)
Take one cigarette vending machine. Take out the cigarettes. Fill them with mini-graphic novels, priced at 4 Euros each. Sell them to kids! This is a new distribution method for comics by Hamburg writers and artists being trialled around the German city.
Friday Morning Runaround – The Nose Knows Bleeding Cool Comic Book News and Rumors
