Simulated Comic Book
February 2nd, 2008
The SCP archives are nearing the magical 200 mark. I’m thinking about celebrating the milestone with a printed anthology. I’ve looked into this before (when I hit 100 strips) and a vanity press book that long starts to get unwieldy, so I might make this a “best of” publication, as determined by the five-star ratings. That would also help to weed out the embarrassing early work 
Would anyone be interested in buying something like that? If it were 50 full-colour strips with annotations and a nice cover, what would you be willing to pay? Does anyone have any advice as to which printing company to go with?
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 am
If you’re looking for something without too much hassle, http://www.lulu.com seems to be quite popular amongst web cartoonists.
http://www.wwaow.com/wwaow/site/home/?lang=en is supposed to be a good alternative.
I have no experience with either of these though.
February 3rd, 2008 at 3:59 am
lulu.com should suit your needs, books are printed on demand rather than in runs, so you’re not lumbered with loads of them if they don’ sell. They may be a bit pricey though but there are a variety of book formats to chooses from.
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:53 am
I would buy it… but depending of the price… the change to Argentina its like a hit in the nuts.
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:15 am
That would be great I would buy one! The last graphic novel I purchased was $15USD.
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:07 am
so long as the ‘out of order’ comic is included, I’ll definitely buy one!
February 3rd, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I would definitely buy it if it had annotations, I love reading about the inspiration and story behind a comic.
February 3rd, 2008 at 6:23 pm
Would certainly think about it, especially if the cost of shipping it across the pond to the UK wasn’t too steep. Although what with the dollar how it is I’m a good position to buy US products.
February 4th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
I actually work for a digital printing company - if you’ll email me with specs for the book (size, sheets, what kind of cover) I can get you an estimate.
I WANT THIS BOOK.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:31 am
You’re probably best off with whatever Carolyn can get you, but http://www.ka-blam.com might be worth checking out. they seem to focus on short-run comic chapbooks.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
>_>
I would buy one then come to your house and make you sign it.
^^
February 7th, 2008 at 12:12 am
I’m going to be leaving my current job at the end of next week, so I’ll start on the book’s layout as my first action as a gainfully unemployed guy. I’ll probably go with one of the print-on-demand houses that take care of the web commerce aspect. Buying an inventory and managing it myself isn’t something that I want to have to do.
The pricing options that I’ve found haven’t been all that encouraging so far. For example, Lulu says that a perfect-bound colour 9×7 book of 100 pages would be about $20 for manufacturing. Their shipping (to Canada at least) is a whopping 8 dollars. Adding in $5 profit pushes the total cost of the thing to over $30. Ouch. Does your company do web commerce, Carolyn?
I’d like to keep the total cost (less shipping) to about 20 - I don’t think many people would pay more than that. If I reduce the profit margin and the page count a bit, this might be possible. I’d like to make a couple of bucks per book, but that might turn out to be naive.
I’m not sure what kind of sales numbers to expect. The site currently gets about 2-3 thousand unique visitors a day, but many of them are robots / one-time visitors. I’m thinking that I’d be lucky to get over 100 sales at this point - which would be enough to finance a modest computer upgrade but not much else. I’m not going to be retiring on this thing
I guess at least I’ll have time to put out more than one update a week for a while before I go back to work (in May). Maybe I can drive some sales with a bunch of new content and an advertising blitz?
February 7th, 2008 at 8:23 am
KEVIN FORBES WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST ROBOTS WE ENJOY YOUR SITE AS WELL
:[
February 8th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Hey Kev,
I’ll buy many for the peeps in Ottawa and I’ll try to promote it here. Let me know how it goes down.
You’ve got my support!
February 8th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
I’d love to pick one up, but honestly, 50 strips is a little slim IMO. I realize that this probably won’t be a Dark Horse co-production, but both the PBF and Penny Arcade books look like pretty good examples (although PA’s ones with nice long commentary sections are better - if not prettier).
February 8th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Yeah, 50 might be a bit slim. It’s all a balancing act between page count and cost. I’ll have to see how many fit on a page before I can get a better idea of what I can do. If I have to go with larger format, but I can print two strips per leaf, that might work out cheaper overall.
I probably won’t go over 100 strips though - that will do a good job of eliminating the less than stellar ones.