From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V8 #30 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Friday, February 21 2003 Volume 08 : Number 030 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing ["Crackers" ] Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing ["Keith Stansell" Subject: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing I just got an e-mail from Cafepress today. Cafepress, for those of you who are not familiar with the name, is a Manufacture-On-Demand merchandise company that offers online stores where people can sell their own custom mugs and t-shirts and crap without having to pay any manufacturing costs themselves. They charge a base price on all merchandise (for example, women's panties have a base price of $7.99) you upload the graphics you want printed on them, type in your description for the product and then add whatever amount on top of the base price that you want to make as profit. Basically you can't go much more than $2 per item before the price becomes too high and you begin to lose customers. They host an online "store" for you and you place a link to your store on your webpage. For example, this is one of my more popular stores. http://www.cafepress.com/ghastly_peep1 Anyways, here's the part that might interest people on the list. I know we've got a lot of aspiring artists, writers, and musicians on alloy and you might be as excited to hear about this as I was. Cafepress is going to be offering in March, Print On Demand book publishing and Press On Demand CD publishing. CD publishing will include full colour CD lable, tray card and CD booklet. Book publishing will be full colour paperback cover with b&w/greyscale printing inside the book. Full colour interior printing will be available hopefully later in the year. They'll also be offering ISBN numbers for those who want them (I have no idea what that means). They haven't committed yet but they think the sizes will be: perfect bound 5 x 8 6 x 9 8 x 8 8.5 x 11 saddlestitched 8.5 x 11 6.5 x 10 I have no idea what "perfect bound" or "saddlestiched" means (Robin, help me out here?). I gotta tell you that I'm as giddy as a japanese schoolgirl in a room full of alien squids. Even though my comic has over 14000 regular readers it still isn't "big enough" to interest any comic book publishers. I've looking into self publishing and it's not that cheap and it would require me to spend a lot of money before the book is even published. Plus I'll be stuck with all the tedious hassle of taking orders and distributing product. If the base price on the cafepress books is low enough that I can make a few bucks off the book in paper form I'll be very happy. I'll probably start off with an original graphic novel based on my comic characters, something around 100 pages or more in length. There are a lot of story ideas I have for my characters that I just can't squeeze into a 4 panel gag-comic so this will give me a lot more room to have fun with them and let them grow. Also, offering something offline that isn't just a duplication of the online content will probably encourage more people to buy the print form. Later, when the add full colour print publishing I'll look into printing an anthology of the online strips. I'm just finding this so exciting because like all the other cafepress products it requires no investment from me other than the work to create the graphics. If it bombs then I'm only out time where as if I tried to print publish on my own and it fails then I'm not only out the time I invested in creating the product but the money I spent to get the product published. This also means some ideas I've had for publishing paperback novels make another big leap forward towards becoming reality. It all comes down to how big the base price is. I'm assuming that the base price will be based on the number of pages you print. They're working from PDF files to publish the matterial so I'll have to get some software for making PDFs. I also don't know what the dpi resolution they require is yet. I'm hoping it will be able to work with 600 dpi since my primative computer has a hard time working on anything higher. As for the CD publishing, it's pretty cool but there are already a half dozen other companies on the internet offering the same thing. Hopefully Cafepress's CD publishing will be competitive with prices offered by the other companies. CDs being so inexpensive to manufacture now I can't see the base price on them being too high. In anycase I'm just thrilled beyond words. This is hopefully a vision of the future where works get published not based on the decisions of faceless men in suits who decide what the publish should buy. Man, this is exciting! Crackers Ghastly's Ghastly Comic http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 12:28:35 -0700 From: "Keith Stansell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Crackers" ...> > They're working from PDF files to publish the matterial so I'll have to get > some software for making PDFs. Hey Crackers, sounds exciting. Here's some software that can convert HTML to PDF files. I use it at the company I work for to create PDF's on the fly in a web based application. http://html2pdf.seven49.net/ It works pretty good (and fast) once you figure out how to lay out the HTML. - -Keith ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 13:47:30 -0700 From: "Keith Stansell" Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing Just a small correction, go to this link for GNU version of the software I spoke of: http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/ - -Keith - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Stansell" To: Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 12:28 PM Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Crackers" > ...> > > They're working from PDF files to publish the matterial so I'll have to > get > > some software for making PDFs. > > Hey Crackers, sounds exciting. > > Here's some software that can convert HTML to PDF files. I use it at the > company I work for to create PDF's on the fly in a web based application. > > http://html2pdf.seven49.net/ > > It works pretty good (and fast) once you figure out how to lay out the HTML. > > -Keith ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:02:24 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Crackers" > They charge a base price on all merchandise (for example, > women's panties have a base price of $7.99) you upload the graphics you want > printed on them, type in your description for the product and then add > whatever amount on top of the base price that you want to make as profit. > Basically you can't go much more than $2 per item before the price becomes > too high and you begin to lose customers. You know, I'm really surprised that Thomas hasn't started exploiting the potentials of Cafepress merchandising... ... I think I know a couple of ladies here who would just love to see Thomas's smiling face on their panties. Thank you folks. I'll be here all week, try the veal. Crackers Ghastly's Ghastly Comic http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 20 Feb 2003 16:03:27 -0500 From: "Crackers" Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing - ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Stansell" To: Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 3:47 PM Subject: Re: Alloy: Print On Demand Publishing > > Just a small correction, go to this link for GNU version of the software I > spoke of: > http://www.easysw.com/htmldoc/ > Great stuff, thanks. I'll check it out. Crackers Ghastly's Ghastly Comic http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V8 #30 **************************