Getting your stuff off the screen and onto paper..

[grasshopper]

... or onto paper cleaner then the paper it is currently on now and into a nifty book format.

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So, I'm looking into getting my second 24 Hour Comic printed

Any recommendations?

I've shot off an email to Snap is Osborne Park (that's where I had my first one printed, and from what I understand, everyone had theirs done there too) as well as the one in Subiaco. Also sent a quote request to Worldwide printing in Subiaco, figure three quotes wouldn't hurt.

Where do you guys get your stuff printed? And what kind of stock do you get?

I figure this would be a good place to trade resource information that everyone has for printers here in Perth.

[Luke]

Snap Osborne Park is where I got my last two done and I've been really happy with them. They were significantly cheaper than any other quotes that anyone I know got anyway. Good turn around too. They do have a specific way you'll need to lay it out for them though so you'll have to have a chat with them.

[andreib]

By the way I really support any action getting arty work off the internet and onto our streets. Too much arty work has been hidden, dormant and alone on the internet.

You should make a 30 page NON TWENTY FOUR hour comic.

[grasshopper]

But 30 isn't a printable amount. Well, unless I do a fold out cover.

[grasshopper]

Holy crap have prices ever gone up!

In October 2007 it was just shy of $130 to get 50 copies of a book printed at Snap Osborne... now it's $197!

That's not much better then the Snap in Subiaco where it cost $207.98

Worldwide Printing (also in Subi) is $250 (or $275 if you want an offset printed cover as opposed to digital).

Not gonna lie, that's a little pricey all around.

These are with 80gsm for internal B&W pages and a 120gsm colour cover (well, at Snap Osborne it's actually a 160 cover).

[grug]

Well, that still makes the books a little less than two dollars a piece to print, which is very reasonable if you ask me, especially if you are charging $5 a pop.

If you produce more at a time you get a discount too.

[grasshopper]

Actually it's $3.94 a book if you're getting 50 printed. Which if I sell at $5 a pop, especially through Quality where I give Keith $1 a book (I don't want to cheat him and he is doing me a favour), I'll only make 5¢ off of each one.

I'd like to go up to 100, but it's taken me forever to get my 50 run through. And I don't know if it's much worth it to do a second run of the first one. At least this soon after finally selling them. But who knows, maybe I should email Julie and ask her about a quote for 100, plus a quote for if I'm getting two books printed at once. in fact, I'll send that off right now.

By the way Grug, my congratulations to you and Jessica.

[grug]

Oh yeah, you're right! Duh.

We sell at $5 when we sell them ourselves, and $6 through a shop. That's pretty fair and we have no trouble moving them for that price.

We usually put together a bundle and print them together, we did 100 of Love Puppets 3 and 100 of our wedding favour comic recently and those did come back at $2 a pop.

Still, you don't print mini-comics to make it rich, and we always consider a the money we put into the print run a loss - the cost of our "hobby" - and then when we sell them, it's a bonus.

(And thanks!)

[andreib]

Yeah, printing prices have gone up dramatically since the first time I printed. I just did a big order to offset some of the additional costs, but of course, that means I have the next 7 years worth of stock of my comic lying around.

Anyone got any extra suggestions on selling these things? Has anyone tried selling in batches of 10 at a discount to comic stores around the world over ebay or something?

[grasshopper]

I found my old invoice for my original print run and the prices have gone up $70. $70!!

I've decided to change my paper stock to 100gsm from 80gsm. It'll increase the quality, and only add about $1 to the entire print run of 50 books. It's taken me longer to get it printed as I'm not too happy with the colouring job I did before, so now, I've redrawing the whole thing (well, tracing) and redoing the shading. I'll the original PDF up on my site though for people to have a gander at.

I haven't tried anywhere else, but I do know that Minotaur Books in Melbourne has a whole section devoted to Australian comics. Maybe you could try working something out with them? Maybe send them a PDF of your book so they can see what it's like and then work out a deal with them. I imagine the drawback would be mailing it over there... granted, mailing within this country isn't that bad price wise.

Another thing I was thinking about was maybe making a torrent file of my books as PDFs (and anyone else who is interested) and putting it up on some sites like Demonoid and so forth. Include a text file with the torrent telling people who did each comic with a link to the respective sites and say that they could buy a hardcopy by contacting the artist at their sites. What do you guys think of a idea like that?

[andreib]

I'm interested in the idea but am unsure of the website Demonoid. Never used it. Maybe a website where we can do the first 10 pages of our stuff and then the 11th page will link them to where they can buy it. Does webcomicsnation do anything like that?

[grug]

Webcomicsnation has a free hosting option, and you can add your own HTML, so certainly you can set up a hub with previews of all of the Perth comic artists and then link to Etsy stores, or Lulu or whatever.