Don't Whine to Tim Denning

or he might write about you ...

We read

Tim Denning

.

It doesn’t matter that his style is quite different from ours. (He leans graphic. We lean beautiful graphic novels.)

We don’t always agree with Tim. But we do find that he often spurs us on. Yesterday was one of those moments.

As preface, let us note that if you whine to Tim Denning, he might write about you. And, no, it won’t be pretty. (You will look whiny.) Thankfully, only you will know he is writing about you. Because he will couch it like so: “I was talking to this guy.”

Now this guy (and that guy, and the other guy) often have the same problem. They want the fruit without the labor. Or, more subtly, they want the fruit, but they give up too soon. Especially if they hit what seems to be an insurmountable wall.

Easy street isn’t really easy. That’s often Tim’s message.

We’ve had no illusions that our current graphic novel is easy to produce. But we have hit an insurmountable wall. At least with our usual provider: Amazon’s KDP.

For some artists and publishers, the issue we’ve encountered would not represent an insurmountable wall.

But here’s the rub:

• we’ve chosen premium paper to accommodate the graphic novel’s black pages

• with that premium paper comes a premium cost to the reader: $29.95 to buy the print version

• we could justify that premium cost if… the printing quality was premium. Indeed, the printing itself looks lovely.

But?

We’ve now seen three proofs.

And the proofs have proven: the vendor just can’t seem to trim the book edge without slippage past the bleed.

Which results in… too many pages with white bands across the bottom. You might not notice. Or you might. We noticed, and it felt wrong to sell the books this way, at this price, if we could do better.

What to do?

First and foremost, we decided not to whine to Tim Denning. (He might write about us. And it wouldn’t be pretty!)

But we will most definitely take Tim’s advice: don’t quit. Business isn’t easy. It takes grit. Commitment. Creative response. Learning and change.

Now, we are a small press that relies on automated processes to be sustainable. We won’t be leaving KDP. But for this particular book, here’s what we’ll do:

1. the digital version is NOW LIVE! Yay! We’ll happily promote this gorgeous graphic novel in its digital form :) Starting right now.

2. we’ll let the artist do some experiments. First up: she’s going to try a Pittsburgh printer. It will not be an automated process. There will be financial outlay to get the product created. She won’t have a print version for sale on Amazon. She’ll have to do the fulfillment by hand.

3. we’ll use this moment to discover new ways of doing what we do. This graphic novel might not be an immediate beneficiary. Overall, we’ll be asking: what’s the upside here? What can we learn? How might we create a door (or three or four) where there seemed to be a wall?

In our experience, what’s true for businesses is true for authors, too: the ones who keep at it are the most successful. They write more books, rather than pinning all their hopes on a single title. They take the long view. They discover and grow.

Whether or not they read Tim Denning, we’ll never know.

If you want to wait for the print version, watch this space. We’ll let you know when it’s available from the artist!

You can read a Colour out of Space summary, here. What is cosmic horror? Find out.