I have committed to printing the ashcan or manga sized books, mostly for cost of shipping. I can send one of these puppies anywhere in the world for about $2, and frankly I don’t get why more creators are not excited by this.
So the idea now is to run a Kickstarter for each title with the intention of simply ‘releasing’ the book to whomever wants to receive it, without regard for profit. I mean to offer just the basics, like the digital for 1 or 2 dollars and the physical ashcan book for 4 or 5 bucks, including shipping. Of course, there will be some deluxe tier with other digital books and what not, but I will only be mailing the ashcans.
I figure to do each one with a minimum of fanfare and over the next year or so to catch up, have everything out there and also available on a few digital platforms, and an Etsy site or such. And Kindle and Amazon, of course. This is a long way from the ‘using issue one to fund issue two’ plan I started with, but there is no value to anyone, myself included, in having these books lingering on my hard drive.
I have been printing books as I go, I think 6 so far, in batches of 50 or 100 each and simply handing them out as I travel the country. The low cost of printing black and white ashcans allows me to do this as a way of ‘distributing’ the books, and I feel better knowing someone is reading them, even if it is a bored security guard or that nice lady in a toll booth. I have some ideas for further distribution, and I might even write about it. But for the most part my days of being in the comic book ‘business’ are practically over.
I’ll likely still make a few more, but with these I will have no illusion that anyone will actually want to read them, much less pay for them. And I’m OK with that.
