Making your own book from scratch: Lessons Learned
I just mailed out the last of the contributors' copies of the Bawdy Bartender book! Huzzah! Now to come up with something else to do.
Lessons I Learned With This Project:
1.) Charge more for the art. I charged WAY too little for the pin-ups; it ended up amounting to about a third of what I normally charge. But, it let me experiment with the whole "book making" thing, which was the whole point, so I can't complain TOO much.
2.) Flat rate shipping is your friend. Mailing stuff first class with insurance and mailing stuff flat-rate priority mail (which includes insurance free) has about a twenty cent difference, and those twenty more cents are on the first class. I don't quite understand why not using your own envelope costs less (you'd think it'd be more), but I'm not gonna question it.
3.) Self-imposed deadlines work quite well. My deadline was to release the book on Halloween, and I did; it successfully premiered at Furpocalypse. I didn't get everything shipped until today, of course, but still.
4.) Printing, laminating, punching & binding your own book is a bitch. But, I priced doing it in the quantity I did (very small run) and doing it myself may have used a lot of my time, but it saved me a fair amount of cash. Doing it at Staples - the only place I can find that will do small runs of laminated, bound books - would have eaten the entirety of the money I made drawing the art, and then some. I would have actually lost money, making buying the book even more expensive for possible customers.
Thoughts In General:
Next time you do this, less laminating. The biggest bitch was laminating the pages, cutting them out, and then running them through the laminator again. It took, by far, the most time of all the steps in the book making, and I bought both a second laminator and 2 new rotary cutters (so spotweld could help).
Lamination is also the most expensive aspect of getting books done through printing companies, and I can totally understand why. It wasn't expensive to do it myself, it was just extremely time consuming.
My binding machine is little, but powerful. It's designed for binding scrapbooks and such, but the little sucker did 30+ 19-laminated-page books without giving me an issue. Best Christmas gift I've gotten recently.
Future Book Ideas:
• Cheesecake Cookbook - This describes itself. Cheesecake pinups with cheesecake recipes
• Beefcake Cookbook - Muscle dudes with meatloaf recipes?
• Sketch of the Day book - Compilation book of Sketch of the Day that's been running over on Patreon since May or June (and technically has been in existence since…good lord, 2006?). Home binding is extremely convenient for printing this since I could do VERY small runs of the book.
• Compilation of any of the comics and/or portfolios I've done over the past decade
• New, very small run comics
• Porn
Lessons I Learned With This Project:
1.) Charge more for the art. I charged WAY too little for the pin-ups; it ended up amounting to about a third of what I normally charge. But, it let me experiment with the whole "book making" thing, which was the whole point, so I can't complain TOO much.
2.) Flat rate shipping is your friend. Mailing stuff first class with insurance and mailing stuff flat-rate priority mail (which includes insurance free) has about a twenty cent difference, and those twenty more cents are on the first class. I don't quite understand why not using your own envelope costs less (you'd think it'd be more), but I'm not gonna question it.
3.) Self-imposed deadlines work quite well. My deadline was to release the book on Halloween, and I did; it successfully premiered at Furpocalypse. I didn't get everything shipped until today, of course, but still.
4.) Printing, laminating, punching & binding your own book is a bitch. But, I priced doing it in the quantity I did (very small run) and doing it myself may have used a lot of my time, but it saved me a fair amount of cash. Doing it at Staples - the only place I can find that will do small runs of laminated, bound books - would have eaten the entirety of the money I made drawing the art, and then some. I would have actually lost money, making buying the book even more expensive for possible customers.
Thoughts In General:
Next time you do this, less laminating. The biggest bitch was laminating the pages, cutting them out, and then running them through the laminator again. It took, by far, the most time of all the steps in the book making, and I bought both a second laminator and 2 new rotary cutters (so spotweld could help).
Lamination is also the most expensive aspect of getting books done through printing companies, and I can totally understand why. It wasn't expensive to do it myself, it was just extremely time consuming.
My binding machine is little, but powerful. It's designed for binding scrapbooks and such, but the little sucker did 30+ 19-laminated-page books without giving me an issue. Best Christmas gift I've gotten recently.
Future Book Ideas:
• Cheesecake Cookbook - This describes itself. Cheesecake pinups with cheesecake recipes
• Beefcake Cookbook - Muscle dudes with meatloaf recipes?
• Sketch of the Day book - Compilation book of Sketch of the Day that's been running over on Patreon since May or June (and technically has been in existence since…good lord, 2006?). Home binding is extremely convenient for printing this since I could do VERY small runs of the book.
• Compilation of any of the comics and/or portfolios I've done over the past decade
• New, very small run comics
• Porn