First off, I'll be at the Boston Comic Con next weekend, April 20-21, at table AA515. This will be my first convention "behind the table" as they say in the hip speak, so it will be interesting. I've got a banner ordered that should be here in time, some free mini-prints and business cards en route from VistaPrint, and even bought myself a shiny new tablecloth.
Because the second thing to mention is the more important - the printed copies of Farlaine #1 arrived two weeks ago and look quite great! For the most part better than I'd hoped.
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Since it's a sideways larger format book(11"x7") I wanted to go with something stronger than staples, and the perfect-binding approach allowed me to slap on a cardstock cover that fit well with it. They dipped the whole thing in glossy a few times and *BAM*, a delicious looking first printing.
There are only a couple of minor quibbles about it, half on my end and half on the printers. For instance on the back cover of the books I've seen there's a stray yellow smudge of ink. It may not be on all books and its barely noticeable so I'm not overly concerned there. A larger concern is the inner binding being incredibly tight. In many cases the pages run together so the reader is left to wonder if they're meant to read across or down, which sucks. In the next book I'll have to weave in a little extra binding space on that edge.
To follow up on the last post, I ended up going with a $5 cover price which meant a cost for Diamond of $2. At 1000 copies they would have been $2/copy, but if I kicked it up to 1400 the price dropped to less than $1.50. In the end they overprinted a little and I had a print run of 1500 copies, which averaged out to ~$1.75/book.
Early last week I sent off my submission to Diamond for inclusion in the August issue. I'd been chatting with someone on their team since the NYCC and he knew it was coming. They've had it for about a week now, but the actual deadline for the issue was only yesterday. So we shall see. Hopefully I did enough to get in.
Oh, and if anyone reading wants to buy a copy of the book right now, email me at goblin@farlaine.com and I'll get one off to you!
-j
