Hello, I’m SuitCase. Visit the comic I help run, the other comic I help run, dig around my personal website, tweet at me, ask me stuff on Formspring or email me. Or just follow this blog via RSS.
Follow-Up
For such a lightly-trafficked rarely-reblogged Tumblog, my posts seem to inspire a disproportionate amount of private feedback and occasional drama. Before I figure out what next to write about, I have some updates on previous posts about bookselling, our burglary and DailyComix.
Books
We have sold 266 copies of Volume One since I finished posting my bookselling experience. That makes for a total of 716, nearing half our print run. My sales predictions were generally accurate, though demand has been very soft post-Christmas. At this stage, the idea of selling hundreds of books in 2012 is unthinkable. But bundles with Volume Two are a very appealing idea!
I am very proud that we have been able to sell so many books at such a premium price. There are a lot of kind, supportive Bittersweet Candy Bowl readers out there.
How Dare You
Brad Guigar, on Webcomics.com last year:
Comic scraper sites (and apps) pop up at the rate of every other month or so. Typically, they use a webcomic’s RSS feed to “scrape” the comic and use it for their own purposes — whether it’s a collection of their favorite comics in one site or an app that allows a reader to easily surf all of their favorite comics in one, easy place. In general, comic scrapers take only the comic, leaving behind the other elements of the webcomic site — like the blog …and the site’s advertising.
The latest offender: DailyComix, an comic reader app for Android. Load it onto your phone, wait for it to download a comic index, pick a bunch to follow, and read them strip-by-strip in a clunky interface. There’s a free, ad-supported version and a $2 paid version.
The reactions:
This is all a bunch of crap.
We Were Burgled
Stupid word, burgle.
On Wednesday, we went to my mother’s place to take care of the dog for the day. She has been barking since the move, and so we were supposed to be there to walk her and stop her from being a nuisance. Which we did! We brought our phones and laptops along (thank God.) And then we went home around 9pm, stopping for groceries on the way.
At 10:50pm, we opened the front gate of our apartment (we have a strange internal courtyard thing, as we live within a secure hotel complex.) This made a noise, and I heard some scuffling inside the unit as I approached the front door. After unlocking the door, I quickly walked down the hallway, first noticing that all the lights were on, then that my iMac was gone, then that the back window was wide open with the flyscreen pushed out.
BCB Page Comments, November 2009 – August 2011
Bittersweet Candy Bowl gets a lot of comments. So a while ago I put together this image graphing them all.
(Click this one. It’s wide.)
BCBCon
This July, we arranged a four-day Bittersweet Candy Bowl reader meetup in Boston.
22 people attended.
I thought it was a pretty great success, all things considered. Fun, strange, memorable and mostly problem-free. In the end, it was the kind of gathering I had hoped for.
Dirty Laundry
I prefer to describe bad people as “mean-spirited”.
It is my philosophy that you can be quiet and conflict-averse, you can be rough and cantankerous, or you can sit somewhere in the middle, and there is no problem in any of it unless you are mean-spirited. That is the crux of being bad.
It’s a subjective judgement, for sure, but it’s a word that sets out what I think is an important truth, so often blurred and mistaken in personal relationships: that it’s the intent, not the words, that matter. Sticking to this word when defining my personal idea of “badness” grants me a lot of verbal leeway when joking around with friends, “ribbing”, but strictly limits me from acting with cruelty or malice. Because, of course, I never want to be bad.
There are two people this post concerns. They are some of the only people I’ve ever met that I can genuinely say acted in a selfish, unkind, mean-spirited way to Veronica and myself. They’re unique in my life. As such, I’ve kept alive a certain interest in how they’ve fared since they ignominiously declared that they would have nothing to do with us anymore.
I understand “airing dirty laundry” is a term that was created for a normative purpose. But you know what? I disagree with its pejorative nature. Sometimes people who treat you badly deserve to be shamed. It might be the only time I ever write something like this. They might be the only people I ever get to know personally who I decide were mean-spirited enough to be criticised in a public place.
Either way, I feel sure that this post is a punishment well deserved.
Making Money with a Book is Not a Bad Idea
This is the final part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: the introduction, part one and part two.
Let’s bring this long, arduous journey to its conclusion.
Money. How much did we make? Was it worth it?
I’ll be super open here. I’m not quite as skilled at this as Dorothy Gambrell, nor am I as organised, but I do have numbers for the book.
But first, vague guesses.
Distributing a Book is Interesting
This is the second part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: the introduction and part one.
I’m breaking with (blog title) convention here, because for all the pain I thought we might run into when figuring out how to send hundreds of hardcover books, I ended up with an overwhelming feeling of.. enlightenment. I learned that things could be a lot easier, at least once you set them up. I would recommend the lessons in this post this to people who need to ship books en masse.
I understand not everyone cares about our idiosyncratic situation, especially if they’re reading this to learn about distributing their own book, but I have to set up the scene:
- We live in Sydney, Australia.
- The books were to be printed in a factory in Quebec, Canada.
- Three-quarters of our paying customers are in the USA.
Also to complicate matters (or, more likely, make them harder for you in following our example) we have bank accounts, residential addresses and tax IDs in both Australia and the USA. Enabling us to set up accounts for stuff in both countries, which you may not be able to do.
So, given this situation, what did we do? The “straightforward” thing would be to have our printer send all our books to Sydney, then mail them out at the local Australia Post to customers all around the world. This is how we’ve dealt with our other merchandise, so far. Buy 400 buttons in a big box from the USA, have them shipped to Sydney, mail them out across the world as we need to.
Preparing a Book is Hard
This is the first part of a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. You may also wish to read the introduction to this series.
Preparing this book was a terrible ordeal.
We were faced with a number of problems in getting this book ready for print. If you’re not familiar with the offset printing process, essentially all you have to do is send three PDF files to your printing company: the cover, the endleaves and the interior. Specify how to build the book, pay them, have them delivered, and you’re done.
Three PDF files. But a lot of work goes into making them. Some of the problems I had were ordinary for people in the position of making their first book: having to learn Adobe InDesign (a print layout program, basically the only game in town these days), learning how to adapt to the printer’s templates and margin guidelines, and knowing which materials to specify you wanted the book made with.
Other problems I ran into, however, were more unique:
You see, the majority of this book’s comic pages were written on blue lined paper, in pencil. (It was a tradition Veronica kept for a while because BCB was basically just something for a handful of deviantART people to read, and the exercise paper was readily available.) I had to make each page look fine in print, a considerable task given that unfiltered pencil looks horrible in print and lined paper looks horrible anywhere.
Printing a Book is Hard
This is the introduction to a series of posts about making Bittersweet Candy Bowl Volume One. Please read: part one, part two and part three.
The more I try my hand at making BCB a serious media venture, the more I have realised how naïve it is to assume the internet is a world-flattening, democratising force of the universe. Maybe it’s simple to tweet or tumbl your ideas, and to that point, it’s true.
But publishing a webcomic on the web requires all sorts of technical, marketing and business expertise. Producing and selling merchandise based on what you publish is a busier endeavour, where creativity gives way to the consideration of minimum orders and materials science and the whims of the marketplace. Going alone may cut out the publisher, distributor, or middleman, but you end up spending so much time trying to learn about the process of doing things, you may as well be filtering your work through somebody who knows.
Self-publishing a book is the best example of this phenomenon so far. Once again, Veronica and I were forced to become jacks-of-all-trades, learning about and working within the constraints of printed books. Here is an unordered list of things that I, personally, now understand that I did not understand before:
- Adobe InDesign
- Bowker and the ISBN system
- Appropriate margins and gutters
- Customer order fulfilment services
- Selling on Amazon.com
- Barcode legibility
- Paypal CSV transaction export
- Basic file operations through shell scripting
- International freight
- Endleaves
- The black-and-white end of working with a CMYK colour process
- Paper weight
- Mail Merge in Microsoft Word
- Sending bulk email and managing a mailing list.
These were all critical skills used in the process of producing this:
Introduction
Here I am. Another medium (Tumblr!), another time.
Baggage Claim is gonna be where I post small articles I’ve always wanted to write but never had the space for.
Just so you know — I’m “SuitCase”, a person who is now largely defined by my involvement in Bittersweet Candy Bowl, a webcomic made by the love of my life, “Taeshi”. I know people, I do and make things, and I study (previously, a BA in history and English, currently, a law degree.) But in online terms, BCB is where my head has been for the last 18 months, and it’s something I want to talk about.
I have good friends who find me amusing and interesting. I also have a lot of broken friendships and aborted acquaintances with internet people who think I am awful, narcissistic and irritating. At some point I should talk about that here, too. I strive to be honest, so you should get a better idea of me by the time I’ve written a few entries.
I hope my writing amuses and interests, regardless.
Theme adapted from Nightnight by Deddy.
