Books, books ... hmm ... books (drools)
Lately people have been urging us to publish Chasing the Sunset in bookform. Of course, this is one of the many secret dreams of most webcartoonist (others include universal domination and super powers - we are, if anything, not limited by mundane things like reality).
Of course, knowing our megalomanic tendencies it will come as no surprise that Alien and I have been considering a book for some time, most recently in the form of On Demand Printed Issues. Unfortunately there's always ... issues.
These issues are usually regarding price. Printing on a small scale tends to have rather nasty costs associated with it. On top of that, chasing the sunset is for the largest part a full colour work, comprising over 340 comics. Even at 2 strips per page (a format the strip dimensions lean towards anyway) that comes up to a minimum of 170 full colour pages.
Taking the on demand printing given above (and presuming a print run of 20), you'd get:
Issue 1: First 23 strips, Black and White: $2.48
Issue 2-4: Next 300 strips, Full color: $4.55 each
Or a grand total of $16.13 pure printing cost for 323 strips. Add to that shipping ($6-$10 in the US) and you get a minimum price of $24 or so (and that's without us earning anything) and that's a best case scenario.
Leaving aside financials, there's other issues at play. Chasing the sunset is very much an ongoing story, but if we publish to book form, we'd need some sort of "whole", something that can stand on its own. Where would we make the cut about what can be in and what not? I don't know.
(Also, it is a lot of work. A lot of the earlier strips are simply not fit to be printed. We only have them at screen resolution and they would all have to be completely remastered, in some cases from near-scratch. But that's just work, we can handle that.)
Going back to the kablam thing .... we're not sure that's what we want. We are looking into it currently because it's something we can have and when you have a relatively small audience what is possible needs to take presedence over what is desired. Still if we had a choice (I have not discussed this with Alien, but I'm pretty sure she's of like mind) then what I'd really like would be this:
A book. At least two-hundred double-sided full colour pages bound in a hard cover. Two strips to a page intersperced with stories, background information, pixie distractions, the lot. It should have one of those ribbon bookmarks (or better yet, several, in many colours) and the cover should resemble those of books you'd meet in fantasy.
It would be a book of dreams. Ours.
But that's unlikely to ever happen, the price to produce it in small numbers would be too high and we'll never get enough readers to produce it en masse (we'd need at least 200000 I think)
Still .. we're slowly accumulating readers ... maybe one day we can at last publish something ...
Comments
AND, you could smaller books (paperbacks) for those who can't afford the hardcover, or who don't want one... (that would baffle me though).
Oh, and you're 16.xx for 300 stripes - that's nothing. Other webcomics have done somewhere around that many strips for a little more money so they could make a small profit too, and I've bought some. Yours would be one I would buy. :D
but i think that sales would be less if anyone could read it on this web site.
unless you put in some extra frames in it
(i know this whole thing is compleatly blastfomous)
so never mind keep doing what your doing cuz its great!
Books are definitely good! Definitely.
But, 200.000 readers? Seriously? What are the costs if you would print, like, only 20 times the whole series Volumes, books, i don't care, as long as i have the full series (autographed by both authors obviously :-) )