News

Good news! You can now buy both Vögelein books at Comixology. These have been in the works for about a year now, and I’m really excied to have them available. If you’ve never tried Comixology’s “assisted view” reading format, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s pretty neat, and adds a subtle dynamism to digital reading. Thanks, Comixology!

On the scale of things that can happen to self-publishers, having one of your print runs sell out definitely ranks far over to the “good” end. However, the cost of offset printing is on the rise, and it took me seven years to sell through my initial run of Old Ghosts, so I wasn’t enthused at the prospect of spending several thousand dollars just to house another 6-foot cube of books in our basement for a considerable length of time. The alternative was to let Old Ghosts go out of print, but I have over a thousand copies of Clockwork Faerie left, so that didn’t make good economic sense, either.

Instead, I decided to do a test run of a print-on-demand version, to get an idea of cost and quality. I went with Edwards Brothers Malloy because of their excellent job on my last two offset print runs, and the fact that I could save on shipping by driving to Ann Arbor to pick them up.

I used the exact same InDesign files for the POD edition as I did for the 2007 offset run, but I took the time to update the endnotes and a few minor things in the indicia. The minimum run was 20 books, and the price per unit was reasonable, around $7 per book. Unfortunately this didn’t make them profitable for me to sell through a distributor like Diamond, who takes 60% of the cover price ($12.95 X 40% = $5.18) but if I increased the run to 250, the price came down to around $4 per book — just enough to make them saleable.

The books were finished in about six weeks, which is longer than I expected, but still not a bad turnaround time. I was very eager to see the quality of the final product — my previous attempts at POD had been iffy at best — for a long time, even the best POD books were little better than glorified photocopies with sketchy bindings.

I brought the box over to a friend’s house, and the two of us did the unboxing together. The results were very impressive! Here are a few photos to give you an idea (in each of the pictures, the books on the left are from the original offset run, and the ones on the right are the new print on demand versions):

The color on the cover is a bit different — slightly cooler than the offset printing — but of the same high quality, and the aqueous coating is the same. The inside of the front cover on the POD version has a slicker finish, and the stock feels a hair lighter, but it’s not flimsy or insubstantial. As you can see from the second picture, the POD version is a tiny bit thinner than the offset version, somewhere around 1/16th – 1/32 of an inch. I don’t consider this a huge issue, as the paper is still of a heavy enough weight that the text and images don’t show through from one page to another.

The binding also appears quite strong and durable; I repeatedly flexed the spine on one of the copies and the glue seems solid; I don’t foresee this edition having any trouble standing up to repeated readings.

The interior was what really had me worried — but it also turned out to be the most impressive part of this edition. It’s a shade darker than the offset version, yet it isn’t muddy. The blacks are crisp and the greyscale well-rendered, something quite difficult to do, and not at all what I expected from a print on demand edition. You can see a side-by-side comparison in the fourth picture.

In summary, I’m very, very impressed with the work that Edwards Brothers Malloy did on the new edition of Old Ghosts. It’s exciting to know that I can keep it in print at an affordable price, and still produce an quality product. If you want to make a short run of prose books or black-and-white graphic novels, give EBM a try. I wasn’t paid to make this endorsement — I’m just a satisfied customer.