Archive for ‘Publishing’

80 items.

Cartoon and Comics Links: Wallace and Gromit and other cool stuff

by Colleen Doran on February 20th, 2012
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

At the UK Daily Mail, a look at Wallace and Gromit, with lots of cool schematic drawings and info on development. Also, creator Nick Park’s first animated video, created when he was only 13 years old.

Cartooning for a sustainable future at Columbia Journalism Review. Newspaper cartoonists face the grim reality that their business model is a goner.

Ted Rall discovers that one of his syndicated cartoons made a whopping 8 cents. This article is a bit depressing, and outside of the occasional crow-worthy kickstarter campaign, I’m really not sure what the future is for these folks. Some have modest luck with self syndication.

“I have a big web audience,” says Bors, “and a lot of my cartoons are incredibly popular. They fly around the web more than a lot of articles do, but for whatever reason, cartoons aren’t on the budget.”

Read it all.

Missed it. Valentine’s Day cards from days of yore. They weren’t very nice.

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CREATOR RIGHTS LINKS: Getting Paid, Getting Robbed

by Colleen Doran on October 11th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Money Management, Creator Resources, Publishing

I’m a bad blogger for not updating more frequently, so here’s a linkpalooza of cool things to read.

Boy do I need to clean out my bookmarks.

At the New York Times, “Begging for Your Pay”.

He waited on $31,000 through November 2009; by February, the company still owed him $20,000. Wisdom, who said he had had a perfect credit score until then, racked up over $20,000 in credit card debt, and his bank raised his interest rates to 30 percent. He was paying more than $500 a month in credit card interest, and withdrew from his retirement accounts to make ends meet.

I feel your pain, dude. It’s been over a year, and a producer still hasn’t forked over the dough.

China and Intellectual Property.

Bootleg copies of the “Dark Knight” and Shenzen sweatshops churning out fake Louis Vuitton bags are only part of the problem. Last March, the United States International Trade Commission banned imports of cast steel railway wheels made by the Chinese group Tianrui. Tianrui had hired nine employees from the Chinese licensee of Amsted Industries of Chicago, a maker of railway parts. They came with an armful of trade secrets that allowed Tianrui to muscle into the business.

What really happened to htmlcomics. You may recall I had a run-in with this scary dude, a convicted felon pirating comics, some time ago. He followed up my post several times with some vaguely threatening emails, odd complaints I had lied about his kindly cooperation with my request he stop pirating my work (read the link and decide for yourself,) and demands to remove anything I had ever said about him online, all of which I ignored. I did not publish any of his later emails, especially after learning what he did to this cop who pissed him off. That’s so not normal. I just handed the letters to my attorney.

He also made the odd claim that he had been released from “all charges”. Whatever charges he thinks they were, the real story is that he was sued by the federal government and had his servers and websites permanently shut down and forfeited. You can read all about it at Copyhype.

Copyhype’s article also lays to rest some of the online cheering from people who claim they had the dude shut down via their blog posts or something. The investigation began in 2009.

The case of htmlComics.com is, as far as I know, the first time a domain name has been forfeited under 18 USC § 2323(a) as property “used, or intended to be used, in any manner or part to commit or facilitate the commission of” criminal copyright infringement.

And while my bottom line has gone up considerably since I first wrote about the perils of digital book filching, I’m chalking that up to the many thousands I spent on advertising, having the website redone, and other rather expensive incentives, not to mention my ubiquitous web presence.

I’m also working with Image Comics to create A Distant Soil digital books. The first 14 issues of A Distant Soil were not published by Image, and they are undergoing a major cleanup operation. They also require new covers and will have some new content. They should be available soon, but this art is more than 20 years old, and digital files did not exist back in the day. We’re doing major restoration here.

I also hope you enjoy the online comic experience at my official website. It’s been fun bringing it to you.

Jaron Lanier declares “Web 2.0 is utterly pathetic.”

“Musicians and journalists are the canaries in the coalmine,” says Lanier, “but, eventually, as computers get more and more powerful, it will kill off all middle-class professions.”

At Plagiarism Today: “Why I don’t Fear Chilling Effects.” Chilling Effects sometimes posts the personal information of people who file takedown notices for copyright infringement online. I think that’s kind of creepy. Here’s another take on the matter.

First, the name Chilling Effects, to many copyright holders, sounds very accusatory. Though Chilling Effects “aims to support lawful online activity against the chill of unwarranted legal threats” it does so by being an impartial database of notices. Not every notice in Chilling Effects is “chilling” free speech in any way, in fact, the vast majority are not.

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POD: Print on Demand True Terror Tales

by Colleen Doran on August 12th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, copyright/trademark, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Legal, Creator Resources, Publishing

If you are a self publisher, or interested in just putting a few of your own books out there using a Print on Demand service, you must read this post.

Looking to avoid The Man? Want to go your own way and own the whole enchilada? When you sign on with a POD service, you’re just signing on with another The Man.

Some months ago, I posted this (very well trafficked) info on iUniverse and their business practices. If you have not already read it, you should. Here’s a sample:

iUniverse charges you $699 to tell booksellers they can return your book if it doesn’t sell.

Returnable books is standard in publishing, except for the comic book direct sale market. Why on earth anyone would charge you $699 for this service I cannot fathom.

Except they want to make a buck from your ignorance.

First off, you guys gotta realize that once booksellers see your book coming from iUniverse, they know it is self published and are far less likely to stock it. Booksellers know Vanity Press when they see it. OK? Let’s just get that out of the way right now.

Scour the shelves of any retail bookstore outside the direct market, and I defy you to find five copies of anything self published. I’m not saying it never happens, I am saying it is sort of like, I dunno, having a meteor hit your house.

Now author Tracy L. Darity has posted an extremely important overview of the Print on Demand service and their biggest scam: outsourcing work, allowing other printers to handle your book. With no payments to you. Especially if the printer is selling the book as “used”.

Read the whole thing.

Although the on-line agreement has a clause indicating they can allow any third party to assist with fulfillment, the truth is only books I order are fulfilled by them. It appears all other orders i.e. a physical bookstore or on-line seller; the book is most likely printed by a third party source. It is then up to that TPS to notify the POD that they have generated a book. There are two huge problems with this arrangement: 1) if the company printing the book never notifies the original POD, the author will never get paid because there are no checks and balances currently in place to track the activity. 2) The printer, at their discretion, can alter the format of the book. By alter, they can change the physical size, reduce the font size, use a poorer quality paper, or choose not to coat the cover.

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Creator Advice Links

by Colleen Doran on July 27th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Creator Resources, Publishing

At Book Country, “Six Ways to Make Sure You Don’t Cripple Your Chance at Getting Published”

And the mistake I always make:

Likewise, it’s dangerous to work on multiple projects. Completing a single book can take years. Try to write three at once, odds are you’ll finish none.

How to Sharpen Your Pitch:

In each case, we know who the hero is and what their quest is. You have not only told the agent what your book is about, you have engaged him or her emotionally in the action. Do that, and your pitch will be a winner.


Tools to Avoid Getting Overwhelmed by Twitter. And I’ve been on it only a few days, so yeah.

Tangentially related: JK Rowling dumps her agent.

‘Chris is distraught and desperately trying to work out what went wrong. He has been with her from the beginning and now feels betrayed and abandoned at a time when his health has not been very good. He just doesn’t know how it has come to this.’

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Harlan Ellison NEW BOOK “BRAIN MOVIES”!!! With J Michael Straczynski

by Colleen Doran on July 6th, 2011
Posted In: Blog, Creator Resources, Culture, Creator Resources, Education, Culture, Film and Television, Creator Resources, Publishing

Reprinted with permission from J Michael Straczynski’s fan page.

I don’t have to tell you who Harlan Ellison is, or that he wrote some of the most seminal episodes of science fiction television in the history of the form. His scripts for The Outer Limits, Star Trek, Twilight Zone and others have won countless awards and are considered landmarks of the genre.

A while back, I got wind of a top-secret project being developed by Publishing 180, the company that publishes the Babylon 5 script books, involving Harlan’s scripts for these series. (Important note: I do not own any part of P180 nor do I receive any financial remuneration of any kind from this project. My involvement here is strictly as a fan and admirer.) I now hold in my hand a preliminary copy of that book, and I wanted to give everyone a heads-up because folks, this is a doozy.

The book, entitled BRAIN MOVIES, contains Harlan’s scripts for “Soldier,” and “Demon With a Glass Hand” from THE OUTER LIMITS, “Paladin of the Lost Hour” and “Crazy as a Soup Sandwich” from the TWILIGHT ZONE, “Memo from Purgatory” from ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, “The Face of Helen Bournouw” and Harlan’s near-legendary manifesto on how to write good science fiction, written exclusively for incoming writers on BABYLON 5. (The scripts for Paladin and Demon received the prestigious Writers Guild Award.)

In many cases, the book contains both the script and the treatment for the script, something almost never seen outside the studio. Most amazing of all, the book contains not just the shooting script for Harlan’s HITCHCOCK episode, it contains an earlier draft filled with his handwritten annotations and changes.

When an episode is broadcast, you don’t get to see the writer’s mind at work, don’t have the opportunity to experience the moment he decided to make a line of dialogue or a scene go thisway instead of thatway, how a turn of phrase was altered in just the right way at the last moment, you see only the end product. By including the draft with the handwritten annotations, you can see the creative process being enacted right before your eyes. The opportunity to see inside the writer’s mind is unspeakably rare.

Best of all, these are not re-typeset versions of the script, they are painstakingly scanned reproductions of the ORIGINAL SCRIPTS, exactly as they were written.

And for the budding science fiction writers out there, what better than having Harlan Ellison break down in his manifesto how to write effectively in the genre, how to avoid various kinds of traps and make your writing better?

The value of this book to up-and-coming writers, academics, collectors, fans, and just plain folks who love science fiction television is inestimable. This isn’t just a book of scripts, it’s an important piece of history.

When I heard that Harlan was going to include the B5 manifesto (entitled “A Terrifying List of Things Not to Do When Writing For Babylon 5”), I offered to write an introduction to the volume, entitled “Touching Magic.” That introduction is now also in the book.

Last, and maybe coolest of all, because of the presence of B5 material, they are doing a limited number of books that are DUAL AUTOGRAPHED by both myself and Harlan. With only one prior exception, this is the ONLY time that Harlan and I have autographed something together, and never before for a published book. Once those signed editions are gone…they’re gone.

Because Publishing 180 is a boutique publisher, they do not generally release information on its upcoming titles until right before publication. But this volume is so important, so extraordinary, that I asked if I could give the B5 fans out there, and the fans of Harlan Ellison who are also in that group, a heads-up on this event. This way we reduce the risk of missing the chance to get one of the double-signed editions.

The book will go on sale in a couple of weeks – I think it’s somewhere around the 20th and those already on the B5 mailing list will get the announcement automatically – but I’ll be sure to post the info here the second it goes online. If you want to be sure not to miss it, a signup page will be up soon at www.harlanbooks.com

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