Amidst the chaos of getting my comic book ready for publication, we're going to visit my family in Georgia. We were supposed to go right after Xmas, but my brother busted up his foot snowboarding (he lives in Colorado), so we postponed it until this Friday.
I have to admit that I'm pretty confused with the submission process for getting distribution for my book, so I'm really glad to be meeting up with Chris Staros from Top Shelf Comics in Georgia. Even if they don't want to sub-distribute (saving me a lot of hassle), I'm sure he can point me in the right direction.
It seems that you are supposed to send out lots of review copies way before your book is supposed to come out. Plus, you are supposed to send a submissions package to Diamond (the big distributor in comics) many months before the book drops so that they can advertise and collect orders from retail shops before the publication date.
The catch-22 here is that you don't have any books printed yet, so how are you supposed to send them out for review?? I printed up some black & white mock-ups at Kinkos (well, actually Kinko's pissed me off, so I printed them at Staples), but they ended up costing me about $9 per book since they had to be trimmed & stapled! I didn't know it would cost that much until they'd already done it, unfortunately (would've done it myself). I'm going to use these mock-ups as a guide for the printer, to send to a few companies in hopes of getting sub-distribution (if Top Shelf isn't interested), and to send out to a couple of cartoonists that might give me some quotes for my press release.
I feel stressed about being away from this project for a week, but I suppose I can try to write my press release and do more research on what the hell I'm supposed to be doing. I'm reading Dan Poynter's Self Publishing Manual, which is helpful but geared to non-fiction writers rather than comics publishers.
We may be leaving our Chihuahua (Pony) with his grandma while we're gone. This tidbit of information was just a flimsy excuse to post an amazing photo of him. Enjoy!
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