Alex Heberling

My Lulu bookstore is online.  I’ve spent the past two weeks or so preparing my material for printing, and at this point, almost my entire body of work is available for purchase.  It’s been rather satisfying seeing all of it laid out like this, and I’m glad I finally got this daunting task done.

My main concern with this method of publishing is the cost.  The downside to being a full-color graphic novelist is that printing costs go through the roof with a print-on-demand service like Lulu.  The entire first Volume of Garanos, with all 172 pages, is going to cost $40 just to print, so once I put in my markup and Lulu takes their cut, it’s probably going to be about $50, and I’ll get approximately eight dollars out of it.  I hope that my readers can understand that I’m making the prices as low as possible while still getting a few dollars from each copy for myself.

The main reason I’m doing this is for my final show, since my plan is to have printed copies of all my comics there for people to read.  I’d like to have a bookshelf of them, all set up, with possibly a table and laptop nearby so people can read them on the web, too.  It’s going to cost a pretty penny, since I’m buying multiple copies of everything, but it’ll be worth it.

According to my calculations, I’ve done about 550 pages in my webcomic career (Jigworthy to present) and almost half of those were done just in 2008.  That’s a hell of a lot of work, and I never thought to sit down and actually figure out the numbers, until I started readying the print files and realized, “Huh.  I’ve done a lot of comics.”

I’ll admit that after almost four years of doing webcomics, I thought I’d be a bit further along than where I am now, in terms of notariety.  However, one good thing about where I am now is that when I do get that big break, I’ll already have this massive body of work to show.  And now that my comics are print-ready, I can actually have more tangible things to show people when I go places like conventions, instead of a business card with a URL which will most likely get lost.  (Not that I’m still sore about Connecticon and the zero exposure all that networking got me or anything.  *laughs nervously*)