Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Perserverance might be the key

It doesn't look like I'll have my dentures in time for Thanksgiving since they got delayed in fitting them so they work wasn't finished. It's a shame for the turkey, but at least I still can eat the stuffing, mashed taters and rice. At least they are making progress on them and seem to be going out of the way to be certain they will fit right when they are done that's the main thing.

I was watching a DVD from Disney about what happens to Aurora (The Princess formerly known as Sleeping Beauty) and Princess Jasmine and both stories were about perserverance and how important sticking to it until the goal is reached.



It did somewhat inspire me to keep on with my portfolio and I did make some more progress on it but I didn't get it all together yet. I have found some new vitamins that seem to help me focus better so hopefully I'll be able to make more progress on it now

Monday, November 05, 2007

I was hoping to have another place to publish my books

I was reading on HappySlip's blog the other day about how she's going to be selling her videos on DVD from a site called CreateSpace and it sounded like a good idea for me to try so I checked it out.

The good part is that they have no set up fees and they price things like Cafe Press where they set the manufacturing costs and let you set you price above that for your profit. They are owned by Amazon.com so they have a big market to distribute to since that website gets a lot of traffic and if I can get my stuff on there I might have a better chance of selling my stuff.





If I able to put the whole story on DVD with a lot higher quality video than is possible with Revver it would be understood better and I'd be getting paid up front for the DVD instead of trickles from advertising.





It does mean that I would have to work on how to design then DVD, but I got some DVD authoring programs and I can do some cover art for them. Since it's harder to follow spread out on my blog like this, I made another The Writer's Nightmare: Revver Version that has only 3 episodes per page so it's easier to load but still easy to keep the episodes in order





I put a version that has the YouTube version of The Complete Writer's Nighmare Animations that has better music and is all in one page from beginning to end with links to both in the Personal Links on the side of this page.





So it might be a better deal to DVD on that site with some work to get the files ready and burned on a Master DVD then design the art work for the cover and disc but it might be worth it.

They also do book publishing with some better options than Cafe Press in that they off more sizes and they also do color pages with would be better for graphic novels and they'll give you a free ISBN code to be able to sell it more widely. Also Amazon is a very popular site for books so I'd been getting a lot better chance of it being bought by more people.





The drawbacks are that it only allows 100 pages in color pages and they make you pay for a proof copy before they'll approve it for sale. That's somewhat like vanity publishing and somewhat like agressive quality control. While I think being able to check a proof copy is a good idea since it means less mistakes being made, I don't like the idea of being forced to buy a copy before they'll be able to sell it.





I was going to revise my graphic novel since the begining was to low resolution and I'd made a lot of changes in the way I represented Cyan's character in the animation so condensing it to 100 pages wouldn't be such a big deal. But since AFAIK they don't accept PayPal or money orders for CreateSpace it's not going to be that easy to be able to order a proof copy. It might also be a good idea to try it out on a more traditional novel that has more text than graphics like "An Angel's Destiny"