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Moose River book one, Third Printing, Test Copy One Ordered

September 6th, 2007

Lots of numbers there.

Ok, if you don’t know already, I’ve been looking into getting Moose River book one printed up using a print-on-demand service. However, seeing as I’ve never used a print-on-demand service before and that there are a few of them out there at my disposal, I’m not all together sure about which company does it best. I do, however, want to sort out which service is the best and stick with it.

Right now I’m in the process of getting test copies printed up from three print-on-demand services: Lulu, ComixPress and Ka-blam!. I haven’t gotten anything back from them yet, but I do have some little tidbits about them I’d like to share with you.

ALL SERVICES: These three print-on-demand services offer fairy competitive prices, with copies ranging between $5 and $7, depending on how many I order. With these prices, I’m able to chop down the price of the book from $10 to $8.

LULU: Today I spent gathering the pages for my book together and compiling them into a single PDF file (via Microsoft Word and Mac OS X’s standard PDF maker); that was a bit time consuming. However, Lulu has proven itself to be the easiest for me to setup. I do like how I have my own account page, and that once the “project” is complete, a unique “buy” page is set up for the project. From there I can buy a copy right away as well as share the URL with others (just as soon as I know the copy is good, that is). Furthermore, the site has a lot of information concerning book construction; almost every piece of information I needed to know is avaliable.

COMIXPRESS: I don’t like the idea of a set-up cost. And I don’t like the lack of an account that I can sign up on my own. You basically just send in files to them, and I presume they would set up an account for me afterwards. Fortunately I can use the .PDF file I created for Lulu (of the pages of the book), so that’s one less thing I need to worry about. The cover needs to be a seperate .PDF file, however I don’t have that set up yet. Actually I think there is a lack of precise information concerning cover construction (at least what information that is there doesn’t necessarily state “covers”), which in turn is stalling me. Hopefully all these minuses make for a great plus in the final result (and cost).

KA-BLAM: I don’t have to make a PDF file, which is good. All I have to do is just take the pages, make them .TIFF files, and ZIP them up. However, there is a lot of questions I have about their services which has almost little information on. In fact, the answers to the most obvious of questions (like “should I include the cover files in the same ZIP as the pages, or keep them seperate from the pages”) is nowhere to be found. Furthermore, the site gives me information about how to do one thing, but lacks any information for similar-yet-different things. It’s really tough to work out what to do. Hopefully these minuses also make for a great plus in the end, but I won’t be able to find out if I can’t get my questions answered!

Once I get test copies in from each service, I’ll give you a run down of what I think about the quality of the work. Hopefully this’ll prove informative to all you other comic folk considering one of these services. 😀

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Moose River
by Philippe Van Lieu
—Fully Charged - June 27th, 2019—

From the bottom of my heart (and the bottom of this page): thank you very much for reading my comics.

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