In The Curly Head Ballet, Natasha finds herself in a village of fairy spirits where she learns to dance. The Curly Head Ballet is a 32 page original story told in comic book format printed and hand bound as a first edition printing of 24 copies.
Fresh off of the desktop, this year’s collection of cartoons is live and available as a PDF digital download with 89 cartoons across 52 high resolution pages.
We are suddenly realizing it’s time, it’s time to come to end of things, again: the end of December and the end of the year, the end of accounting and the time when we need to assemble all those scraps and collate things into some kind of order.
So as far as Londontlife is concerned, that means a new book collecting the year’s cartoon highlights. We push ahead because history is important, even as we still have a thorough backstock of the previous years books. Guess what. We haven’t died yet and we don’t have a small local distribution spot. Such a spot should be on our to-do list. So, I guess we are soliciting ideas then.
Not where we intended this entry to go, but, the gravy train of thought does.
Anyway we will forge ahead to put together a new real book on paper collection digital file aimed toward print, and consider if we should just go digital for sales and distribution. BTW digital downloads are available at the bookstore for previous years books.
It is beginning to look like it’s going to be easier – and a bit more straightforward – to have one store at Society6. It will feature basically prints and mugs. We would love to put up various prints of the Londontlife cartoons, but feel they won’t always have a universal appeal. The Londontlife material is fairly siloed so we will put up some selections and will see how it goes interest-wise.
We won’t be at London Comic this year. Some registration mixup had delayed our registration until any available tables were sold out. Doug’s prints sold well enough last year.
The Society6 store https://society6.com/dougrogers hosts a bunch of things. https://society6.com/art/london-tree-cuts is the direct link to Tree Cuts.
Looks like I have three stores going. Two Society6 and one here at WordPress with Woo. There’s Instagram and Facebook integration for a few items. Square seems to be the most useful for in-person selling-a-thing using that little plastic doohickey. WordPress and Woo like Stripe.
For a time back there, I couldn’t access the previous Society6 store so set up a second Society6 store. There’s just no way to merge them. I think I’ll press ahead focusing one of those Society6 stores as samupress/LondOntLife focused -images and prints- with the other as personal work.
Managing the inventory at Square – to use the in-person plastic box payment system is a PITA. Once setup though it feeds the Woo inventory and Instagram/Facebook access. Don’t naively, not-understandingly, what-does-this-do click anything though. Usually takes me about three days work pulling my hair and screaming to get it straight. Inventory management at Woo is comparatively vastly less intricate, less complicated and just plain easy.
The Insta/Fb shop system despises digital downloads, so only allows ‘real’ product. Meantime, the store for LondOntLife setup with Woo at WordPress holds the real world paper printed books of cartoons and digital versions of the books. Those digital downloads are hosted at my iCloud space.
I think often of getting free from Jack and Melon. Does Stripe handle mobile locations? Seemingly, nope. I’ll be gladly corrected. Does Insta/FB talk to Woo Inventory? Seemingly, nope. I’ll gladly be corrected.
It’s a Londontlife#6 is at the printers for proofs. It’s always exciting for the new book to come out. And this one is packed with 83 cartoons – a record – over 52 5×7 inch pages. Yes, I should be thinking in metric. I am that old.
And Tingfest is on again! It’s been three years! It’s always exiting when the next Tingfest comes around. So books 3, 4, and 5 will also see their debut.
Distribution: The advice is “Go wide not deep” even as the audience for LondOntLife is siloed, localized to London Ontario
I want, simply, to draw the cartoon and share it. Managing all this is a drag.
The distribution from Twitter is the heart of this question.
Twitter is my “open”, “free”, “accessible” distribution platform. Twitter was the easiest way to do this. Anyone could pick that up and share it again. Twitter has this “What’s Happening” periodic email of Tweets. We haven’t noticed any trouble with the Twitter feed at the moment. No loss of follows though more DM’s from pretty young women who want to be my friend. We haven’t noticed anything awful coming our way, but the whole thing is unstable right now. We won’t be buying any blue ticks, and Musky doesn’t need my money. We recognize you may choose to not continue there. Or anywhere.
I have the blog at WordPress and a store for the books. The site registration costs money, but that isn’t the issue. There is a Mail subscription option where the blog post is sent to your personal email. I don’t need or want to collect a googolplex of email addresses for any reason. I could go back to posting each cartoon as a single blog post at WordPress and it can then be shared to Twitter and Facebook.
Verifying the blog as source will post from WordPress to Mastodon. The question for Mastodon is audience and at focusing the account to redistributing the cartoons. Possible? The blog is on the web. I see this as an unfair burden on Mastodon but we haven’t figured everything out out there.
The RSS feed. You need a Feed Reader app. We are trying out NetNewsWire on IOS. It’s free. What is posted to the blog goes to the RSS feed. A copy of the blog post gets fed to Facebook or Flipboard. The same as what would go to Mastodon or Tumblr.
Instagram can’t share to others. It works as a destination, but not a transit station. The blog can’t share directly to Insta. I can share a Tweet or a Flipboard flip though, in IOS sharing. Tedious :-) and always delayed.
Facebook as above. It is hard to move anything outside the garden, but internal sharing does happen. The Facebook page is posts from the Instagram and things from the blog.
From page 21 of It’s a Londontlife #2. We lost a lot of work somehow in a failed backup crash power outage disaster. I don’t know. Work from 2018 and 2019 was amongst that. Anyway. This was Drug Frod’s first use of the Not Withstanding to dismantle the Toronto city council. Horribly prescient.
Check out Ghosts of Election Past where we gathered a few highlights from 2018.
Not that we intended it at all, and it seems a bit of a promotion for that book #2 of cartoons. Turns out a lot of lost documents not recovered washed up on a desert island.
Samupress will be at table 25a in Artisans Alley Sept 17 and 18 2022 with 3 years of new LondOntLife cartoon books and prints. Doug will have some art and cat cartoon books.
