Everybody knows that Keenspot comics have a lot of advertising force behind them because Keenspot Entertainment does all the work for them. They get promoted at cons and they have a lot of good press. Keenspace on the other hand does not. What we have is a lot of people doing the same things (drawing, writing, sometimes coloring and most of the time desperately wanting attention). This got me thinking.
Would anyone like to contribute to an advertising comic for Keenspacers?
The comic would NOT be printed or distributed. It would be posted on a Keenspace site as a high-resolution PDF download that could be printed and distributed at will by any Keenspacer. If possible, it would require a siteadmin style login to start the download so we knew the person downloading was a spacer.
Keenspacers can be found around the world. This would mean free, international distribution for the comic and international advertising, not to mention con presence for anyone with a page in the book. This wouldn't have to be a one-shot deal either. It could be put out monthly (or seasonally or yearly) with new comics appearing in each issue. We could even hold competitions for the cover art.
- Problems:
- The PDF would be somewhere around 250-600 megs so it would only be available to spacers with a high-speed internet connection. Since most spacers attend a university of some kind, this might be less of a problem than it seems.
- There would be no guarentees of quality. One spacer could print the comic on a color laserjet. The next might print it on an ink jet then photocopy it.
- We would need some kind of contract to state that the each page is copyright the particular artist and the artist has agreed to allow the page to be copied for purposes of this comic.
- The spacer doing the printing would be allowed to sell the comic to recover the printing costs. (Meaning the comic would be a commercial work, even though there is no single entity publishing it.) A Creative Commons license would be fitting.
- The contract could specify some minimum print quality standards.
- The site these PDFs would be stored on may require hosting costs (if Keenspace would not allow a 600 meg PDF to be hosted which is probable). How would those be resolved?
- Some kind of logging script would be needed to keep track of user information and who downloaded which file and to what region(s) of the world. That way somebody complains about a screwed up print job, we know who to blame. 8) This is nearly trivial to write but we would need admin permission to host this type of script on Keenspace.
- Inclusion standards: pages would need to follow some very specific formatting rules in order to be considered for inclusion. These rules would have to be decided upon, but truthfully, we could just use ComixPress's Technical requirements or Dreamweaver Press's Submission standards
As for hosting, given that the admins do not like MP3s and AVIs being hosted on Keenspace, it's probable that we would need some paid hosting to do this. Warren has offered in the past to host sites like the Saint Louis Cookout, but hosting huge PDFs would be an entirely different monster.
- For the mini-comic I was thinking:
- 30 pages maximum per issue.
- The mini-comic must be printable on 8.5x11 or A4. Pages will be laid out as a spread before printing so your comic will be compressed to have a sheet of A4/8.5x11.
- 600 dpi B&W pages. 300 dpi CMYK color pages. Remember to include a 6mm/.25in border around your pages so nothing gets cut off (unless that's what you want).
- Anyone who meets the submission requirements would be included, even if it took multiple issues to do it.
- Submissions would be handled on a first-come-first-served basis.
- You wouldn't have to pay anything to submit a page.
- One page per artist per deadline. This means if there are 60 submissions, two books will be printed but one artist can only have one page in one book.
- All submissions must include the artist's copyright information, the creative commons notice and the URL for your Keenspace site.
- The site will include:
- User login and logging of which files were downloaded to which user.
- An info page that says "I printed this many comics and distributed them at this location." That way we can get a reasonable idea of the kind of distribution each comic gets.
- Printing instructions, recommendations for the type of printer and how to bind the comic.
- Of course, the PDFs and how they get made so anyone with a reasonably powerful computer could do it if they wanted to.
- If necessary, the PDFs could be burned onto CD and snail-mailed but that would require a paypal button to recover shipping and materials costs for whoever did the burning. Again, this is not a big deal.
Would you print 5-10 copies of these books and take them to a con with you?
If I am insane, please tell me why because that info would be useful to have in the future. I can understand copyright concerns and people not having or being able to produce print quality pages.
I would like to get some feedback from anyone who has done this type of work in the past.
I would also like some feedback from the admins about whether this is feasible on Keenspace.
The way I see it. If you don't have people working to provide services for you, the best way to go about it is to provide the services for yourself. If enough of us are willing to do that then we become the company. The rest handles itself.
(( Made Sticky by STrRedWolf ))
That doesn't happen in the book publishing industry...you gotta learn to look out for yourself and maybe if you're really lucky you get your hands on an agent and a publicist who can help you the first time around.
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