Alternating Reality Books

Dead Tree Comics, Alternating Realities imprinter web site is coming along nicely. We have added a cover browser and have started working with some of the copyright expired comics. So far, we have posted “The origins of the fighting yank” and started posting “All Romances Number 2”. Our cover browser is just getting started and still working out if it is a good idea to use local hosting, or remote hosting for what is going to end up being Gigabytes of Covers.

We have also posted our first comic into Amazon’s DTP; we used All Romances Number 2, with four thrilling soap opera style vignettes about life, love, and the American Way as seen in 1949. What is interesting is that using Word as the base to hold the scans together is actually working really well. Some of the recent changes to DTP (Digital Translation Process) has really come together so that people who are doing comics as a Kindle readable system are doing good. The problem now is more one of dealing with the black and white screen, color comics need to be heavily contrasted to show up well in Kindle.

We are still looking for people that we can eprint their comic books for them, but have worked out the final remaining bugs thanks to Amazon in dealing with comics, the kindle, and DTP. We should be posting more titles into the system as soon as we work out what is and what is not controlled by copyright. That is going to be the major stumbling block at this point, as we are not looking for a lawsuit. That is probably what is going to be a chilling effect across the board, it is impossible to find some of these artists, so we are turning away from anything that might even potentially lead to a lawsuit. Rather we are working with what we think is free and clear, or we can get a valid license for. The other interesting part is just how uninformed some artists are about what works and what does not work when trying to sell an ebook on many platforms.

My thoughts on this are that artists need to be aware of many of the costs involved in putting an ebook on the market. While they might not be interested, they need to know these things so that they can negotiate a better deal. It is like knowing your hourly charge rate as a consultant anywhere, if you know the costs involved you can work out a much better deal with the publisher. Over the next couple of months I will be talking about what the real costs are to publishing an ebook, and how pricing breaks out across the systems so that people can be better informed as to what is a fair deal, what is a great deal, and where an artist might be taken to the cleaners.

We hope this will help.

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