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This modern age of ours has seen the dream of self-publishing become a plausible reality for more people than ever before. What’s been an interesting process for me this year is the discovery that “self-publishing” can represent offerings on several different levels, with varying degrees of complexity.
Well, okay, using the word discovery would imply I was blindsided, and that’s not true. I knew that the process of putting together a trade paperback collection was going to be more complicated than our previous runs of individual issues, which in turn were more complicated than printing books at home or uploading images as a webcomic. I’m very glad we didn’t start out trying to do a big graphic novel and instead opted for a slow escalation of offerings. Right now you can click back to our first episode and see that–although I’ve been gratifyingly told by many people that they didn’t and don’t mind–the lettering is a bit of a train wreck. We didn’t even settle on a unified font for our dialogue until we were already several pages in, and there are probably people out there who took one look at that and left grumbling at another product of rank amateurs shitting up the Internet.
Thankfully there were enough people who didn’t leave that we felt encouraged to keep going, and keep learning, until finally we reached 2015. The Year of Our Kickstarter. And because that Kickstarter succeeded, it is the year of Zombie Ranch: A Tale of a Weird New West, Volume 1. We are published.
But we were published before, weren’t we? Technically speaking, every time we update this website with a comic, we’re considered to be publishing it and a de facto copyright is established. Every print issue we’ve put out, even the cheapo preview comics we made for Long Beach Comic-Con 2009, represented a publication and establishment of a copyright as our particular expression of ideas and concepts were committed to “fixed form”.
All of this is true, and yet there is a whole new layer of complexity that you can dive into once you’re trying to move on to what marketers love to term “the next level”. One thing we never had on any of our home printed or print-on-demand issues, for example, was an ISBN: The International Standard Book Number. This is that number and accompanying bar code you see on books (including comic books) being sold at stores or, say, on Amazon. In the U.S. they are sold and issued by exactly one company–Bowker–and though they used to be much cheaper, the modern age of self-publishing has ballooned the price considerably, starting at $125 for a single number. You can print a comic up yourself or have someone print it for you, but without an ISBN it exists outside of the usual distribution channels and might in some eyes be said to not exist at all.
Urf, I need to back up a bit. I think this post might end up even more disjointed than my usual blathering, but… so… we’re published and available, right now, on Amazon.com, by virtue of having finally gotten our book approved by Create Space. To be entirely honest, that “publication” happened on August 15th, but we haven’t been trumpeting that to the heavens just yet because there were other things happening, like our Kickstarter printing run (not through Create Space) which I sent the final files off for on August 8th. That run hasn’t finished yet, but we just recently got a small early order that I could use to, among other things, mail copies off to Washington, D.C. for a formal copyright registration above and beyond the de facto one — also a first for us. I applied and paid for that registration electronically on August 22nd, but the copyright office does not count that until it receives all necessary materials. Said materials should have been received by them as of Monday, but their dang system has been offline since the weekend so I can’t verify that yet. It probably doesn’t matter all that much considering I won’t even get the certificate back for several months.
Confused yet? Yeah, riddle me this. Was the Zombie Ranch TPB published on August 8th? August 15th? August 22nd? August 31st? None of the above? Hell, I purchased the ISBN way back in June, but all that does is reserve a number until I populated it with publication information, which I couldn’t finalize until the book was actually ready for print. And then, hey, it takes a few days before the information you enter is accessible on a database search.
Professional publishing houses probably have the kinks of all this worked out, but then again maybe now I know why most copyright notices in books only list a year.
Anyhow, in the end it’s all worked out. I think. We should soon have the Zombie Ranch trade registered and duly ensconced in the hallowed archives of the Library of Congress, which is kind of cool to think about. We have a searchable ISBN, and international distribution on Amazon even if and when our Kickstarter print run runs out. Makes me feel like a real boy, you know?
I also mailed off a copy of the trade to the Small Press application jury for San Diego Comic-Con next year. We’ll see if they agree.