However — in case you missed it — things have changed in the last decade. The print book market has been becoming less viable, and the digital becoming more so. Also the e-book reading experience is becoming more and more comparable to the print one. At a personal level, I’m reading as much on my phone as I am on the page.

So: I’ve decided to charge something for them now. But how much?

That’s up to you. Whatever you think is fair and whatever you’re happy to pay. If you’re looking for examples, read on.

• No stable income and are a bit hesitant to buy anything, but think you would give my writing a try if — say — you found it for cheap at a garage sale? Chuck in a buck or two.
• Read a book of mine already and think you’ll like another? Maybe a $5-10 donation depending on if you have a day job.
• If you like the DIY articles on the site, want to support the approach I have to creative work, or even previous writing I’ve done — $10-20? People who donate in this range will get a free lo-fi sci-fi DVD!
• And I won’t turn away $20 or more, though I will offer to mail you a No Media Kings t-shirt for your support.

Click the donate button on the book you want on the sidebar. Go with your gut — don’t get hung up on how much exactly, you can always come back and donate more if the book changes your life or something.

I’m hoping this will be a way for people to express their support, rather than an onerous paywall. For people who are put off, there’s always the library, or you could poke around on the web (even on this site) for places that’ll continue to give it away for free.

Prose Book Formats: EPUB, MOBI, PDF, RTF. Comics: PDF, CBZ, CBR.

When you donate, indicate the format you want. If there’s a format not listed above leave a comment below with your email and I’ll see about generating it. It’s all DRM free so you’re able to pass it around to friends.

UPDATE: Now available on Amazon, if that’s easier for you Kindlers, though for a static price.

Wheels is a smart and whimsical cyclist alternate reality written by Sarah A. Chrisman, who not only handmakes her books but also a selection of hats you can wear while reading them. Lovely!

Tongues is a baroque masterpiece. The worldbuilding is as dense and rich as China Miéville’s, and the cowboy sex smells of Jean Genet’s forbidden machismo. The fact that this outlaw confabulation has come from a debut novelist from Toronto and a Toronto publisher of excellent weird spec-fiction just makes me extra-excited.

I don’t want to give away too many details, but it’s set in Detroit, involves one of the Four Horsemen, and the first 22 pages should be debuting at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May 2009.

That video (part of my Pleasure Circuit Overload series of vids about videogames) has gotten a ridonkulous amount of attention for what it is and it seems to keeps bumbling into places it doesn’t belong. (CTheory? The New York Times? Whaa…?)

But just so my head doesn’t inflate too much — I didn’t win the Shuster award for best comics writing I was nominated for last week. My new pal Cecil Castellucci won it for her excellent P.L.A.I.N. Janes graphic novel about a clique of nerdy girls transforming their town with art-terrorism.

Undeterred, I’m diving into researching and writing a new comics project, Time Management for Anarchists: The Comic. Which is gonna be drawn by Marc Ngui, the genius behind the My Trip avatar skins (pictured below).

It seems random, but everything in my life connects if you have enough time and graph paper to map it out.

Top: Canadian Tourist skin. Middle: Attack Mime skin. Bottom: Street Priest skin. Created by Marc Ngui for My Trip to Liberty City.

Doing market stalls probably won’t make you rich or sell a truckload of books. Our best market day ever made about $750, mostly we make a lot less than that. Beer money, really. But even if you don’t sell a lot you’re still spreading the word and marketing your product, which is important in the long run. We learned what kind of markets work for our particular books and what sorts of places just don’t. The only way you can figure this out for yourself is by getting out there and trying different markets. Here’s some tips for running a successful market stall.

• Get the word out. Help promote the market or zine fair and let potential customers know you will be running a stall. You can do this by your email list, posting it to your blog or making an event on myspace/facebook. The more people who know what’s happening the busier the event will be.
• Make your table pretty. We have a tablecloth and spent a few bucks at the Reject Shop buying plate holders to display our books. Take a look at the table from the front when it’s set up to make sure it looks appealing to passers-by. Keep tidying your table so it looks neat all day. Free cookies or lollies will draw people to your table.
• Be friendly. You have a better chance of selling stuff if you engage with the people who stop at your stall. Start a conversation, ask a question or make a comment about a particular item that they are looking at. This was quite hard for Locus at first because we’re not super-salesy people, but after a few goes we got much better at doing it and now it comes naturally.
• Keep starting conversations. At a non-book market or zine fair, people often won’t even stop to look at your table; books aren’t for everyone. This is when initiating a conversation is really important, because once they know that the books you have are recipe books or graphic novels or a literary magazine, they might remember that they have a niece’s birthday coming up and she’s into that sort of thing.
• Have one or two lines ready to describe your stuff when someone asks ‘what’s this?’. This can be surprisingly tough but after a while you get a feel for what works and what doesn’t. For example, with one of aduki’s books, Stick This In Your Memory Hole, we mention the cultural commentary aspect of it rather than drop the P-bomb (politics); with Mini Shots it works best to open by saying it’s a new concept magazine series rather than that it’s a short story magazine.
• Encourage people to pick up your books and flick through them. Again, something might catch their eye. If they buy, give them a fresh copy that hasn’t been thumbed through by a hundred people.
• Offer a discount. We sell all our stuff cheaper than retail price at markets and zine fairs. Tell people that everything is on special or put the old price and the sale price on clear display. Even if it’s only a buck or two, it can help to sway a decision to buy.
• Take loads of change. It’s the one commodity that’s always in short supply at a market and you don’t want to miss a sale because you don’t have the right change or have enough change. A receipt book can sometimes come in handy too.
• Keep a tally of how many of each item you are selling. If you have a busy day it’s easy to forget exactly how many copies of a certain zine or title you sold.
• Have small items for sale. Locus make badges to sell for $1 or $2. Many people just don’t buy books or don’t have the $10-20 cash on them to buy your stuff, but will drop a few coins on a little item that catches their eye. We spend our badge money on lunch or use it to cover stall costs.
• Have a business card, flyer, free chapbook or magazine (Emily uses aduki magazine, Lisa uses business cards) to give away. Again, people might not buy your book there and then but might be interested in finding out more. Giving them something with your web address means you might make a sale further down the line.
• Have a signup sheet. If you send out email newsletters have a sheet so people can put their email address down if they want more information.
• Have a variety of things for sale. If you’re an individual with one book, team up with someone else or stock other titles if you can. Having a few things to look at means people will spend more time at your table and there’s an increased likelihood that there’ll be something they’re interested in.
• Charge a commission. If you do stock someone else’s titles, don’t be shy to arrange a commission or fee with them to help you cover costs. After all you’re the one doing the work on the day.
• Take food and water. It can be surprisingly tiring standing around for hours talking to people and selling your stuff. If you don’t know what’s going to be available to eat, take food so your energy doesn’t flag halfway through.
• Keep track of what you sold versus what you paid for the space. Some markets are free, which is great, and others are cheap but may be quiet. Paying $50 for a table at a busy inner suburban market might seem like a lot, but if it’s really busy or an affluent area there’s a fair chance you’ll make that money back. Know when to give up though – if you’ve been to the same market two or three times and had a dismal result, it’s fairly likely it’s just not your market. Likewise, if you find a good thing stick to it.
• Don’t lose heart. Some market days are awful and you can sit for hours without selling anything. Other days you don’t cover costs. Doing markets with someone else is always a bonus in these situations, because they will help keep your spirits up (and watch the table if you need to go pee).

Sticky took the pictures. More indie press news and tips at Emily and Lisa’s blog.

2008′s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Junot Díaz, was asked what he was reading for pleasure and he named my and Salgood’s graphic novel Therefore Repent! “It’s completely nuts,” he said, which is pretty close to what the Quill and Quire guy said (“unhinged”). Seems there’s a literary consensus on that. When my reader poll came out in favour of Lilith being actually daemonic and not just crazy, I committed to doing something over-the-top fantastical in contrast to my more muted stuff — nice to hear it’s working for people. Junot sounds like my kinda booknerd!

In other flattering news, I’ve been nominated for the Joe Shuster Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer award. Unlike some of the other talent there with a dozen or so comics to their name, I have only TR! and one other strip that appeared in the Beguiling-produced Comic Festival. You can read it on Salgood’s site.

Also: Chicago launch of Therefore Repent! next month!

Therefore Repent! got a starred review in last month’s issue of Quill and Quire, made the Best of 2007 list in this month’s issue, and actually squeaked into the bestseller list for Canadian graphic novels last week.

Salgood Sam has booked the Montreal TR! launch at the newly opened Librairie Drawn & Quarterly Bookstore (211 Bernard Ouest) on Saturday, December 8, 7-9pm. As I’ve been in the baby zone, he’s been taking point lately with an audio ad and tabling at Expozine.

All this and it hasn’t even come out in the US yet! It’s due to hit the stores down south in January via Diamond (# NOV073660) and the US publisher IDW has printed up a great looking 30 page sampler to promote it: drop a line if you want some for your store or your pals. UPDATE: Salgood has a nice interview here, and the Montreal Mirror did an article as well.

Oh my, is that a matte laminate cover? It’s so silky…

Good lord, you’ve got full bleed to the edge of the page… all the way to the edge…

Oh god, what a gorgeous shade of pantone blue printing!

Buy it here, or if you’re in Toronto come to our launch tomorrow.

UPDATE: Eye just ran an interview and article on the book!

]]> http://nomediakings.org/books/therefore_repent_now_out.html/feed 10 http://nomediakings.org/writing/graphic_novel_preview.html http://nomediakings.org/writing/graphic_novel_preview.html#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 23:31:34 +0000 Jim Munroe http://nomediakings.org/writing/graphic_novel_preview.html [...]]]> Four pages of our forthcoming graphic novel Therefore Repent! were published in the winter issue of Taddle Creek magazine, which was great. Taddle Creek dusts off the concept of the literary magazine and allows one to appreciate the quality and yes, even glamour, beneath. A mainstay of Toronto’s writers for the past decade, TC publishes excellent fiction, urban history, profiles where writers are given the star treatment — and they throw great launches. Click through to see the four page preview of our post-rapture comic.

Click the pages to enlarge, and check out more of Salgood Sam’s amazing illustration work here. It’s out in August, and if you’d like a notification sign up for my e-mail list on the right column.

Keep reading to check out the cover it its full glory, wingèd helmet and all…

Therefore Repent! is a graphic novel set in a Chicago neighbourhood after The Rapture. Once the righteous have floated bodily into the sky, life goes on pretty much as usual for the immoral majority. Except that magic works, if you’re willing to risk demonic mutations. CNN reports that Mr. Christ and Mr. Bush are on a speaking tour of the red states. And an angelic army appears to have been deployed to mop up the sinners. But through it all, outsiders Raven and Mummy face the possibility of a bigger problem than the end of the world: the end of their relationship.

In the tradition of The Book of Revelation, Therefore Repent! is a lurid dark fantasy tale. By taking the apocryphal scripture as literal truth — as the American powers-that-be claim to do — the story also explores the political and spiritual ramifications of God abandoning humanity.

On writer Jim Munroe’s comic-inspired novel Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask

“It’s an excellent book — a funny, cool riff on superpowers and twentysomethingness.” –Neil Gaiman (The Sandman)

“Jim Munroe has written the first novel to harness the energy, idealism, and cartoon-inspired playfulness of the new wave of culture jammers. It’s about time we have some superheroes to save us after the post-irony meltdown — forces of corporate darkness, beware.” –Naomi Klein (No Logo)

On illustrator Salgood Sam‘s work for Image Comics’ pirate vampire title Sea of Red

“brilliant” — boingboing.net

“jaw-dropping and unusual artwork… just knocked my socks off” — thefourthrail.com