General Category > Comic Related Discussion
Amazon's POD books - and - What are your favorite Nedor stories?
srca1941:
Scans are great, but to me nothing will ever replace the feeling of a physical book. For a long time, I've thought about making my own reprints with something like Amazon's print on demand service, Createspace. I'm not talking about something that I'd sell commercially (although I have thought about, planned, and done some work along those lines at different times), rather I'm thinking of just some one copy only books for myself so that I can have paper copies of some of my favorite PD Golden Age books to read whenever I want. Things that nobody else is selling commercially, like Nedor/Better/Standard material to start with. Amazon seems to have a pretty decent price for something like that. I could print myself a 500 page paperback book for $35.85. That's completely in line with the MSRP and page count of Marvel's Epic line. Selling it commercially would be much higher, $60 before it would even turn a minuscule profit on Amazon, and it would lose money in their expanded distribution. That just seems a little high for a paperback, and profits would be too slim to deal with the hassles of setting up a small business, so I'm just looking at this as a personal project right now. Additionally, with such a large page count, properly restoring each page, which I'd want to do for a commercial endeavor, would take forever. I plan to do just a few simple Photoshop actions to make the pages look nice enough to read (i.e. make colors pop and remove most yellowing), put it in Adobe InDesign, make a table of contents, a cover, and send it off to print. Nothing too fancy. Ideally, I could do one every few months or so. Just whenever I felt the need/desire. Fox, Ace, and Quality volumes are also high on my list if all goes well with this initial book.
Does anyone have experience with Amazon's POD service? Is the quality good enough that this would be a worthwhile effort? I know that there are POD GA reprints for sale there, but as I said, the markup is just too high for me to want to try them. Plus, from what I've seen, absolutely no restoration work at all has gone into them. I'd rather save my money for my own books that will meet my own standards.
All that said, my next step is to pick out stories to put into my Nedor book. Superheroes (including Supermouse) are priority, but I'm open to just about anything from the company. Black Terror and Pyroman are my favorites, and I imagine I'll have plenty of them. I have a few stories in mind, but I don't want a book with all material that I've read, nor do I want to just pick things at random, so I'm asking for opinions. What, if any, Nedor stories have stuck out in your mind as particularly good or unusual, either from a story standpoint, or artistically? Depending on their length, I can probably get 40 or so stories in a 500 page book, so the more suggestions, the better. I'm wanting to stay away from anything fiche just because it doesn't look too good to start with, but if there is a really good story with a fiche fill page or two, that would be OK.
-Eric
erwin-k:
Hi Eric,
I'll start off with a question. Are you planning to use color on the interior pages? If so, there's a whole other set of processing to get the B&W reproduction looking good.
After Amazon bought CreateSpace they began to require that POD authors & publishers use that service in order to get listed on Amazon.com. Before that a huge percentage of independents used Lulu.com.
Lulu you could use just as a printing service to provide copies that you market yourself. The only way to do that at CreateSpace is/was to omit the last step in the publication process. That means that all the copies you might order are marked on the last page, in large letters with the word: PROOF.
Under my Modern Knights Press imprint I have self-published two prose books. The size is 6 by 9 inches. Both feature my second generation pulp mystery man The Voice. I also have eight books I've contributed to published by Airship-27 and three by Pro Se Productions. They are all prose titles.
My advice, as far as content for your proposed Nador collections, is simple. Anthologies, or samplers, of the line's different characters. I picked up a few issues way back when. I generally like what I saw. However, reading any number of issues here on DCM, I've found the stories to be more repetitive than I like. (I mean, did the Fighting Yank ever complete a case without being rescued by his ancestor?) Perhaps you could pick a year and month, then put all the super hero titles from that month into an anthology. Just a suggestion from my personal POV. :)
Yoc:
Hi Eric,
Wow, good luck with your POD project - I hope you will eventually show us a preview of the cover and what you decide to use for contents.
Of course you will be using the wonderful Meskin / Robinson Black Terror stories. And I'd include the silly Black Terrier story from Real Funnies 01. Maybe a Jetta story and something besides Supermouse from Coo-Coo. Pin-Up Pete was an oddball one for them.
Have fun!
-Yoc
srca1941:
Yes, the whole thing is in color. I've done conversion to B&W line art before, it can be a bear depending on the quality of the source material and the original printing. I did most of a whole book of Black Terror 10 or 11 years ago before the project fizzled out. I had good results as you can see below, but I wouldn't even think of doing a 500 page book like that just for myself.
From Black Terror #16:
http://s26.postimg.org/7rsyvddh5/BlackTerror16_BlackTerror105.jpgFrom Black Terror #25:
http://s26.postimg.org/j6u1dqf7d/Black_Terror25_Black_Terror108.jpghttp://s26.postimg.org/j6u1dqf7d/Black_Terror25_Black_Terror108.jpgFrom America's Best Comics #6:
http://s26.postimg.org/k1bzm0xo9/Americas_Best06_Black_Terror07.jpg-Eric
srca1941:
Here are the kinds of images I'm using for my color reprints:
The same Black Terror #16 page:
http://s26.postimg.org/8mk3v5apl/02_BlackTerror05.jpgFrom America's Best Comics #2:
http://s26.postimg.org/6th76tpix/01_ABC02_BT07.jpgFrom Startling Comics #27:
http://s26.postimg.org/qdvq9lq49/02_SC27_FY10.jpg-Eric
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