I’ve mentioned this before – a common question we get while selling our work at fairs, conventions, or festivals is, “How did you get your work published?”
In today’s market, there are options like the process of pitching endlessly to various publishers and agents, and self-publishing, among many others. And with that comes the many tools that are pushed to us every day. I’m not going to name any specific apps, guaranteeing that they will be tools that will turn your current situation into a success story overnight. Instead, I’m going to go through some of the tools you’ll need, attitude-wise, for when you decide to embark on a creative journey on your own: ORGANIZATION If there’s one thing I hear a lot of writers and artists wish to have, it’s organization. We have so many ideas in our heads, we don’t know where to start. Conversely, when there’s nothing going on in our creative minds, we don’t know what to clean up. Having a habit of listing unfinished work, administration, or project progress trackers can be useful in ensuring that we don’t end up in the midnight oil corner, rushing out side projects at the last minute because we forgot. At least not as often as we hope. Personally, list-making and scheduling works for me. Getting all your admin work done during your lunch break (at your day job) can make you feel lighter when you’re done for the day and need whatever limited time you can get to finish up your passion projects as well. At the very fundamental level, at least have a to-do list where you list your needed tasks (it can be as general or as specific as you need it to be) and cross off whatever’s done. Some people may get a runner’s high. I tend to get a to-do list completion high. GRIT Okay, I’m inspired by one of the books I’m reading now, “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth. We may be quick to scoff at how “self-help” it sounds, but the notes from this book were encouraging and, above all, relatable. Talent, passion, and skill will sell work at varying degrees. However, research has shown that time and (deliberate) practice continue to be major contributions to success. Deliberate practice has been an area I’ve been exploring for a while, and it does, from the start, help with self-understanding. The fact that you have to assign a specific duration, goal, and activity for each session gives you a sense of progress. So yes, be passionate, practice, and continue improving on your skills, but most importantly, keep at it. COMMUNICATION One of the most influential things said to me was by Man Asia winner Tan Twan Eng – “Go and get a job first.” That was also his advice to a student who was trying to convince her father to let her go into writing full-time. Major reasons for doing so are: 1) Stable income, 2) The professional / commercial skills that come with having a full-time job, especially if you’re office-based or use technology frequently. Gone are the days where all creators needed to worry about was just to create. We handle emails, forms, applications, grants, the lot. And if we lack the time or the energy to even answer a single email decently, we can fall behind. Wanting to be taken seriously takes a lot of professionalism and clear communication, so one-working-day turnaround times and concise emails will need to be your friends for a while. And there you have it! These tools have certainly helped many of my friends as they push through the independent market. What other qualities and tools have helped you so far? Let me know in the comments!
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I mentioned at least one printable in my previous posts, and I shall deliver. In conjunction to my latest trilogy of posts for indie creators, I’ve got two printables – one for pre-print and logistical checks, and one for easy printer comparison. Again, I hope these will help, especially if you’re just starting out. To download both of these printables, click here. I'm going to quote one of the Editors I've been working with during my day job and many others, "Where did the rest of the year go?" Here we are, standing at the final step before entering the second half of the year and I'm really glad to say that I've found a Hobonichi Daily layout which I'm happy with for my Cousin - the same layout that I had for April, mentioned in my previous Plannerd Feature post. For the months following, I've just shortened the amount of space I needed for each section so that I'll have more space for pieces like these: One of the greatest gifts from the Hobonichi (Or the Cousin, in my case), would be the flexibility their daily pages give you. While I would caution you against pressing your pencils and pens too forcefully on the paper (I've torn through a couple of pages), my "Notes" section has made me a very happy planner over the last couple of months.
Future posts will most likely be a look into what I've been drawing, writing, or just scribbling from my #hobonichi365 features. So stay tuned and enjoy! Now that you’ve set your work to the correct specifications and sent your work to print, what’s next? Logistical processes get so little credit but they are so important in the long run. Together with a few of my other boothing friends, we’ve come up with a few tips on what else to consider once your products are ready.
Storage If you’re printing more than 50 books, you’ll need to consider how you’ll store your products. Non-book products have their considerations as well. Here’s what I learnt from other artists:
Packaging For a majority of my boothing experience, I didn’t think about packaging, especially since I was only selling books. However, as conventions and events continue to get more footfall, packaging becomes increasingly important – not just its appearance but its preparation as well. Here are a few tips:
Transport Transporting your goods comes in two stages – From the Printer to You, and From You to the Booth / Shop. How are you going to get your goods from the printer to wherever you need it? Most of us have two options: We collect the books from the printers’ ourselves, or we pay a delivery fee and the printers send the books / products to our provided address. Do keep these points in mind though:
Many creators I know have roller luggage handy (about medium-sized) to store their goods and deco – it’s a pretty handy tool if you’re talking about having to lug a good lot of items for a couple of days. Note: Some printers give you the option of delivering straight to your event – I would advise against this option if it’s your first job / you have not worked with this printer before. The costs will go up and there won’t be time for you to check product quality before you put them up for sale. Also, you don’t really want to lug 200 copies around, it’s not fun and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be selling all of them in one event. And that marks the end of my Printing for Indie Creators post series! I hope you’ve managed to find some pointers for your own projects. Stay tuned for the printable accompanying these posts. Now that your work is nicely laid out, you’ve checked your bleed borders, and your specifications are checked and ready to go, your next logical step would be to source for a production house. In our current case (as indie writers and comic artists), it’ll be to look for a printer.
If you haven’t got a clue or finished your pre-printing checks, however, I’d suggest you read my previous post in this series just to get a feel of what you’ll need to take note of before sending your work to print. When you source printers for your work, there are more aspects to think about besides price. Here are some areas to look out for: Printing Services & Their Clients What are you printing? Postcards? Prints? Comics? Zines? Different printers have different services or specializations – make sure that the printer provides services you require. At the same time, it’ll be a good idea to check out their clients. Better still, their address. For indie creators, a print shop in the middle of a mall or an accessible shopping area is good enough. When you find printers who are in the middle of an industrial estate, or have loads of clients who deal with journals or magazines, chances are, they’ll be way out of your budget. Quotations & Accessibility Some printers have the option to get a sample quote on their website – you just key in your project specifications and they give you an estimate price. For many others, you’ll either have to go to the print shop personally or send them an email to ask. When you get your quotes though, it’ll help if you can take note of the following:
Note: Be prudent with your budget and manage your expectations if it’s your first time with a printer. There will be some level of error or defects with at least a few copies during some point of your requested job – be prepared for that and don’t go into a fit when there’s an error with a few copies, nothing is perfect all the time. Delivery If you’re printing locally, this won’t be as huge a consideration for you. However, do keep this in mind – the faster you need your prints, the higher the costs may be. If you’re printing your goods overseas, however, there might be a few things to consider:
Again, if you’re not sure, ask. How We Usually Find Printers: A good number of us found our printers via word-of-mouth. If you have friends who have been making zines or indie books for a while, you may want to ask about their printer contacts (nicely, of course). In Singapore, Peace Centre and Sunshine Plaza have a hotbed of printers, so you may want to have a look there. P / S – I tend to go to Peace Centre’s Leadership Printers at Peace Centre and Dezain Print at Sunshine Plaza. Are there any good printers in Asia you’d like to recommend? We’d like to hear from you in the comments! The post is me taking a break from my last 1.5 series regarding the logistics involved in indie creation. I collect gaming dice or items that fulfill the dice mechanic (a.k.a. dice rings). However, when I go for a gaming session with my friends, scrambling for a makeshift dice tray at the game site so that your dice won’t go all over the world is a problem on its own. So here’s my attempt to alleviate the situation: And this was how I made it – I made this over lunch break so it’s pretty quick and simple once you have everything together. All you need are:
Step 1 (Optional): Fit Your Dice You can skip this step of you don’t intend to have this tray to be multi-functional. I thought the movable partitions were a great bonus so I used them to store my usual play dice. Step 2: Fit the Tray Padding I went by estimation and by eye, but you can measure the inside of your container and transfer the measurements on your choice of dice tray padding. I used sheet rubber for mine (the kind they use to make DIY rubber stamps) but you can also use foam sheets – as long as the dice doesn’t sink into or bounce off the material easily. Cut your material to size to fit your tray. Step 3: Adhesive Time to glue! Apply a good amount on your tray. Step 4: Stick it in! Before the glue dries, stick your tray pad in and let it sit for a few minutes. Step 5: Dice Tray Get! And you’re done! Enjoy your dice storage + tray.
This has served me well so far – the best thing about it is that it fits into my mobile game case, but that’s another assembly for another post. Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve found this helpful. What other containers do you use for your dice storage or dice trays? Leave your comments below. A common question we’ve been getting during our events is this: “How did you get your book published?” The easy answer is this: You write / draw, you format and convert to PDF, then, you print. The more complicated answer happens in stages. This post talks about the first stage that comes to play right after you’ve laid your work out.
If you have some basic knowledge on how to lay your work out and have it converted to PDF, that’s good. To make your printing process a little smoother, here are a few questions to answer: Are your pages even-working? Even-working means your content fits into a number of pages which can be divisible by 2 or 4. Most printers will come back to you if your pages are not divisible by 2 or 4 – check this specification with them. Printers tend to fold / print pages on larger pieces of paper, which results in 1 sheet of paper taking about 4 pages of content or more. Bleed – what is that? Not paper cuts. Bleed is a term used to describe the overflow of your page design over your page borders to make up for any minute, measurement-related errors in cutting. So if your page edges are white and you’re printing on white paper anyway, there’s no need to worry. For cases where your work is on a black background, make sure you give a bleed of black around your borders so you don’t get that line of white paper in case the cutting is off by half a millimetre. What size do you want your work to be presented in? A5? A4? B5? Most places take A5, A4, and A3 quite easily. Any odd sizes may result in more expensive printing because of any expenses going to creating a custom die cut. Grayscale or Colour? The most common we’ve seen are black and white interior / content, with colour covers. Remember to check the colour policies with different printers – most of them won’t entertain “discounts” even if you just have a single line in colour. Colour is colour. What kind of paper would you like to use? Very much like colour vs. black and white, different papers bring out different textures and prices. What’s important is to know how you’d like your work to be present in the best but most economical way. (E.g. I know Vellum is amazing, but a 50-page Vellum book of poetry probably needs to be priced high in order to make your cost back) Saddle-stitch or Perfect bind? Unless you have the time / energy to print everything on a large sheet of paper, cut, and sew your books together one-by-one, printers will ask you to choose from a variety of bindings. Do note, though, that in most places, perfect bind (glue) can only be done if you exceed 100 pages. How many copies? Be mindful about this – have a good gauge of how much you intend to give away and sell. Consider your storage solutions as well – storing 100 books in your room is no joke. We’ll talk about logistics in another post. That being said, we’ll talk about sourcing printers in our next post. I hope this post has given you some pointers with what to prepare before going for a print job. Do you have other factors you look out for before you send your work to print? Share it with us in the comments! The second half of the year is coming – which means the bulk of fandom, pop culture, and indie booth events are coming as well. Following my trilogy of Event Prep posts, I thought it’ll be good to put out a checklist for all of you to use as a template for your own booth management. So here’s my first printable: The list will cover three main areas: Administration, Booth Management, and Deco & Design. It’s not a definitive list, so feel free to use this as a beginner’s platform to manage your event booth. To download this printable, click here. March and April saw more layout changes as my life got busier. Throughout those two months, life during and out of work and creating required more organization, especially with my three major projects so far. So now, I’m experimenting with my latest layout all the way through May. Taking away the Must-Do Tasks of the day in place of a single Focus of the Day ‘forced’ me to concentrate on a single task. That got me to a certain realization – My excitement for all my projects have caused me to cram my days with so much, I end up crashing for a few weeks and feeling guilty after. That being said, I'll say that this new layout helps to clear things up a little better. And I think it's quite safe to say that this shift doesn't make my to-do lists feel so overwhelming anymore. Check out my progress from my January and February post. 118 Days down, 247 Days to go for #hobonichi365. We’ve done a post on getting into events as a booth owner.
We’ve done a post on getting through events as a booth owner. So the doors have closed, you’ve collected your booth deposit, and you’re left with the heavily-browsed copies of your remaining stock, your booth deco, and your earnings for the event. Time to celebrate and indulge in your spoils! But what’s with this need for a ‘post-mortem’? To put it plainly, a post-mortem is when you take a step back after you’re done with your boothing event, and then take stock of what you’ve done and what you’d like to do moving forward. Personally, I just do a bit of reflection with the Tiger while we calculate what we’ve earned, but here are a few tips on what we and some of our friends do post-events: REST This is possibly the most important step. Unless you shared your booth and need to get payments / profits split the moment you close your booth, the first thing you’ll need to do is to put your stock aside and sit down for a well-deserved dinner and rest. My friends, after their first time together behind the booth at STGCC, stopped talking to each other the moment they started taking their booth down. And only realized they've been silent all the way only halfway through their dinner - when they felt the fatigue set in. Boothing is exhausting, especially if you’re not used to it, so take as much rest as you need first. TABULATE This is what I tend to do the couple of days after. Simply put, this is when we keep track of stock and how much you’ve earned from the event. There are also other things you might want to keep tabs on after the event, like the amount of contacts you’ve received, thank you notes, and even your own loot from the event itself. It’s just putting aside some time shortly after your event to look at how well you’ve done for yourself. (Note: You’ve already done well by being a booth owner regardless, so yes, well done.) REFLECT And this is what I ask myself as I look back:
And this marks the end of my trilogy of Boothing posts. I hope this helped you to gain some insight into our boothing experiences. We’ll see you at our next event! |
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