Category Archives: Books

Adventures in Merchandising

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So, last Saturday, I may have …built an online store to sell shirts!

I found Printful, a print-on-demand merchandise maker: shirts, mugs, towels, all the things to put my artwork on! They print to order and ship to the customer… and they have a plant in the Toronto area!

Unlike book printer and distributor IngramSpark, they don’t distribute a catalogue to existing retailers. They need the artist to build an online store and connect it to them.

There was a long list of premade stores they could connect to: Shopify, Etsy, WooCommerce, Wix, BigCartel, Square, Ecwid, GumRoad… want a minute! Square? Oh yes!

I signed up for a free account at Printful, to see whether this would actually work. I enabled the online store in my existing Square account and connected it to Printful. In Printful, I selected a shirt, uploaded my artwork, and chose variants.

Printful pushed my chosen shirt to Square Online, and shirts appeared! I had to choose various options–I didn’t want my books to appear in the online store, for example, because they are distributed in a different way, and I only want to use the Square account to sell them in person with my little payment terminal. On the other hand, the shirts will be sold online on-demand only.

There are endless details. Getting the payment going from Square Online to Printful Customizing packing slips etc. Choosing shipping options. Providing a way for Printful to get paid. Uploading a logo to Printful to be used on their labels and packing slips. Likewise, uploading a logo to Square Online for the online store. It wasn’t quite the “easy setup” described in their comparative review of store systems, but it wasn’t bad.

So then I tried to order a shirt.

It let me choose a size and colour and presented a price with shipping cost. I paid. The money went into my Square Card account, from where Printful debited it.

I got an email thinking me for the order.

Meanwhile, in my internal control panel, I could see the order. As days passed, it went from “awaiting fulfillment” to “being fulfilled” (printed) to “shipped”! Outside, I got another email with shipping info.

Now I’m waiting for my shirt, to see what the quality is like. Printful has all sorts of options for shirts that I haven’t seen before, like custom logos inside the collar!

Hopefully I can get all the bugs out and get this working smoothly. If so, The Lonely Little Fridge shirts (and towels, mugs, stickers, etc) here I come!

A Tiny Computer!

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My friend gave me a Tiny Computer. Yes, that’s the whole computer in the first picture (it’s upside-down). It is running Ubuntu Studio, which includes audio, video, graphics, and publishing software. There is a very good chance this could replace my Adobe suite. I will have to experiment. The video is me scanning a drawing into The GIMP, a raster image editor.

The Tiny Computer!

And this post is being made from Linux! Getting images out of my Mac onto Linux required some setup… accessing my Dropbox account from both machines turned out to be easiest. (I kept wanting to cut and paste…)

This Linux distribution is Ubuntu Studio. It includes The Gimp (like Photoshop), Inkscape (like Illustrator), Blender (a 3-D animation app, like the control panel of a 747), Scribus (maybe like InDesign, but we’ll see), Calibre (for ebooks, but annoying because it wants to manage your files), and lots more. There are audio and video editing apps; I’ll have to see what corresponds to After Effects for editing limited animation. Alas, Scrivener is not available on Linux. If I can make and publish a book on this platform…

The trickiest part so far was configuring my scanner. The Epson scanner requires a driver, which Epson provides, but that driver requires further software. I had to go into the command line to install it (fortunately this is the kind of thing I used to do at my old job). And I had the help of my friend Mike, who is a born troubleshooter.

I will be presenting at JAMBARK 2025!

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JAMBARK 2025 is an online summit of writers presenting topics to help writers. It is organized by the fine folks at What’s Your Story Author Services.

We will be presenting about things like worldbuilding, how to write a book if you have no time to write a book, social media for authors, and much much more!

My topic is: “Turning Personal Experiences into Fiction”. I’ll be presenting on Sunday the 26th of January 2025.

Our participants:

The Eventbrite link to sign up:

Register on Eventbrite

“The Ornament” sees the light of day…

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A couple of years ago, I drew a short story called “The Ornament”, to be included in a wintry holiday compilation. That compilation did not appear then, but it has just been published now!

The compilation is called “Snowflakes, Secrets, and Other Winter Reflections”.

It is available now from Kipekee Press as an ebook. Print books coming soon.

But that’s not all! There’s an advent calendar: https://hi.switchy.io/WinterTales2024

…and a contest!
https://kingsumo.com/g/1ggoez1/winter-tale-advent-calendar-and-book-launch

A Need for Giveaways

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So there I was. I had just wandered into a convenience store while wearing my new shirt that I had made with the logo of The Rabbit Trap. The cashier was asking me about it, what did it mean, and I was describing the book. He asked, did I have any info on it that he could give out, and I had to admit I did not yet. Creating something to give away was literally the next major thing I was doing.

To that end, I have now created and ordered bookmarks for The Rabbit Trap. Hopefully they will be here this week.

Versions of the First Book Trailer

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The book trailer for The Rabbit Trap went through a lot of evolution.

It’s technically an ‘animatic’, a kind of draft animation that can be quickly produced and adjusted as ideas change. A fully-animated work would follow on from it.

I started out by drawing a few rough sketches on paper and putting them in order.

Then I decided to try Boords, the online storyboarding service.

Continue reading →

A book trailer, shirts, and Fifty Thousand Words

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I have been working on an animatic, a kind of limited animation, to make a book trailer to promote The Rabbit Trap. I hope to have it done in a few weeks.

To express my gratitude for the help I have gotten with it, I have ordered shirts! They will include the new logo I have developed for the story.

As far as the story itself is concerned, Akosua and the Write-Now Club are proposing another writing challenge: another Fifty Thousand Words in Fifty Days challenge! This will take us to the end of summer, conveniently when I had planned to have a first draft done. I’ve pulled out Scrivener and started organizing things already.

Welcome to SRD Books!

Featured

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If you’re looking for information about The Rabbit Trap, The Lonely Little Fridge, or the compilations that contain my other works, this is the place!

The Lonely Little Fridge is distributed through Ingram Content Group and is available on Amazon and other retailers. The compilations are available through Kipekee Press and Amazon.

My Amazon author page: https://www.amazon.com/author/komiksulo

The Rabbit Trap

A family escapes a totalitarian nightmare, but what happens when one of them wants to go back?

This full-length novel is a sequel to the story “The Rabbit Hole” published in a compilation by Kipekee Press.

The Lonely Little Fridge

A fridge is thrown out. Will it find a new and better home?

This children’s book is available in multiple languages. Find out more.