Jacket text for “Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!”

I am working through a series of exercises with Jackie on planning Red Rabbit! Red Rabbit!. Step 4 involves writing ‘jacket text’ for the story. This is the text that might appear on the back of the book, or on the front flap of a dust jacket. It’s a kind of marketing text intended to draw the readers interest.

So for, I’ve come up with this:

A hidden society of supremacists is trying to take over the world. They are outnumbered by the rest of us, yet they believe that their strength, intelligence, weaponry, and general cuteness give them the right to rule us all.  Yes, cuteness… for these supremacists are rabbits.

Years ago, Tom Johnson and his parents had fled the rabbits’ captivity to build a new life on the outside. Tom’s father had gone back in later to rescue other humans from the rabbits’ totalitarian nightmare… and never returned.

Now, Tom was in high school. But his earliest memories were of the safe predictable environment that the rabbits provided for their human guests. He remembered the rabbits’ soft fur and cute little voices, and their warmth and love… and he looked around at the harsh world of high school, the bullying and endless struggle, and he knew he had to leave.

Locations for “The Rabbit Hole”

The original alt.devilbunnies story postings that provided the characters I reference in The Rabbit Hole mentioned Kingston, Ontario, Canada. When I was writing the story, I needed to firm up my knowledge of the locations. So here are some of the locations:

  • The motel where the Aduins live is based on a motel on Old Highway 2, west of downtown Kingston. 3100 Princess Street.
  • The house where Landon lives does not actually exist. Balaclava Street is real, but 5 Balaclava Street appears to be a driveway or an empty lot.
  • The intersection of Princess and Centennial, in all its shopping-plaza-lined glory.

Legal Deposit

When publishing a book in Canada, it is an actual legal requirement to send a copy or two to the national library for their collection.

This applies to printed books, ebooks, serial publications, video and audio recordings, maps, microforms, even sheet music.

The materials go into the national library, and one copy is made available for the public, while the other goes into The Archives.

More from Library and Archives Canada.

Preparing to print a hardcover

The Lonely Little Fridge is going to be a hardcover and a fixed-format ebook.

Amazon print-on-demand does not print hardcovers, so I set up an account at IngramSpark (https://www.ingramspark.com/), the publishing platform, who does print hardcovers. They also handle distribution worldwide; bookstores order from them.

In order to print with them, we have to provides all sorts of information, in addition to the actual book files.

Continue reading

Backing the Etherington Brothers

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1378058646/how-to-think-when-you-draw-book-4-reprinting-sold-out-books

I just backed this art book printing and reprinting project!

I kept seeing bits of the artwork copied into places like Instagram, and I didn’t know where it came from. But then I stumbled across the book reprint project on Kickstarter. And that led me to the source, the Etherington Brothers out of England:

https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/

The website has hundreds of little segments giving tips and tricks on drawing and writing topics.

Alas, no exhibiting at online TCAF… this year.

However, I got a great message back from them with some useful advice:

For those who are interested in applying for TCAF in the future, we want to take a moment to provide some context for what our committee considers when selecting applicants for TCAF:

TCAF exhibitors should have a substantial body of comics in print. We are a comics focused show, which means that we try to prioritize exhibitors who have lots of comics for sale.

TCAF exhibitors are encouraged to debut new work at the festival. New comics and new books help make TCAF exciting for patrons, and tend to ensure more successful and profitable shows for exhibitors. It’s great to see applicants who have a solid idea of a new comics project, especially one that has a clear and confident plan for completion.

It’s important to note that these aren’t “the rules” for applying to TCAF, and many other factors are taken into consideration, but we hope this helps with your future TCAF applications.

TCAF

So I’m going to finish “Little Lost Part” as if I were exhibiting it at TCAF, and keep going from there!

TCAF lives! Am I audacious enough to exhibit there?

The physical TCAF at the Toronto Reference Library in 2018.

I got an email recently that TCAF, the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, is happening this year… online! The physical version of TCAF has been one of the highlights of my year, but of course recent events have forced changes. After it was cancelled in 2020, TCAF will be online in 2021.

The deadline to apply was Wednesday March the 3rd.

I applied. It’s a long shot, but what the hey.