Murray Ewing has an interesting long account of promoting his Alice at R’lyeh…

“…different subcultures have very different attitudes to self-publishing. In the UK comics scene, there is a thriving self-publishing community, which sees the fact that something is self-published as a genuine plus-point. It actively welcomes the diversity of the sort of things people produce when they’re let loose on their own. Other areas, though, see self-publishing as an active minus-point, if not an outright automatic rejection. Searching for places to send a review copy of Alice at R’lyeh to, I often came across “no self-published work” notices, which started to annoy me as much as the “no fantasy, science fiction or children’s fiction” notices you find in The Writers & Artist’s Yearbook list of literary agents.”

Personally I have distant but strong roots in comics and SF fandom, and a more recent interest in artists’ books and print-on-demand. So I see self-publishing — if done with care — as perfectly fine and as adding a nice frisson of authenticity.

Ewing usefully points to the fannish conventions as places to sell. But unless you’re going anyway, then the travel + ticket + table costs would seem likely to drain any profit from your sales. For instance, Continue reading →

I’ve made a new photomontage to celebrate the start of this blog, and called it “The Thing found in Shroveport Quarry”…

It’s a combination of five different public-domain old photographs.

Also a not-quite so successful “ship attack” picture, which ended up looking more like a still frame from a 1920s film…

I’ve found another Lovecraft “mash up”. Murray Ewing gives a long and useful account of self-publishing his Alice at R’lyeh, This is a new Carrollian nonsense poem, with illustrations, which imagines a combination of Alice and Lovecraft. Predictably, and as I know myself, embedding the required fonts in a PDF and getting it to print to the required page size was a nightmare of Lovecraftian proportions. But in the end, he writes…

“I could get 100 16-page booklets for a little over £100 […] I went with www.thedigitalprinters.com […] I got the quote, uploaded my PDF, got an email back suggesting a lamination for the covers, okayed that, and then, a week later, I had my box of Alice at R’lyeh booklets. That moment — receiving your actual finished, physical copies, tangy with the scent of fresh ink and peppered with paper-dust — is the first heaven of self-publishing.”

The story of promoting it comes in Part two.

Photos from inside the “A Love Craft” art exhibition, which has just closed in New York.

There’s also a less stand-offish set of visitor photos from Zazoo & Satori (a prolific tag-team for photographing all the fab NY shows, it seems) on Flickr.

Allison Sommers has her exhibition work online here and The Observatory Room has the full list of artists and a couple of other pictures online.