Dan Collins, perhaps best known for his cartoons in Hustler magazine, has created an eBook and is releasing them in both through iBookstore (iPad) and Amazon (Kindle)
. The book is entitled, “Cartoons That Will Send Me Straight To Hell” and contains 100+ pages of his cartoons originally published in magazines, newspapers and greeting cards.

As a matter of the nitty-gritty how-to stuff, Dan tells me he taught himself how to create an eBook using the epub file format to give him more freedom to release the eBook on different devices. He also created an iTunes Producer and Kindle Direct accounts, bought the ISBNs and created a store front using Kagi and then will be using social media to advertise the book’s availability. Be sure to read his blog about more of the considerations and lessons learned in creating a universal eBook.

He writes:

Self publishing has always been a dream since before I started working professionally in 1976. This is the dream come true. I am a bona fide publisher to boot. Next up will be a fixed layout book which is well suited for comic strips that need to be in a landscape orientation. I just finished an online course for those.

E-publishing is the best thing since paper and given that publishers have scaled back on cartoon collections in print, a cartoonist now has a very viable outlet for his/her work and the total control we could only hope for in the past.

From their website:

They will explore comics autobiography and journalism, the current shape of the “graphic novel,” the power of hand-drawn images to shock and provoke, historical print culture, the narrative impact of comics style, and where and how today’s most exciting work is happening.

The first of its kind, this historic conference brings together 17 world-famous cartoonists whose work has defined contemporary comics. These internationally acclaimed figures have innovated the visual styles, genres, and formats that make comics popular and fascinating; they set the terms for the possibilities of the form.

Event is free to public. Runs May 18–20, 2012

FoxTrot creator Bill Amend recently released three short ebooks with about 100 curated FoxTrot strips through the iTunes Book Store. He’s getting a lot of attention from Mac blogs such as The Unofficial Apple Weblog, MacGasm, and even a mention by the venerable John Gruber of DaringFireball.

One of the latest is from TechCrunch:

TC: What made you try this? How did this compare to the “traditional” book release system?

Amend: The first time I played around with an iPad on launch day all I could think about was how awesome it would be to somehow get my comics on this thing.

Unfortunately, the comic strip eBooks I’d seen all tended to be a little clunky for my tastes, so I assumed I’d need to build a custom reader app, which proved too big a task for me. And then iBooks Author came out and changed everything. You have no idea how much fun it was to make these things. I love working with the people at Andrews McMeel on my print books, but the finished product always feels like their creation more than mine. These iBooks are all my doing and it’s a great feeling.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, Apple recently entered the textbook market in a big way. They’ve partnered with Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, revamped the iBooks app/store, and created the iBooks Author application to make publishing and selling books quick and easy. This is a big deal, and I’ve got a front row seat being married to an educator and having two children in school.

But as exciting as it is educationally, as a cartoonist I’m thrilled not only by the self-publishing opportunities for myself and other artists, but by what could conceivably be a whole new market for cartoons.

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over the iBook Author license agreement. In essence it states that the software is free to use if you are giving away your creation, but if you plan on selling it, it can only be sold through the iTunes Book Store and Apple gets its 30% cut of the sale.

In addition to depicting a backpack-carrying protagonist, the suit alleges, the “Zombie Kid” cover artwork bears a startling similarity to the “Wimpy Kid” series, including “distinctive striping along the spine, the hand-drawn pictures of the main character on the front and back covers, both illustrated so as to appear to be taped at each corner of the cover, and the miniature illustration of a male child’s head located on the side of the book.”

The lettering is also confusingly similar to that of the “Wimpy Kid” series, according to the suit, with letters stylized so as to look brush-painted.

Via: Tom Spurgeon

I Thought You Would Be Funnier

Grandpa Won’t Wake Up

Oil and Water

Tim O’Shea: Not many folks can say they’ve won an Eisner, but this year’s was actually your second Eisner win. How gratifying was it to get such validation again? Also, how amused were you that you won an award for a collection of work rejected by the New Yorker?

Shannon Wheeler: It was more moving than validating. I didn’t think I would win this time around. I swore I wouldn’t be one of those people who cry on stage at a stupid award ceremony. But once I got up and took the award in my hand I honestly choked up. It meant more to me than I thought.

We are always grateful to readers who buy books directly from us, so we are pleased to offer a new series of mini-comics featuring fascinating, previously-unpublished (or at least way out of print) sketches, drawings and even full stories, which are available for FREE with the purchase of their matching tie-in books, or with any purchase of $50 or more.

If you already planning on picking out some titles for the holidays, might as well get the rare or unpublished work as well.

Via Tom Spurgeon

“I always think of myself as a cartoonist who couldn’t crack into newspapers,” he said recently by phone.

Kinney created the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” main character, a middle school student named Greg Heffley, after accepting that he would never land his dream job of producing a daily comic strip.

Yet “not good enough” for an adult comic strip could translate into “great” from a kid’s perspective, he eventually decided.

And I can’t help but also remember the news story about Jeff, who despite all his success with the series, chooses to keep his day job with Poptropica.com simply because he enjoys it.

When I compared how much I could reasonably expect to get as an advance from a publisher to how many self-published copies I would need to sell to equal that same figure, it seemed likely I would stand to do better financially by self-publishing. Was I right? Time will tell. I have easily paid off the entire print run and am in the black on the book (THANKS to all who have bought a copy!), but I will need to sell a few hundred more copies before I pass the “probable advance” figure. If I sell the entire print run, I will certainly earn several times what I would have earned with a traditional publisher, even if they had sold 5 times that number of copies, due to the low royalty percentage I’d have gotten past the advance.

It’s an interesting business, of which you now know a lot more that you probably cared to. Publishers still have the ability to tap markets that self-publishers simply cannot access, but unless your book is going to sell tens of thousands of extra copies that way, self-publishing it increasingly becoming an option that makes financial sense in the right circumstances. Publishers also basically leave the promotion of the book to the author, which adds to the attractiveness of self-publishing.

Cory Doctrow over at Boing Boing writes about a new collection of lost, unpublished or early work for Dr. Suess that was recently released. The book is entitled, “The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories“.

Cory writes:

The publication of a new Seuss collection is reason to celebrate in and of itself, and Bippolo Seed is more than a curiosity or a completist’s collection of offcuts — much of the material in this book stands with Seuss’s best-loved work. The illustrations are classic Seuss and full of wit and irreverence, though the ratio of words to pictures is a lot wordier than the typical Seuss, owing, I suppose, to the constraints of the original magazine publication. If I had to choose a favorite from among these, it’d be “The Great Henry McBride,” (MP3) about a young fellow who can’t make up his mind on a single career and demands that the world accommodate his wish for excitement and novelty through his whole life.