I hope you guys enjoyed the second installment of our dissertation on the advantages and disadvantages of having a girlfriend with a gun for a leg. It’s a serious debate. Compliments to Grindhouse for the inspiration. Stay tuned for Friday’s exciting conclusion that will put the discussion to rest once and for all!
Sadly, not a lot of movie news for you today. But if you want to get my opinion on Blades of Glory, you should download Monday’s episode of The Triple Feature. Gordon, Joe and I rave about it for nearly half an hour. Yeah, we liked it.
We also discussed The Lookout, getting into movies for free and the annoying trend of releasing DVDs with added features shortly before the next installment in a franchise is about to hit theaters. There’s a Fantastic Four extended cut coming soon and I think Spider-Man 2.1 is already available. What a crock. We hit the issues head-on over at The Triple Feature. Download Monday’s show and you’ll see what I mean.
Can I solicit you guys for a little feedback? I was thinking about the comic book conventions I planned on attending this year as part of my initiative to sell of my remaining stock of Theater Hopper: Year One and Theater Hopper: Year Two. With Henry now in our lives, it’s really difficult for me to imagine being away from him for that long. Now I’m worried that I’m not going to be able to sell off what I have before producing Theater Hopper: Year Three – which I had hoped to do by August of this year.
The first book sold great for me. I was able to build a lot of buzz around it and got a lot of orders out the door. I still have plenty of copies left over, but not as many copies as I have of the second book.
I think after the success of the first book, I bit off a little more than I could chew and dove head-first into the second, thinking orders could be matched before the holidays. By that point, I think people were burnt out on me talking about the books all the time and orders weren’t as strong.
I don’t want to dive back into those self-promotional heydays, but I gotta unload some of these books!
Price cuts aren’t an option. They’re as cheap as I can make them and still turn a profit. I’ve flirted with distribution through Diamond Comics to get the books into comic book stores. But the problem is, they want too big of a cut. Again, no way to turn a profit if I go through them. The only way the books can succeed financially is if I sell them on a one-to-one basis either through the site or going door-to-door at my local comic book shops and book stores. I’ve tried to make them enticing by discounting bundled orders and a few of you seem to like that. But there’s still more work to be done.
So let me pose the question to you – what kind of incentives would you like to see to buy copies of my books? Right now, each book that’s shipped includes my signature and a word of thanks. But maybe I need to do more? For people who pre-ordered the first book, I included a one-of-a-kind sketch and people really seemed to like it. Should I try to do the same thing for Year Two? What would you like to see?
I’d really appreciate any feedback you guys can give me in the comments section. Seems like a great opportunity to get a discussion going. Typically in the past I would ask you guys to send in e-mails. Now that we have this new feature, we can really do some brainstorming together. So what do you say?
Thanks and have a great Wednesday!