Just for clarification’s sake, ComicsMonkey is a wholesaling service and as such only qualified resellers are allowed to place orders there.  The criteria by which we judge whether a registrant meets the qualification requirements are all posted clearly at comicsmonkey.com.

I bring this up only because we’ve recently had a few registrants who did not meet the qualifications go all irate on us … calling us nasty names, and threatening us with various forms of internet-based frontier justice including threats of mass forum/blog postings and email campaigns to — paraphrasing here — “be sure all of Ka-Blam’s customers know how they’re refusing to sell their books to people who are ready and willing to buy them” etc., etc., etc.

So let me address this head-on.

I want you to understand fully how the system works and why we do things the way we do.

We will NEVER refuse any fan who wants to buy your comics.  Never.  We’ve set up a place for them to find and purchase your comics.  It’s called IndyPlanet.  And they can buy anything they want there.  At the price you set.

ComicsMonkey is something entirely different.  ComicsMonkey does not sell at retail prices. ComicsMonkey is a wholesaling service.   It’s purpose is to help you — the creator/publisher — to get your books not only onto the shelves of your local comics shop but on the shelves of comics shops all over the world as well.

In order to make this service work — in order for ANY wholesaling service to work — there must be criteria for perspective buyers to meet before they can be allowed to order at discounted prices.

Here’s what I mean.  Say you’re running a wholesaling service and you decide that there will be no restrictions on who gets discounted pricing.  You’ll allow just anyone off the street to qualify and to order without restriction.  If you do this, then you’re not really a wholesaling service at all.   All you’re doing is undercutting the legitimate resellers out there by selling to their potential customers at prices they can’t possibly match.   That’s driving a wedge between you and the clientele you’re supposed to be servicing.  And  anything that damages your ability to sell to that clientele only drives down the profits for your vendors (the creator/publishers).

So the trick then becomes knowing how to tell the difference between a legitimate comics reseller and someone who just wants to buy a bunch of comics really cheap.

They’re are two ways to go about it.  1) You can set a high minimum order requirement.  In theory this would block the guy who just wants to get a bunch of comics at a cheap price, but it might also discourage ordering in general … especially from the merchant on a budget who wants to try a few things but isn’t willing to gamble a few hundred dollars on products he’s never sold — or even seen — before.  Or 2) you can forgo the high minimum order and simply require the potential customer to prove to you that they actually own or manage a comics shop.

We chose the second option.  What’s more, to entice that retailer on a budget we have placed no minimums whatsoever on our ordering.  We want retailers to try the service.  And if selling them just 1 copy of a single title gets our foot in the door then we’re happy to do just that.  We believe that once they try the service — once they see how great the comics are and how wide the selection is- – they’ll come back for more.

However, there is a downside to the no-minimum policy.  The potential for abuse is rife, so we have to be very careful that we’re only selling to legitimate resellers.     This means that in order to qualify for discount pricing from ComicsMonkey you MUST own and/or operate  a brick and mortar comics specialty shop or you MUST own and/or operate an online store with a functioning, comics-specific retail operation already in place.   Brokers, re-distributors, or online resellers relying on any third party sites such as ebay or Amazon, etc. to process their orders do NOT qualify for discounted pricing at ComicsMonkey.  Only the owners or operators of existing, functioning comics specialty shops or book stores qualify for the wholesaling service at ComicsMonkey.   Anyone else is welcomed to buy at IndyPlanet, but not at ComicsMonkey … and certainly not at wholesale pricing.

So that’s how it works.  That’s why we do it the way we do.  So please keep all of that in mind if you should be contacted by or come across one of those irate ComicsMonkey rejectees or that guy who just wanted to buy a whole bunch of comics on the cheap and they’re screaming about how Ka-Blam’s not treating their customers right or we’re refusing to sell your books to people who want to buy them.

Photoshop is IMHO the greatest app ever invented.  I think the Knoll brothers are deserving of a Nobel prize for app creation.   Photoshop is the best thing to happen to comics since Jack Kirby.  I even once wrote an article published in a major comics magazine that lovingly detailed the history of Photosh0p in comics.   So please do not think this post is a knock  on Photoshop.   It isn’t.  I’m simply pointing out a known deficiency in the program.

Large Gradients.  Photoshop still does not handle large color gradients without producing at least some banding.

This is the one nut that Photoshop engineers have never been able to crack.   It’s improved a bit.  But even in CS4 you will still see some banding in areas with large gradients.   Zoom in.  You’ll see it on the screen.  It’s unmistakably there.

So if you have submitted a job to us that has large color gradients created in photoshop that inherent banding will find its way into our print.    If colors at the extreme ends are close then the banding may be very subtle … maybe even hard to detect at print resolution.    But if you have a lot of variance from one end of your gradient to the other, then you will see some banding.  It’s unavoidable, I’m afraid.

Just a quick reminder, everyone … the digital proof is a LOW RESOLUTION version of the printable files.  It looks a bit fuzzy because of the low quality jpg compression.  Your printable document is high resolution and NOT jpg compressed.

The purpose of the digital proof is for you to double check our pagination — that we’ve laid out your pages in the proper order — and so that you may see what your files look like after a simulated trimming.

The digital proof is NOT in ANY WAY a representation of print quality.  It’s only purpose is for you to verify that the pagination is correct and that the trims are acceptable to you.

I shouldn’t have to say this — and it embarrasses me a little bit that I have to say it — but please, do NOT send us scans of pirated comics and expect us to print them.  We absolutely will NOT do it.

We take copyright and trademark issues very seriously here.  We will never knowingly print anything that infringes on the trademark  or copyrights of others.   We have often refused print jobs because we had doubt — even over the protestations of the customer — about the validity of a print rights claim.

So please … please … do not send us files that you downloaded off of a pirate site — or scanned yourself from the pages of a printed comic — and ask us to print them.  It’s not happening.  Period.

The post title pretty much says it all.  From this point on we simply can’t accept Rapidshare links for downloading your files.  The free service is waaaaaay too slow and difficult to access for downloads and — call us cheap — but given how sluggish and non-user friendly the free service is we’re simply unwilling to pay for their premium service.    Especially, when there are so many good free services out there.

Sendspace for one is terrific. I can’t recommend them highly enough.

I’m sure this may inconvenience some of you, but we just can’t deal with Rapidshare anymore.  Sorry, but it slows the process down too much.

Please give Sendspace a shot instead.

You might have noticed that we’re trying to streamline and simplify things around here.  One of the things that’s become overly complex — both on the user side AND especially on our administrative side — is the process of listing and maintaining the listings at IndyPlanet.  The addition of ComicsMonkey has only compounded the problem.  So we’re going to make a few changes to try to make both of our lives a little easier.

The first is that we’re going to merge the listings at IndyPlanet and ComicsMonkey into a single listing.  You’ll still have the option to list ONLY at IndyPlanet if you so choose, but if you choose to list at BOTH sites — and we hope you do — then you’ll have only a single listing that will appear identically at BOTH sites.  This means a couple of things — 1) you CANNOT have a separate edition of your item specifically geared towards one site or the other and 2) your cover price at both sites MUST be the same.   Because ComicsMonkey has mandatory minimum pricing we’d previously been allowing you the option of having a different price there from what you have at IndyPlanet.  No longer, I’m afraid.  This policy has only caused confusion and has proven too difficult to maintain on our end.  The only solution is to implement a “one price at BOTH sites” policy.

This is what we’ve always encouraged you to do anyway.  It’s in your own best interests.   You need to curry favor and foster goodwill among comics shop owners not alienate them.  To have one cover price for comics specialty shops and another — often lower — price when selling directly to customers online or at conventions undercuts the comics shops and makes you no friends among shop owners.

So in accord with this new policy your ComicsMonkey cover price now becomes your IndyPlanet cover price as well (we’re doing it this way since ComicsMonkey has mandatory minimum cover pricing).   You can still edit the price if you wish, but the new cover price cannot be lower than the ComicsMonkey minimum you see in the listing editor.

Also, to make this easier we’re dropping the requirement that your ComicsMonkey cover price be at thresholds of fifty cents or ninety-nine cents.  We still think that’s a very good idea and would encourage you to set your cover price using those thresholds, but no longer are we requiring it.  So if you want a cover price of $4.00 instead of $3.99 or $4.25 instead of $4.50 that’s fine by us.  We’d still counsel you to avoid oddball price points though.   A cover price of $3.91 instead of $3.99 really makes no sense to anyone.

Secondly, we’re phasing out the option to pay for your ComicsMonkey barcodes from future sales.  We put that policy into place so that if you already had an item or items listed at IndyPlanet you wouldn’t have to pay out of pocket to list those same item(s) at ComicsMonkey.  We never intended the policy to exist in perpetuity.  So from this point on all NEW items ordered will no longer have the option to buy a barcode with future sales money.  You can still take advantage of our POS Ready Service for your ComicsMonkey barcodes but the one time $10 per item fee will apply.  I know that may not be the most popular policy we’ve ever implemented but if you’re going to sell your items to comics specialty shops through ComicsMonkey then your items MUST have a barcode and a standardized stock-keeping-unit number printed on them (that’s a SKU if you’re familiar with retail terminology) and for just ten bucks you get the barcode and unlimited use of a UPC or ISBN.   Price them for yourself and you’ll see that’s a pretty terrific deal!  And we’re going to give you the option to purchase it at the time you place your initial order so you can have it all setup from the beginning and not have to worry about it.

Please Note: This does NOT affect those who have already taken the “pay from future sales” option.   So if you have items presently at IndyPlanet and have not opted to list at ComicsMonkey but still wish to — the “pay from future sales” option will still be available to you until March 1, 2010.   So take advantage of it while you can.