Meet The Cover Girls

[colcool007]

Glad you guys enjoyed it. Thankfully I get notified of a lot of these events through social media and I will do my best to remember that not everyone gets as many nudges as I do about events. In fact, I think I may have written an article about that!

[comixminx]

I set up a free Wordpress - it's easy to do that without spending any money at all if you don't mind having a URL that ends wordpress.com instead of something more specific.

I have had a look at it, comixminx, and I certainly haven't ruled it out so thank you for mentioning it. My computer-literate friend, Ken Dalton, has discussed the question with his son Chris, who not only knows more than his father, but creates websites for a living somewhere in Ireland, and he is going to put a few ideas together in the next few days for me to consider. It might be fairly expensive but I know I won't be ripped off because he acknowledges that many years ago when he was a time-wasting layabout in the Year 10 tutor group I was in charge of, that I managed to get him back on track towards some decent 'O' level grades a year or so later, and was grateful for my intervention. We haven't spoken for quite a while but we are certainly still on good terms. Obviously I will just have to wait and see.

I think what you need to be careful of is that whatever you choose, you have to be able to update it easily yourself. Getting help to set it up in the first place can be very useful of course; at the end of the day though you need to be comfortable not only with writing new text / adding new content of whatever sort you choose, but also with some more admin tasks too. With my Wordpress I was able to invite Mistyfan/Tammyfan to be a co-maintainer, and to add new areas as I went along and thought of new things I wanted to include. For instance I have recently added some pages for galleries of favourite panels from Jinty (per Tammyfan's request), and took the opportunity to add the same for galleries of story title logos. Those weren't things I'd originally thought of when setting up the Wordpress, but when the idea struck, I was able to do it easily and quickly.

[Phoenix]

I think what you need to be careful of is that whatever you choose, you have to be able to update it easily yourself. Getting help to set it up in the first place can be very useful of course; at the end of the day though you need to be comfortable not only with writing new text / adding new content of whatever sort you choose, but also with some more admin tasks too. With my Wordpress I was able to invite Mistyfan/Tammyfan to be a co-maintainer, and to add new areas as I went along and thought of new things I wanted to include. For instance I have recently added some pages for galleries of favourite panels from Jinty (per Tammyfan's request), and took the opportunity to add the same for galleries of story title logos. Those weren't things I'd originally thought of when setting up the Wordpress, but when the idea struck, I was able to do it easily and quickly.

Thank you again, comixminx. These are all good suggestions about what to include, and how. Perhaps the main difference between what you are doing and what I am planning is that whereas you are concentrating on just one story paper in Jinty, I want enough pages to allow me to comment separately on every story paper for boys or girls that I may want to talk about.

A further, and possibly more important, reason concerns my wish to get information about such story papers distributed without having to commit myself to putting it in book form, which frankly is a very expensive procedure. Currently I am writing This Was The Hotspur, which I am hoping to publish as a companion volume to This Was The Wizard. Similar companion volumes for Adventure, The Rover and The Skipper will however only appear on line, if at all. The volume I am preparing about the ten Thomsons' story papers for girls will also appear as a book, but I am less sure about a history of The Victor, the only picture story paper for boys that would have any chance of decent sales at the price I would have to charge for it, and to be honest, the same applies really to This Was The Hotspur, which will be a bit of a punt given that the boys who bought the paper every week as it was published will be at least in their mid-sixties by now.

I have discussed all the above with Ray Moore, whose assistance with information about artists and editors is of huge value to me, and has been since we were first in contact in about 1990, and he is the one who made the point to me that as we are sitting on an enormous amount of data about story papers for boys and girls, we would be very remiss if we didn't release it in one organized form or another. Another fact that I need to heed is that I am still exhausted after all the problems I had in trying to get This Was The Wizard into print, when my computer stoutly resisted all my attempts, and those of Ken Dalton, to convert my pages into pdf files, as required by my printer in Stockport.

It goes without saying that I would welcome any observations from ComicsUK members on the issues I've outlined.

[paw broon]

For what you want to do Phoenix, I think paying for professional help would be the best way, especially as you seem to find the gentleman in Ireland trustworthy. The great thing about computers is that you can get help from anywhere in the world. A site which looks good can be half the battle.
Another thought to consider is sharing your work on an existing site. Drawbacks are that you'd have to find a sympathetic partner and even then fall-outs can still happen. There's also the problem that your work can get lost, especially if the other person is charging ahead with their posts.
It appears that you will want to have your work look good and that can take up a lot of time as you will want scans to be of a good quality - straight, clear and positioned in such a way as to complement the text. Many sites get that wrong.
I look forward to your updates.

[comixminx]

I think what you need to be careful of is that whatever you choose, you have to be able to update it easily yourself. Getting help to set it up in the first place can be very useful of course; at the end of the day though you need to be comfortable not only with writing new text / adding new content of whatever sort you choose, but also with some more admin tasks too. With my Wordpress I was able to invite Mistyfan/Tammyfan to be a co-maintainer, and to add new areas as I went along and thought of new things I wanted to include. For instance I have recently added some pages for galleries of favourite panels from Jinty (per Tammyfan's request), and took the opportunity to add the same for galleries of story title logos. Those weren't things I'd originally thought of when setting up the Wordpress, but when the idea struck, I was able to do it easily and quickly.

Thank you again, comixminx. These are all good suggestions about what to include, and how. Perhaps the main difference between what you are doing and what I am planning is that whereas you are concentrating on just one story paper in Jinty, I want enough pages to allow me to comment separately on every story paper for boys or girls that I may want to talk about.

I think you may misunderstand me slightly, Phoenix - I am not aiming to suggest what you should include in terms of galleries of logos and so on. Rather I am saying that when a sudden new idea strikes, as it inevitably will, you need to be able to add it in without too much difficulty or having to wait for other people to sort stuff out for you. Certainly you will have a different structure from the one on the Jinty blog, though there may be similarities.

What I found very helpful before starting out properly creating lots of new posts was to think quite hard about what site structure I did want - a post for each of Creators, Issues, and Stories, plus a page for each to hold an index of reference to each. I also decided that every time I did a new post about a Story, I'd make sure it was tagged as fully as possible and linked to the relevant index page, so that I wouldn't then have a big job to do, to catch up later. You will no doubt already have a structure in mind - perhaps a different area per each story paper - and I think that having this structure clear in your mind before you start will very definitely help with getting the site worked out. But then you already have experience of writing books and organizing them in the way that suits best,so you will know all this I'm sure!

[Phoenix]

Another thought to consider is sharing your work on an existing site. Drawbacks are that you'd have to find a sympathetic partner and even then fall-outs can still happen. There's also the problem that your work can get lost, especially if the other person is charging ahead with their posts.

I take your point, Paw. I will, however, want to have total control, although I would also like Ray and others to be able to comment somewhere whenever he/they see(s) fit.

It appears that you will want to have your work look good and that can take up a lot of time as you will want scans to be of a good quality - straight, clear and positioned in such a way as to complement the text. Many sites get that wrong.

I agree that the way the material is presented needs to have a professional quality, and to be fair, the scans I get from my venerable Canon Lide scanner produce a very sharp image.

I am not aiming to suggest what you should include in terms of galleries of logos and so on. Rather I am saying that when a sudden new idea strikes, as it inevitably will, you need to be able to add it in without too much difficulty or having to wait for other people to sort stuff out for you.

I suppose that some of my uncertainty is surfacing because I'm not sure what the nature of a page is. When I'm going to type something that is destined for a printed book, I have a blank A4 page on screen. What I'm wondering is whether, when I start to write a book on line, the page will be a never-ending one, or am I being naive? Would a host of A4 pages be possible? Certainly that way I would be very comfortable with the arrangement, and it would presumably be easier for readers to locate any page they might want to read or reread.

You will no doubt already have a structure in mind

The structure that would suit me best would be a series of A4 pages that, as I suggest above, would allow people to read it as if it were a book. I'm going to have to wait until I see what Chris Dalton has in mind. He has asked me to send him an issue of The Wizard so he is probably going to experiment with various scans. He is coming over for a few days before Christmas so everything could be in place by New Year.

[Phoenix]

I'll buy the Liverpool Echo tomorrow to see if there is a report or a follow-up of some description, and let you know if so.

There wasn't any reference to the event in tonight's Liverpool Echo. However, there was half a page in the Preview: Theatre section of the What's On page that is of some interest. The paper's What's On writer, Kirsty McHale, is delighted to reveal that for five days between 28 June and 2 July next year teenage girls of the '70s and '80s will be able to relive their youth as Jackie the Musical is coming to the Liverpool Empire. The show will have a long way to go to surpass some presentations I've seen there, such as Johnny Cash, and the Everly Brothers on their reunion tour.

Apparently it is about a 50-something divorcee who goes back to her stash of Jackie magazines for the same reason she first read them forty years previously - to figure out the opposite sex! I wouldn't have thought that was too difficult!

[comixminx]

I am not aiming to suggest what you should include in terms of galleries of logos and so on. Rather I am saying that when a sudden new idea strikes, as it inevitably will, you need to be able to add it in without too much difficulty or having to wait for other people to sort stuff out for you.

I suppose that some of my uncertainty is surfacing because I'm not sure what the nature of a page is. When I'm going to type something that is destined for a printed book, I have a blank A4 page on screen. What I'm wondering is whether, when I start to write a book on line, the page will be a never-ending one, or am I being naive? Would a host of A4 pages be possible? Certainly that way I would be very comfortable with the arrangement, and it would presumably be easier for readers to locate any page they might want to read or reread.

You will no doubt already have a structure in mind

The structure that would suit me best would be a series of A4 pages that, as I suggest above, would allow people to read it as if it were a book. I'm going to have to wait until I see what Chris Dalton has in mind. He has asked me to send him an issue of The Wizard so he is probably going to experiment with various scans. He is coming over for a few days before Christmas so everything could be in place by New Year.

I think there are some options that you could consider so that you would effectively be producing A4 pages on screen. A blog wouldn't do that for you - the pages there really are 'never ending', in intention if not in practice. I thought it might make sense to create a new discussion thread to cover such topics so I have got further details under 'Non-comics discussion' here:
http://comicsuk.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=145&t=6816

[Phoenix]

I thought it might make sense to create a new discussion thread to cover such topics so I have got further details under 'Non-comics discussion' here:
viewtopic.php?f=145&t=6816

Thanks are due because I'm certainly grateful for all the suggestions that are being offered to help me get a website set up to do what I want it to do, and your discussion thread, comixminx, could well help others too who would like to have such a facility for sharing their thoughts on their own favourite comics/story papers.

[comixminx]

A further, and possibly more important, reason concerns my wish to get information about such story papers distributed without having to commit myself to putting it in book form, which frankly is a very expensive procedure. Currently I am writing This Was The Hotspur, which I am hoping to publish as a companion volume to This Was The Wizard. Similar companion volumes for Adventure, The Rover and The Skipper will however only appear on line, if at all. The volume I am preparing about the ten Thomsons' story papers for girls will also appear as a book, but I am less sure about a history of The Victor, the only picture story paper for boys that would have any chance of decent sales at the price I would have to charge for it, and to be honest, the same applies really to This Was The Hotspur, which will be a bit of a punt given that the boys who bought the paper every week as it was published will be at least in their mid-sixties by now.

One thing I was meaning to ask you, Phoenix, is about your comment on the expense of publishing a book. Are you mostly referring to the expense of printing (in which case, digital publication of some sort or another will reduce the majority of the expense involved), or the cost of your time & travel etc, or some other costs? If you have to pay for permission to reproduce extracts from the works you are writing about then that cost will never go away, for instance, and might even be larger if you were publishing digitally.

[comixminx]

I thought it might make sense to create a new discussion thread to cover such topics so I have got further details under 'Non-comics discussion' here:
viewtopic.php?f=145&t=6816

Thanks are due because I'm certainly grateful for all the suggestions that are being offered to help me get a website set up to do what I want it to do, and your discussion thread, comixminx, could well help others too who would like to have such a facility for sharing their thoughts on their own favourite comics/story papers.

I'm sure we are all motivated to help you (and others) share their thoughts effectively - it benefits us all!

[Phoenix]

One thing I was meaning to ask you, Phoenix, is about your comment on the expense of publishing a book. Are you mostly referring to the expense of printing (in which case, digital publication of some sort or another will reduce the majority of the expense involved), or the cost of your time & travel etc, or some other costs? If you have to pay for permission to reproduce extracts from the works you are writing about then that cost will never go away, for instance, and might even be larger if you were publishing digitally.

I never factor in any extra costs of the time/travel variety, comixminx, because apart from the fact that it simply never occurs to me to do so, most of the research work that I did for the two books I've published already I did in the eighties when the British Library was to be found at the back of the British Museum. I did it over several years during school holidays, even half terms, staying with my digs mate from university and his wife in High Wycombe. So in effect I have had all the necessary information about The Wizard, Adventure, The Rover, The Skipper, and The Blue Bird since that time. I didn't need to research The Hotspur as I had all the issues, either actuals or photocopies.

As far as Thomsons' story papers for girls is concerned, I didn't start collecting them until 2000, so the research work on those was done in the new British Library in St. Pancras. By this time my elder son, Andrew, was working in London, and living in an apartment near Canary Wharf, and I was working as a supply teacher so I was able to go down whenever I wanted, which was quite frequently. The research took a long time over many visits, largely because I hadn't acquired anything like the number of girls' papers that I have now.

I didn't decide to write Free Gifts In The Big Five until I had the vast majority of the gifts, many of which I bought from fellow collectors, and I sourced others in antique shops/centres, cigarette card fairs and via eBay. So clearly there have been several kinds of costs to me over the years, far too many to factor in to the price of my books. It seemed simpler to write that off and concentrate on getting back as much as possible of the money I had to pay out to have my books printed and bound. Thomsons themselves did all the arrangements in respect of Free Gifts In The Big Five (2005), and I had This Was The Wizard (2014) printed, bound and delivered by a firm in Stockport. The cover price of both books was determined when I was told how much the whole job was going to cost me. I have fully covered my costs with sales of Free Gifts In The Big Five. In fact I've only got 35 left out of 250. On the other hand, This Was The Wizard has some way to go before I start making a modest profit.

I've not had to pay anything for permission to reproduce extracts from the story papers that I'm writing about. When I first enquired about copyright costs, Martin Lindsay, the Head of Syndication and Licensing, simply asked me for two copies of my book for the firm's library. I checked in with him again for my second book and got the same request. I no longer have to worry about copyright because a week or so after I'd sent my recent books to Martin, not having had an acknowledgement, I rang him to find out if the parcel had arrived. It had, he'd thoroughly enjoyed reading one, and they'd been sent to the library. We then had a very pleasant chat for about a quarter of an hour at the end of which he asked, What are you and Ray doing next? I told him that we were looking to write a companion volume on The Hotspur and I was already doing the research for a book on the company's output for girls. He was delighted.

[comixminx]

...clearly there have been several kinds of costs to me over the years, far too many to factor in to the price of my books. It seemed simpler to write that off and concentrate on getting back as much as possible of the money I had to pay out to have my books printed and bound. Thomsons themselves did all the arrangements in respect of Free Gifts In The Big Five (2005), and I had This Was The Wizard (2014) printed, bound and delivered by a firm in Stockport. The cover price of both books was determined when I was told how much the whole job was going to cost me. I have fully covered my costs with sales of Free Gifts In The Big Five. In fact I've only got 35 left out of 250. On the other hand, This Was The Wizard has some way to go before I start making a modest profit.

I've not had to pay anything for permission to reproduce extracts from the story papers that I'm writing about. When I first enquired about copyright costs, Martin Lindsay, the Head of Syndication and Licensing, simply asked me for two copies of my book for the firm's library. I checked in with him again for my second book and got the same request. I no longer have to worry about copyright because a week or so after I'd sent my recent books to Martin, not having had an acknowledgement, I rang him to find out if the parcel had arrived. It had, he'd thoroughly enjoyed reading one, and they'd been sent to the library. We then had a very pleasant chat for about a quarter of an hour at the end of which he asked, What are you and Ray doing next? I told him that we were looking to write a companion volume on The Hotspur and I was already doing the research for a book on the company's output for girls. He was delighted.

Ah, well, if the main costs have been the printing and binding then yes, digital publishing could make all the difference. The acquisition of the story papers and so on themselves - well, that's the cost of our hobby!

Very glad to hear such positive interest from Thomsons. It contrasts with Egmont's benign neglect - at least the latter seem to turn a blind eye to sites such as mine. And of course that could itself be so much worse, if we were either subject to cease-and-desist orders or to large fees.

[Phoenix]

Ah, well, if the main costs have been the printing and binding then yes, digital publishing could make all the difference.

How, comixminx?

The acquisition of the story papers and so on themselves - well, that's the cost of our hobby!

Indeed it is. You will never catch me complaining about those costs, although from time to time I do wince a bit when I discover just how great a proportion of one of my successful eBay bids I will have to pay.

It contrasts with Egmont's benign neglect - at least the latter seem to turn a blind eye to sites such as mine.

And why would they not? You are not doing them any harm. Quite the opposite really.

[comixminx]

Ah, well, if the main costs have been the printing and binding then yes, digital publishing could make all the difference.

How, comixminx?

If you are making your book available digitally on your own website, then no need to pay for physical printing, binding, distribution, etc - no upfront costs, and if the website is free or cheap then perhaps no direct costs at all. You might even be able make an ebook version available through a site like Lulu, which would allow a customer to order a print on demand version if they want - at which point the price they pay would cover the cost of printing that one copy, and it would be sent straight to them (again at their cost, I should think).