busybee comics

So, “Invasion” is the last story that I plan on putting in a second Unity compilation, current working title being “Distribution.” But in order to make Book 2 worth printing, I need to get more sales of Book 1, not to mention more readers who will want to buy Book 2!

What can you do to help? Well, here’s some options:Post reviews of Book 1 on the Amazon product pagePublicly follow the comic on Comic Rocket (and, if you’re feeling generous, Belfry)If you post on other webcomic forums and there’s a thread asking about what comics you read, feel free to link to busybee comics!

And of course, anything else you can think of would also be great.

Thanks, everyone!

So, my wrists are in bad shape again, and there’s another multi-page comic project I’m supposed to be working on which has a pretty firm deadline in just two weeks, so I think updates might be more sporadic than usual here for a while.

Like I said earlier, I’m busy getting a comic together for a ‘zine, which is going to hopefully be sold by one of my Meetup cronies at Sakura-Con. In the meantime I’ve got plenty of sketches from the Meetup group that I can post as filler.

(I will probably not be at Sakura-Con myself, but I live just up the street from the convention center, so maybe I will be at a nearby party or two? We’ll see!)

Oh, and you may have noticed the new-ish site layout. I’ve tried making it a bit more modern (including flexible layout support), but let me know if anything’s broken!

Hopefully I’ll be starting my comics back up again soon. Two of my three projects-with-a-deadline (six-page comic for an anthology, and a three-minute soundtrack for a commercial(!)) are now basically done, and the third one is blocked on me getting that bit of inspiration needed to make it actually happen.

As far as my wrists go, they’re pretty much under control right now, thanks to massage therapy (although I could still use a bit more work on my wrists specifically) and getting an even fancier, more-expensiver keyboard at work.

Aside from my wrists and my lack of motivation at work and my usual anxiety problems coming back for stupid reasons and my inability to record a simple song by the deadline this weekend and me feeling like a wreck in general, everything’s great!

Just thought I’d share.

On the plus side, stay tuned for a special surprise on Saturday.

(I guess now it isn’t as much of a surprise. Still, it’s special.)

I’m taking some time off from drawing to give my wrists a chance to heal. So, guest comics! Just email them to fluffy at beesbuzz dot biz and include how you want to be credited and any website you want a link to.

This is open to everyone. Don’t say, “I’d draw something but I don’t know how to draw.” I have no idea what I’m doing either. As the ever-wise Jake the Dog says, “Sucking at something is the first step to being sort of good at something.”

My wrists are a lot better now but I still need some time to regroup my thoughts regarding Invasion, and anyway I’ll be traveling for a good chunk of the next week so I don’t think I’ll have a chance to really work on it anyway.

But still feel free to submit guest art if you want!

The end of the story is in sight! Which means that the end of book 2 is as well!

However, my wrists are taking a turn for the worse again.

Some people have been asking me what my plans for book 2 are. Here is what will definitely be in it:Stories:PlanetfallBreederMeatBlackoutInvasionAdditional content:Endnotes (i.e. the popup text from every comic, just like in Book 1)A Young Sapient’s Hiero Primer

What else may be in it, time/ability/energy permitting:Additional bonus strips with humorous intent (for once)Maps:Inside UnityOutside UnityBonus artworkSelf-deprecating whining

The current plan is to finish Invasion, then post a Kickstarter for preorders. As soon as the Kickstarter goes live I’ll start working on the book itself. Kickstarter backers will definitely get a much sweeter deal than the people who will miss it and will, as such, need to buy copies from Amazon at a later time.

Meanwhile, if you want Book I to tide you over until then, remember you can always buy a copy or ten!

You can probably guess what I’m going to say here, but I’ll say it anyway. I’m busy with real life, my wrists suck, and I haven’t had a lot of time or energy to work on comics. There’ll also probably be a pretty big gap in August since my parents will be visiting for a couple weeks and I’ll be doing stuff with them (and it’s my work studio that doubles as the guest bedroom, so I won’t really have any space to work in for a while either).

On the plus side, if you’re in the Seattle area, I’ll have a piece up in the Center on Contemporary Art’s member show from July 18 — August September Somethingth! So if you have a chance you can go and check it out.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be able to finish Invasion in a reasonably timely manner, and then it’s off to Kickstarter to deal with book 2!

So there’s only four strips left. I also already have the book mostly laid out and typeset - it just needs those last four strips, some chapter title pages, and for me to get around to doing whatever bonus content I feel like doing.

Those of you who preordered the book last time may recall that I did it through Kickstarter, which is a great resource for people who need the financing to do a book run. However, from what I learned last time, I really don’t need that financing, and for the purpose of this book printing I don’t think it would really be all that beneficial to anyone.

Essentially, using Kickstarter means:At least another month’s delay on the production of the book (since final proofing can’t start until after the funding period has completed, or longer if a stretch goal means adding more to the book itself)A lot of extra stuff that doesn’t help the book get done at all (such as having to produce a promotional video)More time and resources have to go to the promotion of the Kickstarter itself, figuring out stretch goals, rewards, etc.Afterwards, a lot more work goes into the distribution of the final product (creating/packing rewards, handling fulfillment, etc.)

And in the end, while there’s a bit more opportunity for promotion of the final product during the crowd-funding stage due to the (albeit rapidly-shrinking) window of interest people have for these things, the end result is that any sales I make via Kickstarter don’t count towards sales tracked in the traditional retail channels.

So, what I’m thinking of doing this time around is just producing the book completely on my own (I have all the resources necessary for that) and handling presales through Amazon.

The plus sides to those who want the book are:

• You get it faster, and shipped quicker and more cheaply (especially if you have Amazon Prime)
• There’s only one place to keep track of its existence at the outset
• When the listing goes up you’ll be able to preorder it and then forget about it until it actually ships (and less stress on me in case people move, decide to cancel their order, etc.)

The minus sides to you are:

• International orders might be a bit more problematic
• It’ll be a little more complicated to get the book signed/drawn in/etc.
• Fewer “warm fuzzies” via Kickstarter (although on the plus side you won’t get spammed by every little frantic update I post to the backer blog, either)

So, if you have an opinion, what do you think? My preference should be pretty obvious from the above, but I’m willing to entertain reasons why I should still go via Kickstarter.

So, here’s the state of affairs on the book-exclusive bonus contents (and the book as a whole):The appendix is coming along well (although more questions to answer would be welcomed!), and I suspect this is one of the only comic books to use BibTeX for its bibliography. Or even to have a bibliography.The bonus art section has a bunch of stuff in it, but it could always use more! Send me your fanarts for inclusion! (I will also post them on the site.)I am having a hell of a time getting LaTeX to cooperate with my custom Hiero font and I’m not sure just how much I want to explain about a language which I pretty much make up as I go along anyway. Does anyone feel strongly about how extensive this should be? Because it’s looking like I’m going to have to do some goofy stuff to make it work.Come to think of it, any goofy stuff might also make it difficult to provide an ePub/Kindle/whatever version, so I guess I’ll be using inlined bitmaps or something. That might actually be easier to deal with anyway.Who the hell uses LaTeX to typeset a comic book, anyway?

Input would be appreciated, as always.

Current book status:

• Two more strips to be drawn. They’re kind of ambitious so they might take a while, though.
• I’m having someone else do the chapter title pages. They’re looking quite fantastic so far, but I don’t know how long they’ll take to get done.
• Currently the Hiero language primer is 7 pages long (including a dictionary), the Q&A is 8 pages long (not counting the bibliography), and there are 9 pages of bonus art. It’d be awesome to get more bonus art, guest comics, and so forth submitted by readers. I should also probably plan on drawing some book-exclusive bonus comics or something.
• I haven’t even started working on the book cover yet. I have a few general ideas but nothing’s gelling just yet.
• I can start presales of the book as soon as I have the final pagecount (which depends on Q&A and bonus art) and at least preliminary cover art (which depends entirely on me). I suspect I will be able to have the book itself printed and shipping by December if all goes well.

If you want to make art to be included in book 2, it is time to do that! Try to get it to me by the first week of October, since the book is hopefully going to be proof-ready soon after.

Holy crap that was intense. I think I’m going to take a break from Unity for a while.

The book itself is almost done, too; the chapter title pages are coming along great, the bonus content is complete (aside from any additional fanart people want to submit, hint hint), and all that’s left for me to do is to design a cover and get the dang thing proofed (proved? proven?). Which reminds me, I really ought to figure out a timetable for the printing process itself.

Also, very soon I will hopefully be able to start taking presales on Amazon!

Yep, I’ve fallen behind on comics right now. Here’s the deal with what’s going on:

• Work has me crazy busy (and tired), and I’m changing teams soon so this is probably not going to let up in the immediate future.
• Book 2 is nearly ready to print — all that’s left is proofing and the resulting color correction — but in the meantime my usual printer has up and disappeared from the face of the planet so I’m scrambling to find another printer that can handle the job. If anyone knows of a short-run printer that can do custom trim sizes (or at least 8"x9" as a standard size), perfect binding, CMYK printing, and runs of 200 or less for around $6/copy, please let me know. (The book is 154 pages, of which 100 are in color.)
• I have a bunch of comic ideas (including a new series) but no time to work on them. Also, my Wacom tablet stopped working so I’m limping along with my UC Logic one (which is very fiddly and has a very different feel) and I also finally got around to upgrading to the latest version of Photoshop (from CS4) so there’s a bunch of relearning and tuning I have to do, since a lot has changed in the meantime. Fortunately, both tool changes seem to be going okay.

So, yeah, if you know of a short-run printer who can do what I need, please let me know. For those who have already preordered through Amazon, the ship date is very somewhat likely to change, but don’t worry, your credit card won’t be charged until the shipment actually happens.

So, today’s picture isn’t a comic per se, but the most recent reason why book 2 has been delayed for a few more weeks. The printer had trouble with my PDF, and thanks to a series of miscommunications they ended up converting it to a bunch of RGB images to print out instead of trying to fix the PDF structure (or get a better structured PDF from me). The end result is that the text is all speckled and fuzzy and it’s definitely not to my standards (it basically looks like it was printed out on a cheap inkjet printer).

Part of this is my fault for using LaTeX for my book production process; it’s known to generate sub-optimal PDFs, and last time around I think Ken had used Acrobat’s optimizer to work around the issues (but this time that knowledge wasn’t transferred on to the person doing the actual printing — the business has gotten a lot larger and as a result, Ken has had to delegate a lot of stuff to less-knowledgeable employees). Also, Ken’s been completely professional and way more patient with me than I deserve through all this, so don’t take any of this as a mark against Keness.

In any case, my timetable was somewhat optimistic before and was based on them being able to stick to their schedule and us only having to go through one full proofing cycle; now it’ll take a minimum of two but I’ll probably need to do three.

The end result is that book 2 won’t be coming out until sometime in December at least. Sorry about that.

As always, if you’ve preordered through Amazon, your credit card won’t be charged until it actually ships. (And this is why I’m still happy about my decision to not do a Kickstarter this time around.)

Note that after preorders ship I will be setting up my own web store and handling fulfillment myself due to some inefficiencies with Amazon fulfillment that I’d rather not get into a rant about at this time but suffice it to say that unless you sell a few copies per week you’re better off just doing your own PayPal cart or whatever.

Anyway, now that that unpleasantness is out of the way, the other unpleasantness is that I’m not really into doing comics for now. I’ve taken on a lot more responsibility at work lately, which is good for my career but not so good for my free time. I’ve also been filling up what free time I have with working on music, both doing soundtrack work for others and working on a third Sockpuppet album. So, my attention is diverted elsewhere and I’m just not really in a comic-making mood these days.

I’m feeling depressed again and Good Things just isn’t doing it for me, so I thought I’d try something different.

I got the third proof of book 2 today, and it’s fantastic! Time to print this mother-lover.

You should preorder it. Preorder the heck out of it.

This is when everyone buys everything, right? How about a couple of books?

Copies of Book 2 are finally en route to me. It’s been a frustrating experience with way more delays than should have happened, and I’m sorry that it’s unlikely that preorders will get to people by Christmas, but at least they’ll be arriving soon.

I neglected to mention earlier but the books finally came from the printer, and the preorder batch is en route to Amazon right now. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like people will be receiving it until after Christmas (since it won’t reach the warehouse until the 24th), so if you were planning on getting it for that purpose, I apologize. But considering that pretty much everything that could go wrong did, I’m just happy to have actually gotten the book out this year (primarily for tax reasons).

When I get back to Seattle I can also start doing direct sales to people, which I think works out better for everyone. I can also start on the ebook version, which I will probably sell via my Gumroad store, perhaps with an ebook+physical copy bundle option if Gumroad supports that.

As of a few days ago, Amazon is actually shipping out the books. So, if you were waiting for it to be really real before buying it, you can do so.