Figures of Text

First, the saga of the comics.

We ordered a somewhat ambitious print run of 100 copes of Fish for Fish from Comicxpress in the US about a month ago. Shipping should have taken two weeks. Even if there was a delay, we should still get them in plenty of time for the Edition Book Arts book fair.

Right?

On the 23rd of June, according to the parcel tracking, the comics arrived at the sorting office in Portlaoise. They should have arrived in Cork the next day.

We waited, and waited.

Then we started ringing customer services. They told us that the comics must have been taken by customs, and we’d have them in a day or two. The parcel tracking page on the web still said the comics were in Portlaoise. We asked about this, and were told that customs is run by little gnomes who clamber out of trapdoors at night and steal parcels at random from the shelves, and they don’t bother scanning barcoded items.

This was worrying, but we still had plenty of time. It’s not like delivery could be stalled for another whole week, right?

After the weekend, we rang the customs office directly. They’d never taken the comics.

For the next week, I was on the phone to customer services an average of three times a day. They managed to find our parcel again a week after it arrived (on the 30th), then lost it again. At one point, they claimed it was in one of four possible places, when it was actually being sent back to the US. Another time, I discovered that the parcel had tripled in weight between being scanned the first time and the second time a week later.

Two days before the con, we still had no comics, and were debating not showing up at all. We discovered that a printer in Cork could do a rush job. Trusting to the powers of irony, we ordered another twenty copies, ensuring that the original hundred copies would therefore show up the next day.

They didn’t.

They did, however, show up on the morning of the con, at the GPO in Dublin. To be fair to customer services, they worked wonders in getting the comics from the UK (in a fit of genius, the sorting office had found the parcel that they’d spent a week searching for, then decided to return it to the sender) and redirecting them to a place where we could collect them. The downside of this heroic effort was that we turned up at the book fair with six times more comics than intended.

Edition Book Arts felt a lot like a games con, except I knew no-one there, which was a very unsettling experience. We were seated next to veteran Paddy Brown, who’s doing a comic version of the Ulster cycle of myth; Paddy made us feel welcome, but it was still a nerve-wracking experience.

Neither deli nor I have any previous experience with the comics scene, so we had no idea how to push our comic. We sold quite a few copies to friends, and a grand total of… one copy to someone who didn’t already know us. Ah, emotional blackmail and nepotism.

Overall, I’d describe the experience as ‘educational’. We didn’t disgrace ourselves with our first foray into self-publishing, but we’ve still got a lot to learn. We made a few contacts at the fair that will prove useful, and it’s good to be able to say that we did it.

Now, anyone want to buy a comic? We’ve got a hundred of the damn things left!

Trackback URL