Why I Have Not Reprinted Those Minicomics

This week I received another sweet, out-of-the-blue email from someone who'd read my minicomics about rafting down the Grand Canyon and wanted to know if they could buy hard copies anywhere.

I love and also dread these emails.

It makes me so happy to know that people are still finding my work years after I've put it out into the world, bothering to write and tell me they liked it, and offering to give me money so they can own a copy for themselves. What's not to love about that? Ideal scenario, if you ask me.

But most of my travelogue minis have been out of print for years! Shameful! I want to give the people what they want! So I run off all full of piss and vinegar thinking "I really should reprint those comics. How hard can it be?"

And then I hunt down the original production files and find they look like this:

😬😬😬

I even synced all these files to Dropbox which means I can't go off of which one was accessed most recently! AGH!

The truth is I've let these minis go out of print for a variety of reasons:

• I fell off doing conventions in 2019, so there wasn't a lot of pressure to have them redone by a particular date
• Even when I was doing shows, I was moving toward selling more graphic novels like Baggywrinkles and 100 Demon Dialogues, so I wasn't as reliant on minicomic sales to make ends meet
• The cost/benefit ratio was really hard to justify! I'd spend $2.90 printing up a copy of the book, so I'd sell them for $8 (retail usually being 3x the cost of production), which meant that if I wholesaled copies somewhere at the standard rate of 50% off, I was walking away with a profit of $1.10—not exactly a bill-paying endeavor
• I've moved house a bunch in the last year and find myself baffled over what to do with my minicomic collection, so the idea of other people wanting to voluntarily acquire minicomics is somewhat alien
• I've moved away from Portland so I can't just waltz down to my printer and futz with the files on site until they look right
• There's massive paper shortages right now! Who's to say they could even print them if I asked!!
• I work with several distributors now, so I get caught up thinking about how I need to get them printed in Portland but then split up and mailed to several different locations
• If I did want to find a different, local-to-Ojai printer (one who might even be able to do them for cheaper than $2.90 a pop!), I'd have to go through the rigamarole of finding the right paper weights and specs all over again and then I'd still have to ship books to these different distro locations and and and--

You get the idea. I get overwhelmed and I avoid it some more until the next time I get a sweet email out of the blue and then the cycle repeats again.

The whole reason I'm writing this blog post, though, is that writing about these avoidant spirals often holds the key to getting out of them. I have the financial resources to get these books back in print right now as more of a public service than a smart business decision. This week has also brought with it a little more executive function than I've had at my disposal over the last month (maybe 15% instead of -5000%? I'LL TAKE IT) so I feel like I should make hay while the sun shines.

In conclusion: I just used the momentum of writing this post to call my printer in Portland for the first time in three years and they actually still have the production files on hand???

So I guess there's a reprint coming our way! How about that! IT WORKED.

Thanks for being my nebulous cloud of accountability assistants. You're worth every penny.

<3

L