SPACE – brief report

Posted on April 27, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Back from SPACE.  People love free stuff.  I think maybe I pushed the free book too hard & didn’t push the sales hard enough.  But hopefully the comic sampler will plant the seeds.

I got to sit as a panelist on a talk about the future of comics.  On the one hand I don’t make sense as an authority on that, but I guess I am a bit of an authority on the replacement of physical sales with digital sales & different cultures respect for intellectual property in general.

Did a little guest spot on Guttertrash’s SPACE podcast.  We’ll see if it makes the cut into their show.

I might have made a couple contacts for making new comics.  We’ll see what happens.

Time to get back to work.

Posted in comics, daily news | Tagged , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Working

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Got a lot done today.

Packed up my stuff for going to SPACE tomorrow.  I think I might take some Silberspy masks to take photos there.

Sent out follow-up emails for Sarah June & Carta (it’s been ten weeks since the promos went out, so it’s about time to stop on that).

Sent out the emails to video outlets to promote that stuff.  We’ll see what happens.  One place wrote back about wanting to use the one Aarktica video but wanting it to have Closed Captioning on it.  I have noticed this requirement before & been confused by it.

Assembled about 50 mini-comics.

Bought new rotary blades for my paper cutter.

Talked to a fellow label owner who has taken an interesting twist on the digital only route.  He takes the $2500 he would spend on a physical release & gives it to the band as tour support for them to do a month long tour.  Wow.  That’s probably a good idea, but I’m still a little scared of the idea of just giving somebody money like that when it doesn’t seem like it will ever recoup even in theory.

Posted in comics, daily news, music | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

I treat you like a machine because you are a machine.

Posted on April 22, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

So I finished printing the comics today.  The sampler has one less story that I’d hoped for due to time constraints & I’ll get that changed around when it comes in.  Probably have to print some more when I get home & have more toner.  My printer is complaining that it’s worked to hard & I tell it, “I treat you like a machine because you are a machine.”  I don’t anthropomorphize machines; I mechamorphize living things.

I talked to Bob Freville a bit today about the possibility of doing a Hemo soundtrack once things get set for the film to be licensed & released.  I guess I just want too much stuff on my mind.

Right now my plans for the next ten days are to assemble all the comics, get the final mixing/mastering & artwork done for Remora: Mecha, encode the back catalog for the download shop, send out final waves of promo for the Carta & Sarah June, send out the promo blast for the music videos, send out the comics for review, finish re-working the website, work on recording my super secret piece of music, shoot a couple videos, write some comic scripts, work on some questions for QRD interviews, work on mixing the record with my son.  So the usual.  I need to get some things off of my to do list.

Posted in daily news, music | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Cops & Crooks, SLFvsSLCNTN, price points, Vigilant

Posted on April 21, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

So I got in the Cops half of the artwork for Cops & Crooks & tweeked all the artwork & got the layout done & that printed today.  Printed out a bunch of other comics today & ordered new toner.  Not sure if I have enough in my house to print the number of comics I wanted.  I think it’s about 350 more comics I want to print.  Assembling them is going to be awesome as well.

Talked to Nic Slaton (slicnaton) about trying to do another Small Life Form versus slicnaton recording session.  Last time we had a bit of issues with tons of clicks in the recording, but I have since figured out ways around that problem.  So this time out it should work well.

I’ve been noticing that since I put up the new releases available as digital albums for $5 that I haven’t seen an increase in sales, but half the sales of these releases are the downloads.  So it turns into number crunching time to see if I’m screwing myself:
Digital Sale through Silber
$5 – $0.50 (Paypal fee) = $4.50 income
Digital sale through traditional outlets (after all fees)
$5.79 (iTunes), $5.38 (Amazon), $3.57 (eMusic), $0.003 (Spotify album play)
Domestic Physical Sale:
$12 – $0.65 (Paypal fee) – $0.25 (bubble mailer) -$1.73 (shipping) – $3.25 (cost of disc after all expenses) = $6.12 income
International Physical Sale:
$14 – $0.85 (Paypal fee) – $0.25 (bubble mailer) -$3.96 (shipping) – $3.25 (cost of disc after all expenses) = $5.59 income
Distributor Physical Sale (aka retail)
$8 – $0.10 (packaging) – $1.00 (shipping) – $3.25 (cost of disc after all expenses) = $3.65 income
But of course there is the catch of going to the post office costs $3.50 in mileage on my car (7 miles round trip).  So I still feel like the $5 price point is approximately fair to me & more than fair to the fans.

I wrote half of a script for a new comic called Vigilant.  It’s loosely inspired by a documentary I saw today about a group of teenagers in the UK terrorizing child molesters by doing things like cutting off an arm & lighting houses on fire & smashing heads with bricks.  Supposedly crime in that town has dropped over 50% since the kids started being their own police force.

I counted it up & I’ve gotten 14 mini-comics actually finished & printed in one year (since SPACE last year).  I feel that’s a pretty decent record.  I plan to beat it next year.

Posted in comics, daily news, music | Tagged , , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Web Repairs & Comic News.

Posted on April 19, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

A lot done today.

Finally got the Silber header/banner on the website to look right in Internet Explorer & Firefox at the same time.  Woo-freaking-hoo!  Gotta populate it through the site.

Got the layout set for printing Worms #6 & Mecha #1.

Wrote the intro things for each series for the mini-comic sampler/anthology.  Just waiting a day or two on that to see if the short for Marked comes in.

Got the artwork for the “crooks” portion of Cops & Crooks.

Got an artist interested in my as yet unscripted comic “Built” about a robot fighting his masters & programming.

Posted in comics, daily news | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Music Chit Chat & Comics

Posted on April 18, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

As always, not as much done today as I’d hoped for.

Did the layout for the test versions of Worms #6 & Mecha #1 & a lot of the test versions for the comic anthology/sampler.  Wrote a script for Mecha for the anthology & built it together from Johnny’s original character sketches.  A lot more to go on those.

Talked to Brian McKenzie a bit about the upcoming stuff for Electric Bird Noise & Wet Teens.  Stuff is getting a little insane lately when I look at how much I’m putting on my plate.

Talked to Sarah June about her doing a free promotional EP.  She’s actually going to be based out of Boston doing some gigs for a month, so if you are in that area give her a shout about where she can find a last minute gig.

Talked to PD Wilder & he’s going to be touring a bit in July.  Trying to figure out about lining up a couple gigs for him on the east coast.

I got new RAM for my printer & installed it.  I know, most printers don’t have RAM you can upgrade & the average person would never need to.  But I think it’ll increase my printing speed for the mini-comics & I have a lot I need to print this week for SPACE.  Literally I want to make up 1000.  Which is kinda ridiculous.  But that includes the sixty copies of the six new comics for promo use & will have me stocked up for the next year or so as far as potential sales.

I’ve also been having a number of conversations via email lately with other labels.  Trying to get things going for transmitting ideas for promotions & increasing money flow.  Expanding branding in other territories (notably Italy, France, & Japan).  It’s interesting these days how some labels have high profiles & few sales while others have low profiles & plenty of sales.

Posted in comics, daily news, music | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Getting things done

Posted on April 17, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Alright, getting things done.

I got mostly caught up on my emails from the past couple of weeks.  & got out this weeks press/radio follow-ups for Sarah June/Carta.  Next week will be the last official week on their promo campaigns.

I got done my current wave of research in YouTube playlists for promoting the Silber videos.  I’ll be acting on the info “soon”.  But it’s a bit hard to know exactly when with all I’m trying to get done right now.

For some reason I got a boost of orders today, but not of a single release (which might make sense since the Carta & Sarah June just got some high profile reviews in Black & Side-Line).  Just random orders, just weird for them to all come at once.

In the digital shop side of things, I have noticed people do seem to be taking advantage of it.  So I’m pretty hopeful about things for it.  I just need to encode the rest of the shop.

I got the original audio files from Irata today for re-issuing their disc in the Silber digital store.  Due to technical problems the highest res files available are 160kbps MP3s instead of wav files (the CD was actually created from these files).  I’m excited about working with them & pretty much everyone that is slated for the upcoming stuff.  It’s pretty great to get to work with people in a way that is not financially risky & seems mutually beneficial.

Got a letter from Dave Sim today proposing a new collaboration with him.  I don’t know that I really have time to do it, but then again, he’s Dave Sim so I’ll make it happen.

I was going to do this really retarded Silberspy video today at the car wash (did I mention it was retarded?), but ended up getting the mask broken before the video happened.  Sad day.  I know I have like seven of the masks now, but they’re all still special to me.

Those of you that hang around me way too much know I have a really cheap cell phone & that I’ve been recording demos on it for the past two years or so.  Well, it’s got about 40 songs on it & it ran out of space (internal card, no export features).  So I guess I need to start working on my album so I can clear room.  I’m thinking about an eventual sequel to “songs i sing” as that’s what most of the material is like.

Got the credit card bill today that had the manufacturing costs for the Sarah June disc on it.  Paying with the credit card always makes me feel like I pay three times because first I get the bill, then I get the bill for the credit card, then I get my bank statement.  So in my mind it feels like I spent $6000 instead of $2000.

Tomorrow’s goals: mini-comics layouts completed for Worms #6 & Mecha #1.  Possibly some work on the web banner working properly in Internet Explorer.  Possibly encoding a couple albums for the digital download shop.

Posted in daily news, music | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Now Functioning

Posted on April 16, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell

Okay, my computer is working again.  It’s embarrassing how important it is for me to work.

Wrote the first draft for XO #7. 

Been working on the questions for the QRD guitarist interview series.  Anyone have any questions they’d like to see guitarists asked?  Really gear oriented questions.

Got a bunch of catch-up work to do.  I’m hoping things’ll be caught up to where I wanted to be last November by the end of April.

Posted in music | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Myspace Money?

Posted on April 13, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell
It’s getting to the point that I really need my laptop to start working.  It ends up that when I copied over my Pagemaker files to my back-up hard drive, it doesn’t keep the links correctly so to print the mini-comics for SPACE I’d have to re-link about 2000 image files, which I don’t want to do if I don’t have to.I got a weird legal letter from MySpace to me care of my publishing company saying they owe me money.  I need to look into if it’s a scam as I’ve never heard of anybody else getting something like this?  I guess in the fine print of the MySpace agreement they have the right to exploit your music & I guess that means they did, which is exciting.  Though their selection is a little nutty & unexpected.  Miss Massive Snowflake’s instrumental cover of “The One I’ve Been Waiting For.”  Anyone know anything about this happening?Last night I saw Star Trek III for the first time.  How did I not pick up on Kirk & Spock being lovers before?

Posted in comics, daily news, music | Tagged , , | Comments Off

Comments are closed.

Actual guitar playing.

Posted on April 12, 2010 by Brian John Mitchell
I actually played guitar a few hours today.  Nice to get back to what things are about.  Thinking about doing some ultra-minimalist slowcore cover songs with videos.  Put that in my long “to do list” I suppose.I’ve been thinking lately about buying a steel dobro.  I hear the metal guitars work really well for picking pattern stuff, but not so good for chordal stuff.  So I’m torn.  Clearly those stainless steel guitars look freaking cool.

My replacement power supply for my laptop had the wrong polarity.  Hopefully it didn’t fry the motherboard (which I hear can happen).  Bad year for Brian’s laptop….

Posted in daily news, music | Tagged | Comments Off

Comments are closed.