What to do with my cartoons now? I could go back to the notion of submitting to magazines, but the more I thought about self publishing my own book, the more appealing it sounded. For one thing, I would retain all the rights to my cartoons which at the time sounded like a good idea. I started researching and discovered what I needed to do to put this in motion: I would need to copyright the cartoons, get an ISBN number as well as a barcode, and then find a company to print my book. As it turned out, all of this was easy to do. So after a few months and a somewhat depleted savings account, I had my own book of cartoons in hand (actually, boxes of them).
The last thing I had to do (or so I thought) was to get a website to promote and sell my book. I will admit, at this point, I thought the hard part was over. I had this naive notion that somehow through the internet people would find my book, and it would just start selling; that just by word of mouth cartoon fans would find it and want it, but that hasn’t been the case. People may want it, but they first have to find out that it exists. The truth is, it takes a lot of hard work to market a book.
So what have I done the last two years to get the book out there? Mainly I have been setting up at festivals, art walks, and the like which has been successful, but on a limited basis. I also contacted a few locally owned bookstores and gift shops which have agreed to stock my book. But the problem still remains that if no one knows about it, they don’t know to look for it.
This brings me to the end of 2013 – happy that I was able to sell the books that I did, but wondering if I had made a mistake in self publishing. In Part 4, I’ll discuss what further steps I’ve taken to try and remedy the situation. Thanks for visiting.