Happy Holidays!

Whatever or whenever you're celebrating, may you have lots of friends, family, food and brights lights -- and JUST enough snow for snowballs.

The AFTERDEAD gang posed for the attached card.

Donna Barr

I just sent this email to a bookstore in response to their youtube description of another funnel site (keeping authors going through one gateway):

Hi -- I'm joining IndieBound.org at your Facebook (video) suggestion.

Now -- I love independent bookstores. But as an author, I can't afford to lock myself into one seller base. I use Lulu.com, Dimestoreproductions.com, Booksurge.com, Amazon -- whatever it takes.

Dimestore and Booksurge work to keep customer costs and carbon footprint down by direct ordering. A retailer can get POD books at near wholesale through Lulu or Booksurge.

However, any retailer that tries to funnel authors through one gateway -- and penalizes those authors for refusing to use only one gateway -- is going to find authors selling everywhere except that gateway -- and the one with the gate ends up being the only one behind it. Even Diamond Comics is figuring this out (say what you will about them, they're trying).

I WANT to keep small independent bookstores running. But can you use POD the way it was meant to be used -- without distributors, without returns and shredding?

I know Amazon makes you crazy -- but it fills a huge customer need. Indie bookstores worked with distributors to limit our customer contact and sales. Why go to your bookstore when they can only get it on Amazon? By using Lulu and Booksurge you can get the Amazon rates -- near wholesale -- without distribution or extra fees, or order limits. You can compete.

It's where it's going. Help keep indie bookstores strong by joining where the authors are going."

Visit Donna Barr's The Little Store

Another blog entry yanked out of an email. A reader contacted me about a children's charity book a colleague was putting together. I told the reader I had a few pages that had only appeared in a mini (I was going to say "very limited" mini, but that's a redundancy).

He wrote back saying the publisher would probably want original work, even if it did appear in a mini. I wrote back and said that if the guy wasn't paying, he should be on his knees to all the nice artists, crying, "Thank you! Thank you!"

Dear retailers:

PLEASE put the left-over Desert Peaches and Stinzs and Afterdeads in the Bargain Boxes!!! Even better, if you get a damaged copy, don't waste time and money sending it back -- give it to a likely reader.

They run right back for $35 to $85 in books. But then, the savvy sellers amongst you already know that.

See the little "Donate" button over to the left?

Even if you don't plan to do anything with it, go look at it.

Future good things are coming, and that donate button may be the only way I'll get paid. I don't need a lot of money -- I knew this financial mess was coming, and I prepared for it with lifstyle -- but the less I have to earn running around taking pictures of local schoolkids or the dump or disarticulated feet, the more time I'll have to DRAW STORIES AND GET THEM TO MY READERS.

I mean, more than usually.

There are at least TWO things my readers totally missed, or only just recently guessed:

1. When I was hinting like a mad thing that Udo was Jewish, NOBODY got it (okay, one friend in theater got it).

2. Only very recently has ONE reader (congrats!) asked me if I was extrapolating from Maus when I wrote Desert Peach #26, "Miki."

This new schedule is working so good.

Computer: every day except Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Makes it easier for the solar panel and battery to provide more of the power for the laptop.

Tuesday: Other art-related stuff.
Thursday: All that household crap that piles up.
Sunday: Day off. PERIOD.

4:00 pm: ALL activities stop except for art and writing. Unless I've got a reporting deadline, and those go fast.

I remember how much fun I had with readers' ideas and suggestions.

I just swiped the phrase "a closet intellectual" from 2 posts ago for use in the story I'm working on now.

Working as a journalist up here, I always warn people they're talking to a reporter (I want a Borodino with a "Press" card in it!). But they still tell me everything and everything, and I have to ask them, "Is that a quote? Is that for the record?"

A lot of artists are struggling now -- but when have we not? "Health care - what's that?" Fancy SUV -- LOL! We probably can keep our heads above water because we've always been up to our neck in it.

I've always kept a group of creators around me, who all depend on each other in emergencies. One of us -- a woman -- is "engaged" to me ("When everybody's gone, let's move in together and share costs, so nobody ends up alone -- which is dangerous for the old.") There are farms and communes and friends in this network.