Author: dougsamupress

Looks like I have three stores going. Two Society6 and one here at WordPress with Woo. There’s Instagram and Facebook integration for a few items. Square seems to be the most useful for in-person selling-a-thing using that little plastic doohickey. WordPress and Woo like Stripe.

For a time back there, I couldn’t access the previous Society6 store so set up a second Society6 store. There’s just no way to merge them. I think I’ll press ahead focusing one of those Society6 stores as samupress/LondOntLife focused -images and prints- with the other as personal work.

Managing the inventory at Square – to use the in-person plastic box payment system is a PITA. Once setup though it feeds the Woo inventory and Instagram/Facebook access. Don’t naively, not-understandingly, what-does-this-do click anything though. Usually takes me about three days work pulling my hair and screaming to get it straight. Inventory management at Woo is comparatively vastly less intricate, less complicated and just plain easy.

The Insta/Fb shop system despises digital downloads, so only allows ‘real’ product. Meantime, the store for LondOntLife setup with Woo at WordPress holds the real world paper printed books of cartoons and digital versions of the books. Those digital downloads are hosted at my iCloud space.

I think often of getting free from Jack and Melon. Does Stripe handle mobile locations? Seemingly, nope. I’ll be gladly corrected. Does Insta/FB talk to Woo Inventory? Seemingly, nope. I’ll gladly be corrected.

Distribution: The advice is “Go wide not deep” even as the audience for LondOntLife is siloed, localized to London Ontario

What we are pondering.

I want, simply, to draw the cartoon and share it. Managing all this is a drag.

Where you can find us

• Twitter: @LondOntLife Following? About:450
• WordPress: Londontlife.ca Following? About:7
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/londontlife/ Following? About:50
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/londontlifer/ Following? About: 20
• Anyone on Tumblr?:
• RSS: https://londontlife.ca/feed/
• Flipboard: almost ready
• Mastodon?: no specific address yet

The distribution from Twitter is the heart of this question.

Twitter is my “open”, “free”, “accessible” distribution platform. Twitter was the easiest way to do this. Anyone could pick that up and share it again. Twitter has this “What’s Happening” periodic email of Tweets. We haven’t noticed any trouble with the Twitter feed at the moment. No loss of follows though more DM’s from pretty young women who want to be my friend. We haven’t noticed anything awful coming our way, but the whole thing is unstable right now. We won’t be buying any blue ticks, and Musky doesn’t need my money. We recognize you may choose to not continue there. Or anywhere.

I have the blog at WordPress and a store for the books. The site registration costs money, but that isn’t the issue. There is a Mail subscription option where the blog post is sent to your personal email. I don’t need or want to collect a googolplex of email addresses for any reason. I could go back to posting each cartoon as a single blog post at WordPress and it can then be shared to Twitter and Facebook.

Verifying the blog as source will post from WordPress to Mastodon. The question for Mastodon is audience and at focusing the account to redistributing the cartoons. Possible? The blog is on the web. I see this as an unfair burden on Mastodon but we haven’t figured everything out out there.

The RSS feed. You need a Feed Reader app. We are trying out NetNewsWire on IOS. It’s free. What is posted to the blog goes to the RSS feed. A copy of the blog post gets fed to Facebook or Flipboard. The same as what would go to Mastodon or Tumblr.

Instagram can’t share to others. It works as a destination, but not a transit station. The blog can’t share directly to Insta. I can share a Tweet or a Flipboard flip though, in IOS sharing. Tedious :-) and always delayed.

Facebook as above. It is hard to move anything outside the garden, but internal sharing does happen. The Facebook page is posts from the Instagram and things from the blog.

Samupress will be at table 25a in Artisans Alley Sept 17 and 18 2022 with 3 years of new LondOntLife cartoon books and prints. Doug will have some art and cat cartoon books.

Quick turnaround from M&T. I guess that’s why they’re called Instaprint after all. Nice clean job, great quality. My only concern for the next book is most efficient use of the paper page as the size of these leaves half the 11×17 sheet as waste. We will have to consider the sizing next time: either smaller and more pages with all full page cartoons or larger – perhaps more of a comic book size.

In the cartoons, sizing the text on screen when the image can be zoomed solves one problem, but sometimes it reproduces in print at a fixed size as too small. Then again I am also always wearing my readers, and freely zooming the art to draw it.

In the end the major cost is the paper. Might come to the same end depending on display and distribution.

Washed my hands and signed and numbered each of the 20 limited run editions of the books. Need to update the ISBN info and get the print versions up on the LondOntLife bookstore website.

See you at London Comic Con.

Unusual delays, staff changes, Covid… but we managed to check out the proofs for books 4 and 5. August is short, and September is coming up fast. Anyway, a few small changes in book 5 will be heading back to the printer after the weekend.