KILL ALL MONSTERS

 

What is Kill All Monsters! you might ask?

Only the  bestest comic book ever, that's what. And it's coming soon to print - if we act now and order it!

Michael May and Jason Copeland bring us a tale of giant monsters taking over our world and humans fighting back. What isn't to love there???

In this month's PREVIEWS, page 244, the print version of the first trade is up for pre-order and we should all jump on it! This is a pretty big deal now days. To get a retailer to actually stock a comic nowdays, especially a trade, retailers have to know that customers are interested. The more that are pre-ordered, the better chance that one ends up on a shelf for a new reader to pick up.

And we want these talented bastards to keep making this comic - it's awesome. Take this random part of a panel - 

 That's me literally choosing a page at random and posting it - that kind of sweetness is all over the place. So call your local comic shop (If you're lucky enough to have one) and pre-order KILL ALL MONSTERS. If you need it, the Previews order number is APR130764.

And follow Michael May's blog too - it's a great read.

Bill Paarlberg Questions Art

Hosmer Garden Cemetary by Bill Paarlberg

Bill Paarlberg is a splendid artist that does paintings and illustrations of the Portsmouth NH area. (And a sweet series of giant monsters attacking things... Two guesses how I first found him...)


In a new blog, he talks a little about the perception of art and what is art, when displayed in a gallery or installment. How far does that piece influence the surroundings? I thought it was interesting. Check it out HERE.

Etsy 101 - Part Two - History II

What Is Etsy?

Following in the grand tradition of craft fairs and flea markets worldwide, Etsy is essentially an online version of an arts and crafts supermall. Every seller on the site opens their own shop, naming it, running it, making, marketing, selling and shipping their wares. For the most part, everything on the site is supposed to either be handmade or vintage, or in some cases, modified sufficiently to create something handmade.

Launched in 2005, Etsy was named after the creator watched Fellini's 8 ½ and, searching for a vaguely nonsense word that would allow him to build the brand with no preconceived notions, noticed the phrase “Etsi” uttered often. In Italian, it means “Oh yes”.

Imagined as a marketplace that values hard work and handmade items, a place where quality over quantity reigns, the site struggled for the first few years, but slowly gained customers and shops. Along the way, they also modified things, staying on top of site improvements and keeping an eye on media trends like Twitter and Facebook.

Today, Etsy has over 22 million registered members and over 850,000 shop fronts. (Though that sounds gigantic, eBay has over 100 million active members) Most Etsy shoppes are considered a side business, a way to make a little extra cash or unload some “Vintage” clothing they found at a yard sale. According to Wikipedia, the bulk of sellers on Etsy are college educated women in their twenties and thirties and range from stay at home moms, to bakers, to artists and craftsmen as well as vintage sellers and fabricators.

Quickly becoming an offbeat and unique way to find a gift and support the independent business world, there is a lot to love about Etsy. Their search engine is quite efficient at finding what you are searching for and the range of products and prices is almost unmatched and they strive to be thorough when it comes to weeding out big businesses that are selling bulk quantities. That said, many people have managed to push the shops boundaries a bit and there are some out there that seem to be outside the realm of handmade products and goods.

Today there are over 18 million items on Etsy and 42 million unique visitors peruse the shops every month.

Peruse us HERE!

Saggy Socks

Being a fan of old-timey clothing and an anti-fan of saggy socks, I find myself intrigued by this product from yesteryear - Sock Garters But I worry they wouldn't go well with my Bean Boots, which is where I experience the most distressing sock saggery.

I also find myself inappropriately intrigued by that man's posing.

Etsy 101 - Part One - History Part One

PART ONE: History Part I - Deeply Dapper

 Back in the summer of 2010, I got a new car and decided it needed a unique sticker to go on it. I searched websites for far longer than logical and still couldn't find the exact thing that fit both me and my vehicle, a blood-orange colored Honda Element. 

Finally, I decided what I wanted - a Sasquatch sticker! Unfortunately, all of the ones I could find were either cheesy or more insulting than fun or drawn really poorly, so I decided to make one for myself. Grabbing a still of the famous Patterson footage, an exacto knife and a package of white clearance Con-tac paper (Yes the adhesive stuff you line drawers with) I created my own little sasquatch silhouette for the back of my rig. 

I think it turned out pretty great and once or twice I was stopped in traffic by people, asking where I'd gotten the decal.  At the same time, I had been making creatures in jars - Bottled Bugaboos - sculptures of non-existant creatures with aged scientific labels for cabinets of curiosity and I came up with an idea for another project, which I STILL haven't gotten around to making yet. 

All of this got my wife and I thinking about the idea of trying to sell them in a semi-official capacity. We had a shop on Etsy before, that had been unused for long enough that it'd gone inactive and we decided it would be the perfect way to try our hands at selling some of my geekery. 

I posted a thread on my favorite site on the internet, R3, The TRDL Forum, asking for advice and suggestions on a name, throwing out such winners as Cryptic Clips, Deeply Dapper and Arcane Accoutrements. Clearly, growing up a Marvel Comics Zombie had left me with an uncontrollable urge to name things with alliterations...

The forum responded, overwhelmingly preferring Deeply Dapper and on August 20th, 2010, just a couple of days before my birthday, I officially opened Deeply Dapper on Etsy.

I sold my first Sasquatch sticker about a week later and between then and the end of the year, I sold 13 stickers, each meticulously cut by hand from a cardstock template. Between those and one of my sculptures, I made $101.84. It wasn't much, but every time I slipped one of those little white guys into an envelope, I got a charge from the idea that someone, somewhere would be sporting a piece of my artwork. 

So we started thinking of ideas to expand the brand.....

Holiday Sale

Get into the Holiday Spirit with our biggest event ever!

Deeply Dapper's Holiday Sale!  Now that we are full of delicious turkey and stuffing the shopping has begun.  Please visit our shop for special sale items and use the code 'Holiday12' to save 10% off your entire order from Deeply Dapper.

We want to wish a special Thank You to the customers who help support our shop!  Happy Holidays!

How to read a Kindle Book on a non-Kindle Device In Ten Steps

I love my nook and my wife and I both love our rugged, perfectly petite Sony Pocket readers but more and more of late, authors are going site specific, especially with Amazon's new KDP Select arrangement, which allows the books exclusive to them to be given away free for 5 days a quarter and to be borrowed by Prime members. That makes it very difficult for me to read a new book like Blake Crouch's thriller PINES or Lindsay Kiernan's romance A Taste Of Honey (Which I did the cover for) when all you have is a nook.

Luckily there is a solution! It takes a couple of steps and you do have to download a couple programs, but anyone can do it.

Today we're going to download and convert the hilarious Miss. Penny Watson's newest novel LUMBERJACK IN LOVE. Because lumberjacks are awesome.

STEP .5

For any of this to work, you'll need an eReader, a computer and an Amazon.com account.

STEP ONE - Is It Secret? Is It Safe?

This is the largest roadblock to reading an Amazon Book on a rival reader. If the author or publisher has elected to enable DRM, or Digital Rights Management, you have to do all sorts of tricky steps to make the book readable, including adding a few hidden steps to a program. It's a hassle. It's doable, but I'm not going into that here.Luckily, many authors, especially awesome self-pubbed authors like Penny Watson and Blake Crouch have elected to NOT protect their books so those of us that don't own Kindles can still enjoy their books!



STEP TWO - Download Two Programs

Download Calibre. It's free and without question, the best program out there for organizing your eBooks. It allows you to edit metadata, choose different covers and countless other nice features. It's well designed and absolutely free. I'll have to get into the rest of Calibre later. What's important today is the ability it has to convert eBooks from one format to another.

Click To See Larger

Once you've downloaded the program and started it up, this is the screen you'll see. There's a lot going on here, but it's all pretty intuitive. Down the center is your library (Or lack thereof if you've just opened it for the first time) with a fun little cover flow across the top.

 Download Kindle For PC This is the program you'll need to get the file of the book to your computer so you can convert it. 



STEP THREE - Attach Your Reader

Plug in your reader. Calibre should register the addition and a little icon for your device will pop up on the screen. Technically speaking, this task doesn't have to be done yet, but I'd already uploaded the cute picture of your reader plugged in. It can be done at any point after the conversion.


STEP FOUR - Click To Buy

Buy your book. You will have to set up an Amazon account and choose to download the book to your Kindle Cloud Reader.

STEP FIVE - You've Bought It!

Don't bother choosing to "Read now in Kindle Cloud Reader" that opens your book in a non-physical form in your browser, like a ghost. You'll never find the file.

STEP SIX - Open Kindle For PC

Now here's where it gets a little tricky. The book will open from Kindle For PC just fine and you can read it on your computer, but your book is floating in a digital collection in the internet and is not physically a file on your computer at this point. We need to save it to the computer to convert it. You see that little cloud in the corner of CHOKE ON YOUR LIES? That means it needs to be downloaded. Right click and download your new book.

Now we're talking.

STEP SEVEN - Find That Book!

This part can be a little annoying too, but shouldn't be too bad. Most computers store the books in your "Documents" folder in a folder marked "My Kindle Content" If it isn't there, the easiest way to find your ebook is to do a search of the computer for .azw, which is the Amazon extension for books. Unfortunately, your book wont be titled something simple like "LUMBERJACK IN LOVE" or even "BEARDS ARE SEXY" instead, it will be some gobbeldygook starting with B00. But that's okay - you've bought the file, it's downloaded to your computer and you know where it is! It's all downhill from here!


STEP EIGHT - Send It To Calibre

 Now, if you've been good all year, you can take that new file and double click on it and it will open in Calibre without a hitch - even have the right title, author and cover attached! If not, you may have to right click the file and choose "Open With" and find Calibre to open the file with. But hey - compared to the rest so far, that's a piece of cake.

STEP NINE - Covert It!

Now that your book is loaded in Calibre, all you have to do it click on the title one time to highlight it and choose "Convert Books" at the top. That will bring up the conversion screen you see above. If you have a Nook, Sony Reader or pretty much anything but some obscure off-brand, the Output Format (The box in the upper righthand corner)  should be EPUB. Choose OK. Down in the corner of the screen, you'll see a rotating wheel next to the word Jobs telling you when the formatting is complete.

At this point, you may have to actually unplug and replug your reader into the computer, depending on whether it fell asleep and disconnected from Calibre.

STEP TEN - Send It To Your Reader

Now that conversion is complete, click on Send To Device on the toolbar  to load your novel onto your reader. Click on the arrow next to the Device icon and choose to Eject the device when it's done sending. (Again, look for the little jobs icon in the corner)

READ YOUR NEW BOOK!

Look at how sexy that is - it's cute little images are there, the font is adjustable, the Table Of Contents and Menu works, pretty sweet!

So it is a bit of work, but with a couple of programs and a teensy bit of know-how, that new novel by that author you love can be yours! Just keep in mind that the book does have to be DRM FREE. If it isn't and the novel is self-pubbed or the author is one of the many out there that interact with their fans, encourage them to make it DRM free - after all, it allows the best of both worlds - they can take advantage of the perks from Amazon's Select program and their fans that own a different brand of reader can still buy and enjoy their novels!