We've accepted a few new authors, a couple poets, a couple fiction people. For one of the fictioners, we're doing a chap, an excerpted kind of thing, pamphlet-stitched with a letterpressed cover -- and I'm kind of excited about the book, and maybe more excited about the stuff we're doing around the book. Art cards and a series of paint-by-numbers paintings (cradled birch panels, the outlines silkscreened on, then we paint them by hand, then screenprint the outlines back over it... they're kinda fucking awesome) to hang in a gallery show for the release party/rocknroll reading we're gonna host for the book. The poetry ones -- I don't give a crap about poetry, that's the job of the poetry editors, to give a crap -- we're just putting together and releasing, which is enough. The poetry audience is worldwide and doing a reading here in Tucson would just get the poetry crowd out, and I'm not so terribly interested in hanging out with them. One of our editors is going off to teach at a multi-century-old prep school on the east coast, the other's off to teach in South Korea, so it's not like anyone's here to do anything for them anyway. Damn poetry people.
(You like how I'm acting here, in my first post, like I've been posting all along?)
In other news, it looks like the club/hotel people are gonna go with a straight-up artist for the graphic design job instead of me, so it'll continue to be the thing where I have to go through the one or two levels of bullshit to get my work done (I ask the designers for something, I get nothing, then I do it on my own, then go through the process of presenting it to the designers and the managers to get approval for the shit I'm doing rather than just doing the damn job myself) -- it's frustrating, this process, especially since we're a full-service kind of thing, do all the production ourselves, and you'd think these penny-pinchers would be all about having it all in one place, paying me my salary and getting all the rest along with it...
Also, me and the other guy, we're working on getting the storefront, having everything in a place, but the spots we're looking at are crazy expensive -- the question is whether we can be a viable thing in an off the beaten path location, considering all the not-local kind of services we do, selling to bookstores, libraries, etc., workshops, custom work, all that... I feel like it could work, feel like we'd make it work, but it's just something you can't predict. I want to.
And about that not-local stuff we do, the LA label's being annoying with their completely irrational and impossible demands for their site... but we make nice and make them happy and that means all the other people give us their money to do simpler things, so I'm sucking it up and just doing the work, learning all the things I have to learn to approximate their needs... and the album packaging for the local guy's nearly finished, the polymer plate should arrive tomorrow or Tuesday and then we can do the last letterpress stuff and do the final gluing up of the covers, and that hellish job will be all the hell done. The LB band's packaging should be cake, once we get the final designs. And the Tucson band's site design is coming along nicely.
Me, I'm gonna go get more materials in the morning. Need board, need paper, need glue. Gotta order more thread -- Harcourt Bindery, funny enough, turns out to be the cheapest place to get the stuff. They're the oldest hand-bindery in the country and their shit's damn expensive, but on this they're the affordable ones.
Gonna make the interns do the bulk of the work.
(You like how I'm acting here, in my first post, like I've been posting all along?)
In other news, it looks like the club/hotel people are gonna go with a straight-up artist for the graphic design job instead of me, so it'll continue to be the thing where I have to go through the one or two levels of bullshit to get my work done (I ask the designers for something, I get nothing, then I do it on my own, then go through the process of presenting it to the designers and the managers to get approval for the shit I'm doing rather than just doing the damn job myself) -- it's frustrating, this process, especially since we're a full-service kind of thing, do all the production ourselves, and you'd think these penny-pinchers would be all about having it all in one place, paying me my salary and getting all the rest along with it...
Also, me and the other guy, we're working on getting the storefront, having everything in a place, but the spots we're looking at are crazy expensive -- the question is whether we can be a viable thing in an off the beaten path location, considering all the not-local kind of services we do, selling to bookstores, libraries, etc., workshops, custom work, all that... I feel like it could work, feel like we'd make it work, but it's just something you can't predict. I want to.
And about that not-local stuff we do, the LA label's being annoying with their completely irrational and impossible demands for their site... but we make nice and make them happy and that means all the other people give us their money to do simpler things, so I'm sucking it up and just doing the work, learning all the things I have to learn to approximate their needs... and the album packaging for the local guy's nearly finished, the polymer plate should arrive tomorrow or Tuesday and then we can do the last letterpress stuff and do the final gluing up of the covers, and that hellish job will be all the hell done. The LB band's packaging should be cake, once we get the final designs. And the Tucson band's site design is coming along nicely.
Me, I'm gonna go get more materials in the morning. Need board, need paper, need glue. Gotta order more thread -- Harcourt Bindery, funny enough, turns out to be the cheapest place to get the stuff. They're the oldest hand-bindery in the country and their shit's damn expensive, but on this they're the affordable ones.
Gonna make the interns do the bulk of the work.