Exciting day for me: the release of the bookstore edition of How Comics Are Made! Over the last few months, I’ve solicited and collected quotes from artists, writers, readers, and others about their reaction to the book. If you’re curious about whether it’s for you, these might help! (You can download to read as a PDF, too.)
Seattle Times Q&A on How Comics Are Made
In advance of the June 3 release date of How Comics Are Made, a new printing of my 2024 book, Rebekah Denn interviewed me for The Seattle Times about how the book came to be and my interests! It’s exciting to appear in the local newspaper. Andrews McMeel Publishing acquired the book last year after I shipped my edition, and as happy as I was with the printing I arranged and oversaw, I am equally squealing over this edition—mine was a softcover with french flaps; the new one is hardcover with a dust jacket and endpapers! Due to advantages of scale, its list price is just $40, which seems very reasonable in today’s market.
To celebrate the book’s availability in stores worldwide, I’m doing a release event at Ada’s Technical Books & Café in Capitol Hill (Seattle) at 6 pm on June 3! If you’re in the area, come by and hear a short presentation about the whole history of printing newspaper comics from me, see Georgia Dunn show how she makes Breaking Cat News, and be part of a Q&A with Georgia and Brian Basset, creator of Red & Rover. We’ll all be available to sign books, too—my title will be there plus the two latest collections from the cartoonists!
The event poster prepped by the fine folks at Andrews McMeel Publishing
Cover of How Comics Are Made, the Andrews McMeel Publishing edition
How Comics Are Made in Bookstores June 3
Last year, I published How Comics Were Made, a look at the whole process from an newspaper cartoonist’s hands to the printed page, under my own imprint after a very successful Kickstarter campaign. It sold well over 2,000 copies, and the whole process was delightful. After the Kickstarter campaign, Andrews McMeel Publishing was in touch about acquiring future printings and editions. My self-published version sold out in March, and a very slightly different new printing appears in bookstores as How Comics Are Made on June 3! You can pre-order the new printing from bookstores worldwide; I’ve assembled a list of links to indies and chains alike.
To celebrate the book’s release, I’m having an event with two syndicated cartoonists at Ada’s Technical Books in Seattle. Georgia Dunn of Breaking Cat News and Brian Basset of Red & Rover graciously agreed to join me. I’ll do a presentation about the book and Georgia about her cartooning, and then I’ll ask the two of them about their careers. We’ll have a Q&A and then sign books! If you’re in Seattle, please join us at 6 pm on June 3! Full details here.
I interviewed Georgia and Brian for the book, visited their studios, and included their work in the book. Georgia also is the artist featured in the contemporary part of the book, showing how cartoonists produce their work today.
Georgia demonstrating scanning her cartoon to send to her syndicate
Brian drawing Rover
New Week, New Work: Six Colors, Take Control
This week I made two big changes in my career that I’m happy to share.
First, I’ve taken the title of Executive Editor at Take Control Books, a publisher I’ve worked with from their launch in 2003 by Adam and Tonya Engst and since 2017 for Joe Kissell and Morgen Jahnke. Over that time, I’ve written so many titles I can’t remember them all, partly because of updates, mergers, and splits of books into new works.
As executive editor, I will take on more editorial responsibility, particularly with editing books, but also in updating titles where the author has opted to move on to other projects, such as iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, a series updated each new operating system revision for many years by Josh Centers. To help Take Control Books expand, I’ll be consulting with Joe on how to find new readers and new lines of revenue, including my specialty of crowdfunding. I’ll also continue to update my nine current active titles.
Second, Macworld has decided to discontinue Mac 911 after 20 years, and which I’ve written for just over 10 years. The column started with that name to tell readers, “We’ll solve your Mac emergencies,” but it grew quickly to cover any Apple product, including iCloud and iPhone. Foundry/IDG handled the end extremely well, and I thank them for my time there! I can’t speak for them about ending the column, but I can say from my own experience that it is a hard business trying to stand out in search results. Mac 911 always had a twofold intent: provide a service for Macworld readers and to find new readers who discovered the columns through internet searches or other referrals.
These days, search on an Apple-related software or hardware question, and search engines mostly provide AI slop and other links to low-quality, high SEO (search engine optimized) crud. This makes it nearly impossible for a column written for a broad audience to be found, even if it’s the best answer on the topic. (I pat myself on the back, because I only wrote answers to reader questions for which, after searching extensively, I couldn’t find that a good explanation already existed.)
I’ve moved my kit bag of tricks over to Six Colors, a site founded by friend, long-time colleague (and former Macworld editorial director) Jason Snell and run by him and similar f & l-t c Dan Moren. Six Colors was founded in 2014. You can read my introduction column, posted this morning. We’ve cheekily titled the column, “Help Me, Glenn!”
The personal tone is intentional: Six Colors is supported through subscribers and sponsors. The way for it to thrive is to continue to provide a high value to readers who want what Jason, Dan, John Moltz, Joe Rosensteel, Shelly Brisbin, and others, and sponsors who want to reach that audience. (I’ve sponsored Six Colors multiple times to advertise my print and ebooks—it is a motivated set of readers!) Instead of casting a net in the sea and pulling it up to see if we can eat tonight, at Six Colors I’ll be part of the counter staff where people pull up a chair and want to chat a bit about what’s not working for them.
As part of this new column, I’ll be providing excerpts and references to Take Control Books where appropriate, building a figurative link between two of the great independent editorial operations supporting people who use Apple products.
The Talk Show: Episode 420
I appear on the latest episode of John “Daring Fireball” Gruber’s The Talk Show podcast. John and I talked tariffs, hegemony and colonialism, and mother loving iPhones on mother loving cargo planes. Also about typesetting, printing, and crowdfunding.
Testing Out New Kickstarter Features
Kickstarter has had long periods in which it has changed little about how to build, run, and manage post-campaign details. These lulls have been punctuated with major changes. When I got ready to launch the campaign for Six Centuries of Type & Printing earlier this year, I noticed that the company had added and tweaked lots of features. Some may have been in place for a year or more, but I believe only one was available when I launched How Comics Were Made in February 2024.
I started using Kickstarter to fund my book and art projects about 15 years ago. Six Centuries was my 11th! My 9 successful campaigns have ranged from raising $3,000 to over $165,000. I also managed the project for Shift Happens, which brought in $750,000 in its crowdfunding stage. I’m always looking to see what I can test and what I can learn from taking advantage of more of what Kickstarter offers.
With Six Centuries, these are the features I used for the first time.
You can still back the campaign even though it’s over using Late Pledges, described below.
Pre-launch editor: Kickstarter previously alerted prior backers about new campaigns. The pre-launch editor lets you set up an image and some text about an upcoming campaign that has been approved by Kickstarter but which you have not launched. This allows people to click or tap to sign up to receive an alert when the project launches.
Featured rewards: All rewards used to be presented in dollar order. By setting one or more reward tiers as Featured, they show up at the top of rewards, making it more likely people will see them first.
This is the editor view in Kickstarter when setting up a campaign. Note the Featured tag at the bottom, plus Late Pledges (see later in this post).
Secret rewards: If you’ve built an audience, you may want to reward them for paying attention to your new projects and provide a discount. Kickstarter added timed and quantity awards several years ago, which let you set tiers that expired after X hours from launch (like 24 or 48) or after a certain number of rewards were redeemed. Many creators, including me, would label a reward as an “early bird” special and alert people through email lists, Patreon, and other direct methods to get in early. However, anyone arriving at the campaign could choose that tier.
With Secret Rewards, you can create one or more reward tiers with an exclusive, secret URL that must be followed for a backer to gain access to it. I created one loyalty tier. (For now, each Secret Reward has a unique URL; you can’t unlock multiple Secret Rewards via a single URL.) In a future camapign, I will consider offering both an exclusive Secret Reward available through the campaign and an early bird reward that anyone can back.
The Late Pledges presentation of rewards appears on a separate page from the main campaign.
Individual images for add-ons and rewards: Rewards used to be just a list of stuff in text. Then Kickstarter became more sophisticated, having you created reward items that were bundled in whichever quantities you wanted to form a reward you would then describe. More recently, the company added media support so you can provide unique images for each item and reward tier, as well as for add-on items. (The cropping and dimensions Kickstarter provides for some areas images are shown is still a work in progress; it required a fair amount of trial and error for me to get it right.)
Late Pledges: When a Kickstarter campaign ended, you used to be on your own for ecommerce. I transitioned with How Comics Were Made from Kickstarter to PledgeManager from KickTraq (which handled post-campaign address collection, tier upgrades, add-ons, and new pre-orders), and then finally, after shipping all initial Kickstarter rewards and pre-orders, to my own ecommerce site. That also reduced the fees collected. Late Pledges offers a different way to manage post-campaign pre-orders. Each reward tier can have Late Pledges separately enabled—you’re not required to turn it on for all awards—and a higher price set. Kickstarter takes the same standard 5% + Stripe fees (about 3%) for Late Pledges.
Post-campaign pledge manager: I’ve used both BackerKit and PledgeManager to handle all the details of management of backers, orders, and shipment tracking for previous campaigns. For Six Centuries, I opted into Kickstarter’s beta to test their integrated “pledge manager” (no capitalized term for it yet). One of its key advantages is that you can set shipping prices for collection after a campaign is over by providing a range of expected shipping for each tier and add-on. This has a few advantages: First, your shipping doesn’t count towards your goal, so you can formulate a goal based on the item price, typically setting your goal value lower. Second, Kickstarter acts as your marketplace facilitator, collecting sales tax for every state that has it and for some other countries. Kickstarter not only calculates the sales tax but also handles the paperwork and filing with each sales tax, GST, or VAT authority. This does mean all backers will have to complete an additional transaction when they provide their address.
This was a lot to test in one go. However, each of the above scratched a different itch. I can track some of the results. For instance, I use Kickstarter’s simple referrer codes to set up dozens of origin trackers to test which method people found the campaign. These combine with the Secret Reward URL. I can see the number for people at each tier, which lets me know how useful having a special discounted reward was. Kickstarter offers some advanced analytics (in beta for two years now) that provides finer slicing about returning backers from other campaigns, which also helps assess how many people who participated in my previous Kickstarter campaigns found this one, too.
What I can’t tell is whether images in items/rewards or featured items boosted results, but intuitively, I think they enhance a campaign and thus must have some effect. (Kickstarter beta tests many features, so they likely have metrics in-house that support this.)
I have yet to see how well Late Pledges and the pledge manager perform. Having on-site Kickstarter pre-ordering after a campaign seems dramatically better than directing people to another site, so I am hoping I see that in the results.
Last Week for Six Centuries Kickstarter
Update! The goal of $35,000 was reached on April 16 and the project finished far above its target, with three stretch goals unlocked for extra things (an audiobook, extra ebook, and custom bookmarks) for existing reward tiers. You can still get in on the campaign via Late Pledges, a Kickstarter feature to enable additional support/quasi-preordering.
I am entering the last week of crowdfunding for the new, affordable edition of Six Centuries of Type & Printing, my look at technological evolution from before Gutenberg to the present day! You can back the campaign to get an ebook, print/ebook bundle, and special higher tiers.
Six Centuries of Type & Printing (first edition shown)
With some optimism about meeting the goal, I’ve added two stretch goals: at $40,000 (about 115% of the goal), I’ll record and release an audiobook that will be free to all backers at the $10 (ebook) or highter tier. At $45,000 (about 130%), everyone at that tier or higher receives a copy of my $15 value Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It, a 116-page collection of my essays and reported articles on type, printing, and language from 2017.
Advance Copy of How Comics Are Made
My publisher, Andrews McMeel, just sent me a few advance copies of the upcoming bookstore edition of How Comics Are Made, which hits the shelves June 3, 2025. I did a modest unboxing so you can see the new cover components and the great job their printer did on this mass-market edition. I’m quite pleased in every regard!
You can snag a copy ahead of time by pre-ordering from many fine bookstores of all sizes. I’ve provided a list of pre-order links for a range of from local stores up to international behemoths. The book will be available June 3 in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and in the rest of the world either in June or early July!
Books in a Time of Trade War
Update April 2, 2025, and noted where that’s the case.
I didn’t set out to print books in Canada to stake out a political position, although it’s indirectly become that.
A few years ago, when I was obtaining bids for my client-author Marcin Wichary (Shift Happens) to print his books, we checked in with Hemlock Printers in Burnaby, B.C., Canada (adjacent to Vancouver). This was 2021 and then 2022. The Canadian border had been closed for a while. The future of the COVID pandemic’s direction remained unsure. And we had wanted to go on press—to be there while the book was printed. Hemlock came highly recommended but their pricing was somewhat above the printer we chose, Penmor Lithographers in Lewiston, Maine. We felt that in a pinch, we’d be able to get to Maine and possibly not to Vancouver.
When I was planning How Comics Were Made, I look at several printers in the U.S. and Canada, and ultimately picked Hemlock. I live 2.5 hours from the Burnaby, have a NEXUS border card (the equivalent of TSA Pre for crossing into Canada), and wanted to diversify my experience since I run book projects for other people.
The big advantage to Hemlock wasn’t price—they are competitive with North American printers. They have a sterling reputation and I owned books they printed plus samples they had sent; I knew they could deliver the goods as well as anyone. Rather, it’s integration. Many printers offer some mailing operations. For instance, Penmor can ship via USPS mail in batches of 300 or more. But few can provide domestic, international, and on-demand fulfillment. That’s the role of Hemlock Connect to Hemlock Printers.
The two operations are sibling companies under one corporate parent, locally owned in B.C. (in fact, family run like Penmor). When my How Comics Were Made book was printed, it was trucked about 30 minutes away to the Connect warehouse. After intake, I sent them a spreadsheet with all global addresses, they processed it, and that was it. With Shift Happens, I had to get the printer to arrange freight to the only fulfillment firm I was able to get both return calls and provide exact information about pricing and timing.
Hemlock Connect also operates as a fulfillment warehouse—that is, as orders come in, whether one or 1,000, they process them on demand, sometimes as quickly as the same day. Being close to the border, the company can offer USPS pricing for Media Mail and other services. They drive a truck (or more than one) over the border nearly every day to drop off pre-paid USPS packages in Blaine, Washington, which must be a very strange post office. Blaine is a small town, but Hemlock and many other nearby Canadian firms likely send millions of packages a year through the branch? The cost differential between shipping directly from Canada and driving over the border is enormous.
That border used to be one we didn’t worry about. The huge trade between Canada and the United States guaranteed it would remain open, plus NAFTA’s transition into a somewhat fairer USMCA (called CUSMA in Canada), which provided more labor protections along with benefits for trans-national integration.
Then we had the second iteration of this president, who has decided to destroy the economy by whim and outdated economic theories, proven time and again to ruin countries. But it turns out, there is a silver lining for books being imported or shipped from Canada.
I am certainly not an international trade lawyer, but I received email this morning from a Hemlock competitor that confirmed other information I had read at law firms’ sites and from Canadian publishers, and combine with some research of my own:
USMCA: The walkback of early March tariffs were to the borders of the USMCA, exempting or subjecting products under those rules. Books remain exempted under USMCA, which means they can be imported by ones or 1,000s into the U.S. at no cost. April 2, 2025: The Trump administration seems to have opted to keep this in place, besides metal and car imports. So books still remain exempted through this pathway.
IEEPA: Here’s an abbreviation you have probably not heard: the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. This is a 1977 act that Congress used to delegate certain tariff powers to the president for rapid, unilateral action—though subject to congressional revocation later (the current Congress is too weak to exercise oversight). Under the IEEPA, books and other “information and informational materials” are exempt from tariffs. (Anything under “heading 49 of the US Harmonized tariffs schedule.”) You can find this in the March 6, 2025, tariff order in a pretty circumlocutionary legal form. It says, in essence, this category of stuff has no new tariffs. April 2, 2025: As far as I can tell, this also remains in place because it would require new legislation from Congress to change the terms.
De minimus exemption: There has long been an exemption for low-value goods entering many countries. De minimus means “too small to matter.” For the U.S., de minimus packages had to total under $200 per shipment per individual until 2016, when it was raised to $800. This is described in the document linked just above, too. When Trump made his first tariff pass on February 1, the rule accidentally removed the de minimus exemption. The sheer volume of such packages—four million per day!—threatened chaos and all imports under those rules were halted briefly until a correction was made within a couple of days. Under the March 4 rules (revised March 6), de minimus goods will still remain exempt. (It “shall cease to be available for such articles upon notification by the Secretary of Commerce to the President that adequate systems are in place to fully and expediently process and collect tariff revenue applicable pursuant to subsection,” which is certainly months but might be years.) So shipping individual books or small quantities each day from Canada even with other tariffs in place should remain tariff free for now. April 2, 2025: Trump did remove the de minimus exemption for China but it appears to remain in place for now in all other countries.
This all reassures me, as I have a book currently in crowdfunding that, for reasons of price, quality, and fulfillment integration, I picked Hemlock Printers + Connect for once again. The printing side reassured me that they would manage any increase due to tariffs; the shipping side felt they wouldn’t see a change based on what most of their customers need, either.
I do have a political side note…
While we received via a broker a couple of bids from China for Shift Happens, I made the decision during that project that I could not in good conscience have work sent to that country. (My authors certainly can, but I would not be involved in the print production management.)
Part of it is human rights: while nearly every country has issues, the plight of the Uighurs is enormous and profound. Prison labor is often used without disclosure in China. The environmental record is poor for how they handle production and waste in industry. All books must pass a government censor’s review. And I feared getting caught up in a geopolitical conflict in which books would be seized and destroyed or cost 100% as much to import as expeted.
The flip side is, of course, that Chinese printing is often of very high quality and can cost 20% to 50% of the North American price including ocean freight delivery to a U.S. port and then truck or train to a warehouse. I have found, though, that European printers can offer prices between the U.S. and China with the added adventure of offering European shipping costs to delivery goods within that region and to Africa and Asia.
Right now, the tariff picture remains unclear—the president could impose further tariffs at any moment on China, China could add an export tax on goods, or the flow of some goods could be halted.
Six Centuries of Type & Printing: a New Edition on Kickstarter
Today, I launched a Kickstarter campaign for a second edition of Six Centuries of Type & Printing. The book briskly tells the story across 64 pages of the evolution of type and printing, starting with early documented efforts and surviving artifacts from China and Korea, and introducing Gutenberg and his innovations. It then takes you through each generation of increasing sophistication in metal and relief printing until the abrupt 20th century shift into flat offset printing, which was made possible through photographic and digital improvements, and phototypesetting and digital composition.
Six Centuries of Type & Printing; second edition will closely match these photos of the earlier letterpress edition
If you have been following my adventures for a few years, you might remember the 2019 project, The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule. Collaborator Anna Peterson created over 100 hand-crafted wooden cases, and I collected and commissioned thousands of type and printing artifacts (including original artwork) and wrote and produced the Six Centuries book.
The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule (2019)
That 2020 edition of the book was in an edition of about 425 set in hot metal in the north of England, printed by letterpress in London, and bound in Germany. The price ranged from $125 to $175 from Kickstarter to selling out early in 2025.
This new edition will capture all of the qualities of the original book but be printed by offset in North America, making it far more affordable. I had wanted to bring the book back into print, and many people had told me that they would purchase a copy if only it were not so dearly priced.
I plan to update the book’s text to incorporate new insights and research, digitally typeset it, and have it bound with the same look as the letterpress edition: the stark red endpapers with printed type and printing artifacts, the green cloth cover, and the bronze foil stamping.
The campaign has several tiers, from ebook only ($10), print/ebook bundle ($32 for all-comers), signed and inscribed ($55), and signed, inscribed, and gift-wrapped in paper derived from the book ($75). (Shipping is additional.)
An example set of Tiny Type Underwriter artifacts
There’s also a special limited tier called Tiny Type Underwriter. At that $750 level, you get a unique set of type artifacts that I sourced for or had made for the Tiny Type Museum. You’re also thanked in the book, and receive three copies of the print and ebook editions. Each print book can be separately gift-wrapped and inscribed as well.
You can back the campaign for the next 30 days at Kickstarter!