Category: Do-It-Yourself

  • Divestment December

    It started with this photo. The leaders of the world’s biggest tech companies, standing together at Trump’s inauguration. Waiting patiently and performatively for their chance to kiss the ring.

    It feels like looking at a black and white picture of Germany in the ‘30s.

    But I’m grateful for it: that picture woke me up. The fact that these fucking guys are chumming around at the dawn of the new dystopia they’ve aided and abetted? It was time to cut these fascist collaborators out of my life.

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  • Build Your Own Indie Arcade Cabinet

    Last year I organized a project where we gutted an ’80s era arcade cabinet and filled it full of indie games. Jph Wacheski, the chief retrofitter, wrote the article below for people wanting to do the same in the most recent Broken Pencil.

    Lots of people are making their own games these days — point-and-click tools like Scratch and GameMaker are making it more accessible for non-programmers, and it’s easy to get your game out there via the internet. But wouldn’t it be even cooler to get you and your friends’ games out there on an old-school arcade cabinet?

    The old cabinets are generally made to play one specific game, but you can re-fit it with a PC and a display and wire up the existing controls to make playing new games possible. Many people have been doing this to run emulators of the classic games — MAME cabinets can run hundreds of old games on a single cabinet. The Hand Eye Society, Toronto’s videogame culture collective, wanted to do a similar thing, but with locally made games. They debuted the Torontron, which plays six hand-crafted games by Toronto indies, at the last Canzine. Jph, who did the retrofitting, takes us through the steps he took.

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  • How To Enjoy Research

    We’ve just launched the mini-site for Sword of My Mouth, making the first two issues (and commentary from me and Shannon) available for subscribers and people who’ve pre-ordered the graphic novel. It’s the first third (48 pages) of the book so far, and we’ll be adding a chapter every other month until we launch the complete graphic novel edition at next year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. UPDATE: The Globe and Mail just ran an article about our publishing experiment.

    One of the things we did differently with this book was research, and so I’ll take this opportunity to write a bit about that. (more…)

  • A Self-Publishing Comics Primer

    One of the coolest thing about the comics world is that it doesn’t dismiss self-publishers the way the lit world does. Maybe because it’s a less pretentious field, or a newer one, or that drawing talent is more quickly discerned at a glance. Certainly it helps that one of the more prominent awards and grants, the Xeric, is open only to self-publishers.

    Comic artist and former No Media Kings intern stef lenk received a Xeric grant for her illustrated booklets TeaTime 1 and 2. Whether you’ve got a project that you’re submitting to the next Xeric deadline at the end of this month, or if you’re just interested in hearing about the nuts and bolts of comics publishing from printing to promotion, you’ll find stef’s opinions and experiences in the article below food for thought. UPDATE: Canadian comic self-publishers will want to check out this Gene Day Award.
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  • 10 Ways to Get Your Writing Out There

    I did a talk at Word on the Street last week tailored to a general, writing-interested Toronto audience. Ramón Pérez did live sketches that illustrated the talk, which were amazing considering the scant minutes each was allowed and the not-terribly-visual subject matter.

    Other than actually writing, the most important thing to do as a writer is get your writing out to readers. You get feedback from readers, connect with fellow writers who share your sensibility, & you get a sense of closure that allows you to move on to your next project.

    Some people think that getting published by a traditional book publisher is the only way to get your writing out to readers. There’s a real bottleneck here — even though there’s some benefit to the publishers in this circumstance, I would argue that writers don’t benefit from it, readers don’t benefit from it, and neither does our writing culture. This perception of the editor-gatekeepers just creates a tense and risk-averse climate.

    So, I’m going to detour around the bottleneck and focus on the diversity of methods writers can use to get their writing out there. The ten things I list are often considered different mediums and require collaboration and/or different skillsets, but writing can be central to them. (more…)

  • Selling Your Wares: 16 Tabling Tips

    emilyandlisa-thumb.jpgLocus is a collaboration between two small independent publishers in Melbourne, aduki independent press and Vignette Press, run by Emily and Lisa. They got together to run market stalls (and now also a blog) because they knew doing it with a friend would be more enjoyable than going it alone. They were kind enough to share their advice on selling indie books and zines.

    Doing market stalls probably won’t make you rich or sell a truckload of books. Our best market day ever made about $750, mostly we make a lot less than that. Beer money, really. But even if you don’t sell a lot you’re still spreading the word and marketing your product, which is important in the long run. We learned what kind of markets work for our particular books and what sorts of places just don’t. The only way you can figure this out for yourself is by getting out there and trying different markets. Here’s some tips for running a successful market stall. (more…)

  • How To Get a Book Deal Without an Agent

    Ravenous for a book deal.I published my graphic novel Therefore Repent! in Canada in August, and IDW (who put out 30 Days of Night) just released it in the US last week. I just got a copy of their edition and it looks great: they used a slightly thicker paper stock and a slightly lighter ink, but it’s otherwise pretty much identical to the Canadian edition. Even though I’m best known for writing articles on do-it-yourself publishing, I’ve learnt a lot in publishing with other folks too. So today I’m going to answer one of the questions I get asked the most:

    “How did you get a book deal?”

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  • How to Enjoy Conventions

    cons-thumb.jpgJust coming down from the high of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival where we not only found an excited audience for our new graphic novel (we sold 90 copies in two days!) but I got to sit beside my favourite comic maker at the convention, Carla Speed McNeil — who, incidentally, I first heard about through the first TCAF when we were on a self-publishing panel together. I did a quick 20 minute interview with her and we talked about why she creates anachronistic science fiction societies, how she gets around the fact that her work is complex and hard to promote, and the development of her sin-eating aboriginal bad-boy.

    Download the MP3 here.

    Keep reading to hear about the other amazing cons I went to this summer, as well as some tips for enjoying them! (more…)

  • How to Become a Famous Writer

    Ariel Gore gets the word out thereI’ve always prided myself on the fact that the DIY publishing articles on this site have a certain lack of, shall we say, bullshit. And normally, a book called How to Become a Famous Writer Before You’re Dead would smell a little funky to me. However, Ariel Gore, Hip Mama mag creator and indie culture maven wrote this book, and like all her books (I’m particularly fond of her memoir Atlas of the Human Heart) it is excellent. As well as sharing her own considerable experience, she interviews folks like Ursula K. Le Guin, Dave Eggers, and even me, and manages to pack more wisdom and practical advice than I’ve ever seen in a book of its ilk. (It had an extremely high nods-per-minute ratio.) She even gets the folks she interviews to give “assignments” at the end, making it a writing class unto itself. Plus it’s extremely readable — I intended to skim to find something to excerpt but I found myself sucked in and reading most of it. Below is one of my favourite sections in the book. (more…)

  • Roll Your Own Boom Pole

    Click to zoom.Benny had told me we could use a paint-roller extension as a boom pole, but I figured I was going to have to tape on my shotgun mike somehow. Much to my delight this was not the case. The day before the third Infest Wisely shoot, when I got my $15 Home Hardware Extension Pole (8′, #4538-682) back home I noticed there was a small hole in the removable black tapered tip. My Rode VideoMic has a shock mount that connects to a shoe mount for use on a camera, but I saw that the shoe mount was screwed in. I removed the screw and threaded it through the tapered tip of the paint roller and it actually fit!

    The next day, we did an eight hour shoot and it was rock solid and sounded sweet — when I was perched on a rusted-out catwalk high above an abandoned factory floor, I was glad I didn’t also have to worry about the mike falling off.

    Of course this is almost ridiculously specific to Rode VideoMic owners living in Canada, but it’s too neat a trick to keep to myself. For some more generally useful DIY Sound tips from my sound guru Carma, keep reading!
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  • How to Silkscreen Posters and Shirts

    Willy vs. Mass ProductionSilkscreening is such a great happy medium — nestled comfortably half-way between hand-drawn and mass production, more colourful than photocopying and with an aesthetic all its own. Artist Shannon Gerard broke out her silkscreening gear to make cool shirts and posters for her upcoming comic launch, and despite being crazy busy has shared her skills in this funny and detailed tutorial. Read on to learn how to print your own posters, shirts, or whatever you fancy printing on, and how the Virgin Mary and Spiderman join forces to help her out.
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  • Do-It-Yourself Book Press

    By Hamish MacDonald

    Blood, sweat and glue.UPDATE:Hamish has started a DIY Book podcast!

    Back in 2000, I wrote an article for this website about how to produce your own book. Things have changed considerably since then, both in the technology available to individuals and in the services available in the marketplace. It’s all good news for us independent publishers.

    The original article was called “DIY Book Production.” Aside from being a clunky term, you now have more power than that: You can be your own press. I now produce my own books at home from start to finish, and in this article will explain what I’ve had to learn and acquire in order to do that.

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