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Terry Hooper-Scharf

Thursday 27 December 2018

New Books or not? Age (British) Reprints...

Someone said that it was a shame that there would be no more British Golden Age reprints book published.

Well, I have the material but the thing is that I do not have the time it takes to work on cleaning up and making all of the material available.

A great deal is included in Black Tower Super Heroes 1-8 which are all 80 pagers and took months to put together -unless you have had to do this work you will not know how long it takes or how complicated it can be.  BTSH run was finished in early 2018 but has not been published.  The reason is simple really and I have gone into this before.

My financial situation in publishing has never been worse. Sales last year amounted to 7 books and if they were purchased in the US once the print on demand have taken their money I get hit with US Taxes.  The latest book has  price tag of £15 and from that I will get £4.68 and I have to eat and pay bills.

The first of the British Golden Age Collection was published in 2009 and like all the volumes that followed it has sold zero copies.  I decided to put all the volumes together at a price that would be a saving on buying all the separate volumes.  Four copies have sold over the last few years.

I often ask where all those people are who wrote "Oh, I'll buy thyat when it's published!" have gone? Where are all of the old comics fans who whined on relentlessly about not being able to find or read these lost "gems"?

It was worked out -by someone else as I prefer not to think about it- that for the material published in the original volumes and Ultimate Collection I had spent well in "excess of £2000" ($2000+) but the person kindly added "I don't think that it would do your health good to hear the exact figures".  Now I'm anxious.

So, yes, if you wanted to buy those comics then, having checked every-so-often, that £2000+ can be doubled.  You see why the books are bargains now?

These are not mass print runs -only copies ordered are printed off so in that way they are collectible but who cares?

BTSH has all different material to the original volumes and I do not offer pdf downloads as I have explained in the past: https://hoopercomicart.blogspot.com/2018/03/on-did-free-content-kill-paying.html

Be aware of a "legal" con also going on.

Earlier this year I got a complaint from someone that a book they had ordered had not been delivered. I checked nut no book had been ordered.  It turns out that Johnny Numbnuts had ordered from an online book seller.  He had done so as the book he ordered was 'post free'.  He got his book two weeks later and he really liked it.

Johnny Numbnuts did not get a "thank you" from me as he might normally do.  You see, he expected me to find out what was happening with his book and why the delay.  I pointed out that he hadnot purchased the book from my online store so I had nothing to do with it and really did not care. If he had purchased from my online store I could actually chase up the POD company and ask what was going on.

Johnny did not really care about the publisher -me- he was like a lot of people who thought he was getting something for nothing -in this case 'post free' -there is no such thing. If you are dumb you will believe there is.  See, Johnny paid £28 for a book that on my store would set him back £15.00 -dependent on the option of postage -regular, tracked or signed for- he would have paid up to £20. He was paying for regular postage plus a chunk on top for the seller.

The seller, depending if they are Amazon or another book service, will pay me, for a £20 somewhere in the region of £1.50 and they can sell the book for whatever price they want.  The other thing is that the book will still take up to 8 days to print and get to them (so they add extra to cover that) and they then have to post it to their buyer. So it has to go from printers to seller and then on to customer and that adds more chance of it going missing and good luck getting your money back.

If you order it direct from the online store you have three choices of postage AND I have never had a damaged package yet. THAT is what it will cost you with a 5-8 days delivery time. take a look at this for the Complete Golden Age Collection:

Retail Print  Price (excl. taxes) £25.00   MY Revenue -£2.64

Yes, I get hit with taxes!!  But at the moment the Complete Golden Age Collection is temporarily reduced by 20% to £20.00

On Amazon UK the price is £25.00 and they state Usually dispatched within 1 to 3 months.
Uh...1 to 3 months???

Oh and the Ebay sellers who offer the book as "rare" or "vintage" not to mention "long out of print" and want you to pay £29-40.00 a copy PLUS p&p....it is a con.

When you take all of this into account you will realise why I do not want to add another 8 books to the online store.  Nothing sells.

As for trying to get a freebee under the pretense of "reviewing" -an obscene response often offends!

So, yes, plenty of old and new material just no one buying.

I'm not going to have a good 2019 so I wont falsely with you a Happy New Year if you don't mind.

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