The Vampire Prison flip through video
1. Different
A different format! I'm trying a different thing this time around, as you can see. Shopify has a 'blog' option and I'm wondering if that makes sense as a thing to use instead of the newsletter format.
2. The Vampire Prisoner flip through
The printer sent me the innard pages for The Vampire Prisoner. Here is a flip through video:
My pal Rebecca just happened to be visiting on a my-dog-was-sprayed-by-a-skunk-and-she-needs-to-check-if-it-still-smells-so-bad-that-it-is-not-allowed-in-her-house inspection when Fedex delivered the package. She was gracious enough to sit with me while I inspected the pages on video. I shot the video because I wanted to be sure to catch my reaction when I discovered whatever horrible problem was hidden in the page block. Having Rebecca there, ready to call an ambulance, was just good luck.
But, spoiler, nothing was spoiled. The pages look great.
I wish they were a little more contrasty, but that's it. And the paper is good. Not what I was expecting, but I like it. It's a pearly matte. I'm guessing the slightly matte paper is the reason the contrast isn't where I would like it to be.
And these are the -actual- pages that are going into the book. Like, they printed the entire run of innards and assembled the book blocks, THEN sent me this for a proof. That's a new one on me. Every printer is a new adventure.
And this was a new one on me: They printed an ordering number on each folded signature spine. Normally I get a stack of signatures and use a marker to make a sloppy diagonal slash down the spine side of the stack so that they can easily be put back into order. This is the first time I've seen organizing information printed on the signatures. Emphasis on SEEN. Maybe this is always a thing and I just never noticed.
So I'm happy with The Vampire Prisoner's guts.
A reminder: Everyone who backed So You've Met A Thousand Year Old Vampire is also getting a copy of The Vampire Prisoner. I promised you folks 600+ pages and the two books together make up that count.
I laughed while making the video because a dedicated person could read much of the book in the video. Don't do that, you'll wind up with a squint and a headache. I'll send out PDFs in the first or second week of October.
3. Short
I'm going to wind these newsletter/blog thing up early, even though I have more I want to write. I dunno if this is going to work as a newsletter so I don't want to get too invested.
4. I CAN EDIT!
Holy shit, I can edit the blog post after sharing it. I'm writing this after seventeen comments were added to the page.
Such a mixed reaction! Exactly what I didn't want.
What are the benefits of the blog, though? For some of you it is easier to read, for others it is harder. Lou points out that the blog makes the newsletter available to new visitors. I've had folks ask about access to old newsletters, so the blog would satisfy that demand (as thin as it is).
The sensible thing is to write the newsletter as usual then xfer it to the blog (or vice versa). Both make sense and having both in no way affects the folks that prefer one or the other. Somewhere there'll be a Shopify plugin that'll let me easily translate between them and it'll be worth a couple of bucks, I guess.
The only downside to the blog format is the inevitability of the blog's ending. I'm always suspicious when a group's "News" page hasn't been updated since 2022, even though they are still in business and only stopped updating because the intern moved on.
Happy Halloween Month Eve,
Tim H
Our dog got skunk-sprayed within the last few weeks as well. My commiserations, Tim.
The blog format is alright, but I do prefer the email format – but I do like the ability to leave comments instead of sending you strange one sentence email replies!
I’m not liking that the comments don’t have in-line reply options. It hampers the conversation aspect. There’s other stuff I don’t like about, but one of the weirdest is that the blog felt more impersonal. It feels weird to write half-formed, personal thoughts in a blog that just anyone can see; doesn’t feel weird to write those same thoughts in a newsletter going to 22k of my closest friends. It’s that ‘zine’ mindset, I think.
I’m also not liking that this could be a place that I have to moderate and that there don’t seem to be any moderation tools. As was pointed out, even the email address request is meaningless because you can type gibberish in there and it’ll accept it.
What I might try is this: The regular newsletter written using the regular tools, I send it, then I bulk copy and paste that into a blog. I can probably figure out how to do it so that at least some of the embedded links survive.
I’m not liking that the comments don’t have in-line reply options. It hampers the conversation aspect. There’s other stuff I don’t like about, but one of the weirdest is that the blog felt more impersonal. It feels weird to write half-formed, personal thoughts in a blog that just anyone can see; doesn’t feel weird to write those same thoughts in a newsletter going to 22k of my closest friends. It’s that ‘zine’ mindset, I think.
I’m also not liking that this could be a place that I have to moderate and that there don’t seem to be any moderation tools. As was pointed out, even the email address request is meaningless because you can type gibberish in there and it’ll accept it.
What I might try is this: The regular newsletter written using the regular tools, I send it, then I bulk copy and paste that into a blog. I can probably figure out how to do it so that at least some of the embedded links survive.
I like both, the newsletter in my inbox feels a bit more fun though and it’s nice to get an email that’s not the usual spam from numerous food delivery platforms trying to get me to buy something. I think the idea of doing the email newsletter and then uploading the contents to post here would work best.