Comic Cuts - 19 December 2014

Click here to order Frontline UK

The race is on to see if everyone will get their copies of the new book before Christmas! As promised last week, I processed all the orders on Saturday and I'm now waiting on news of those orders shipping.

Being a boutique publisher, I don't have huge shipments of books coming to the house—it's hard enough finding space for the books I have without having to worry about finding storage space for boxes of Bear Alley's titles. The beauty of print on demand is that I can have the books shipped directly from the printer to the customer, saving everyone a couple of quid along the way.

On the other hand, I'm at the mercy of the printer, who had a rush of orders in early December and is now taking a few days longer to dispatch books. Add that to the well-publicised problems some firms are having with delivering packages, and I'm left crossing my fingers and my toes that everyone will get their books this side of Christmas Day. The good news is that I think everyone will.

Weight-watchers—or, rather, those of you keeping tabs on my efforts to lose a bit of weight—will be pleased to hear that I'm almost down to where I wanted to be before I destroy my diet with Christmas turkey and pudding. I lashed out on a new set of bathroom scales and had a very nervous first weigh-in: would I weigh the same as I did on the old scales, or were the old scales lying to me. How would I know that the new scales were accurate? What I needed was for both sets of scales to agree that I was a certain weight. And they do.

The new scales are a bit scary as they measure accurate to a quarter of a pound and my confidence in my new weight of 15 stone 9 pounds was shaken when I discovered it was actually 15 st. 9¾ lb. The slight yo-yoing of weight over the course of a day takes me back up to 15 st. 10 lb. regularly, so I need to see if I can shave off at least a quarter of a pound before next week. As I do low-impact exercise (walking and using an exercise bike) to avoid buggering up my back, finding ways to burn off an extra 750 calories is going to be fun... and I use the term "fun" in both an ironic and a completely wrong way.

Updating our Annual watch from two weeks ago, the latest sales figure for Beano Annual 2015 I have is from week ending 29 November 2014. We can now work out sales figures for three weeks:

w/e 15-11-14  11,555 (61, 930 total)
w/e 22-11-14 14,265 (76,195 total)
w/e 29-11014 17,735 (93,930 total)

Sales are rising as people hunt around for stocking fillers, although to give you something to compare these figures to, Zoe Sugg [Wikipedia], a.k.a. Zoella, the video blogger, put out her first (ghosted) novel and it sold 78,110 in the same week, making it the fastest selling novel of all time. If only comics sold the same way (and, yes, I do mean the ones I put out!).

Random scans this week are a quartet of titles from Corgi's junior imprint, Scottie Books, including another Roger Hall (thanks to Phil Richards), plus a couple of John Richards (no relation) and a James McConnell.

 

 

 

All that remains is for me to wish all the folk who visit on a Friday a Merry Christmas. Anyone who visits on a more daily basis, I'll try to post some more bits 'n' bobs while I still have the energy, but expect some post-free days: presents don't wrap themselves and Christmas Pud doesn't eat itself.