Not to pour water all over it but they just finished a GoFundME on the 31st of December to prevent them from going into bankruptcy because they had no credit and no operating capital, have been publishing for 10 years and haven't sold enough to be picked up by Diamond for distribution yet and have a track record of announcements that never see the light of day because they are no more than wishful thinking by the owner before he does any due diligence to check what the market and costs on plans actually are. So good luck to him, but having done the due diligence on producing small press runs on newsprint in the last 5 years and found the cost is in the range of 20 cents per page just to print it, I don't see how his numbers can work. He has focused on digital only books with some print on demand for those 10 years because he hasn't had the capital to front the money for print production nor the infrastructure or deals in place to get his books distributed to the market.

So I'll believe it when I see it and I will be shocked if he can get a 20+ page book printed on newsprint without losing money on every copy he prints at any price point, in particular the price point he is promising.

Maybe he made enough on the GoFundMe to give this a go, maybe he found someplace that offers offset newsprint printing at a more affordable price (which is problematic as many print shops now offer only digital printing, and not offset presses to keep their costs down so you have to find not only a printer who has the equipment, but one willing to use it on the miniscule print runs an indy comic would have and not charge an arm and a leg to do so because they lose out opportunity costs for larger clients if they tie up the presses and have to reset the plates etc.), maybe he found a distributor, maybe he found creators willing to work for nothing to keep costs down and this will work. But there's a lot of maybes in there and not a whole lot of real foundation to build hopes on for me.

The other problem is paper mills aren't making much newsprint any more, making enough to supply the clients who use it regularly (i.e. newspapers) but not much of a surplus beyond that available for purchase by others. The lack of extra supply drives prices up too, and newsprint is actually more expensive in most cases than plain white paperstock unless you are contracted to buy preset quantities in bulk like the newspapers do.

It'd be nice to see a newsprint comic for nostalgia's sake, but there really isn't a viable market for getting it produced unless something in the printing market has radically changed since late 2014 when were trying to do an old school coloring book on newsprint featuring super-heroes and monsters created by a local comic producing studio and I spent nearly 2 months trying to find a way to make it happen, to find a printer capable of doing it, finding a printer who was capable of doing it willing to do it at a price that didn't make it cost-prohibitive, trying to find a supply of newsprint, etc. etc. etc. and finally deeming it non-feasible and going with plain white paper for the product. Now this was a side/hobby business for the folks at the studio and this guy has been at it a bit longer than me, so he may have contacts/leads I didn't, but given what I found out there when trying this and what other self-publishers and independent creators I have networked with over the years on the con circuit have told me, these sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking rather than a real business plan where the due diligence has been done before making an announcement. Making a logo and tweeting "hey we're going to this" is easy. Making it happen is hard.

Well I guess this is one way Alterna Comics keeps their costs down-every year they do an anthology book and have an open call for subnmissions, this is their compensation for creators for that book:



So you don't get paid per se, you have to go out and sell copies of the books yourself if you want to see any money for your work.

Not sure how they compensate creators for ongoing series, but it doesn't look like they would actually offer a page rate, which severely limits the creators who would be willing to do work for them to a pool of people just looking to get work published so they can break in but who don't want to actually self-publish.

Here's a link for their submission page for that anthology...

www.alternacomics.com/if-anthology

It's the way amateur press does things. Small gatherings of creators who do things at a self-publishing level banding together to gets books printed and then making their money selling their stuff on the small press convention circuit. It's not the way a professional publisher does things let alone one that has delusions of grandeur like Alternapress and their press releases that gossip columns like Bleeding Cool and clickbait sites like Newsarama pick up on.

This is one of the many reasons I am skeptical of this publisher.