3/21/2002
Business Update
For those who care, I'm thrilled to announce that I've developed a method to mass produce the tiles for the Vampire Glyphs book. I'm using Polymer Clays and picked up a book on crafting with polymer clays which detailed how to make molds and 'stamps'. My first attempt at it was only a semi success. I determined I need slightly better sculpting tools to get the level of detail and 'clean' lines I want for the project. Some black acrylic paint will need to be applied to the grooves after the clay has baked, but that isn't going to be that big of a job. The final bits of writing are coming together nicely and I am now looking at production (getting quotes from printers next week) and distribution (don't know about this one, obviously Ingram and Pacific Pipeline aren't going to distribute it which means I have to do direct sales - which means contacting book stores directly to get them to sell the product, which means I have to provide a track record, which means I have to sell it directly to the public myself first). This means I should set up at least a DBA Stygian Enterprises so I can accept checks or maybe I should just stick to PayPal...can't think of that right now. I'll work through that part when I get to it. I figure for my first run I'll produce just 10 books (130 tiles) and see what comes from that. My estimates are production cost per set being close to three dollars and sell each set for $9.00 to $12.00. That would be 60 to 90 profit which I could recycle into producing more, improving binding and getting an ISBN .
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