As far as running your own small print on demand press from home, these guys have got the right idea. http://atomicpublishing.net/default.aspx

It’s not the only binding solution out there… but I like it.

Add the following ingredients to their binding system and you’re on your way:

1. Printers
   1. Black and white
   2. Colour
2. Guillotine
3. Open source software
   1. Gimp
   2. Scribus
   3. Inkscape
4. A website
   1. Joomla!
   2. Wordpress
5. PayPal
6. Some free time

You could set this all up for under $2000 and then have the ability to produce unlimited books and sell them online in your own store.

Worth a thought? Of course!

Books are just stacks of paper stuck together…

Broken sunlight flashes on the blank wall before me, and then it is gone… night has fallen in that space between this moment and the next one. I stare at the wall wondering where all the light has gone. The wall remains, but it is empty now, flat tones, muted colours, and subtle shadows. The emptiness. The nothingness. The Blandness. I stare at  the wall. Sweat trickles from my temples and the fan tap, tap, taps on its bent axle as hot air, not cool, circulates in vain around my sweaty feet. The wall doesn’t care.

I stare at the wall. The emptiness. The nothingness. The blandness. I stare into the moment where regret lies hidden behind the shadows from the light of what once was. I stare into those eyes, now memories, and beg for forgiveness, beg for reprieve, beg for some response, a sign, a token, a knowing glance, a tear… and nothing happens. I stare at the wall, and try to love emptiness for its soft caress and promise of stable anguish, for the joy of knowing that once it was not so… but for having been in the sunshine once, emptiness holds no love for me.

I stare at the wall.

I stare at the wall.

Well, as a part of my new job, I’ve just made my first website with joomla! I created it to replace the existing company website. You can see the new site at: http://www.studentcarewelfare.org.au

I used a free theme from Rocket Themes called Novus, but I customised it slightly to suit my needs and the company style.

Their old website was made with static pages and can be viewed here: http://www.studentcarewelfare.org

The reason I made a new website is to allow for better management of the content, so I needed to implement a CMS (content management system). I would have used Wordpress, because I love it,  but it didn’t have the kind of extensions I wanted to use for this project.

It was a steep learning curve, Joomla! isn’t as intuitive as Wordpress. I had to think about putting the site together in a totally different way. Still, I got there in the end and I’m still learning as I go.

I’ve started a group on redbubble.com, Works for Publication, for artists and writers where I’ll be publishing their works in POD (Print on Demand) anthologies.

I don’t know if it’ll take off or not, but in one week the group already has 15 new members.

I cant afford to give the books away so I’ll be selling them at cost + postage to contributors, which I think I fair because the contributors will be able to resell the books at retail to make a profit and in that way get paid for their contribution.

Generally, people don’t get paid for contributing work to anthologies and they still have to buy copies for themselves at close to retail. It’s not really fair… With the changes going on in the publishing industry, I think this is an interesting approach and a way forward. Time will tell.

Google Sketchup is an amazing free tool for any artist. It’s quick to download and easy to use.

I created the image above with very little fuss, in my first attempt at sketchup.

It’s useful for artists because it’s like having a studio on your computer… you can use it to work out shading, shadows and perspective.

What makes this even better is that you can download premade 3d models for free, which you can populate the 3d environment with. You could actually recreate a whole city and fill it with people. As I said, this program is amazing.

The free 3d models can be downloaded from Google’s 3D Warehouse.

Check it out… it’s totally worth a look.