Ahhhhh….Spring is here and with it a convention somewhere EVERY weekend!

I just got back from a wonderful trip to Anaheim and WonderCon. I met a lot of you there and not a chance to introduce us and our services to a lot of creator/publishers. I love attending conventions. Conventions are invigorating. They make you want to go home and create! They give you that drive to finally finish up that next issue you’ve been working on for a mighty long time. It’s heartening to see the passion to create comics in so many people.

As in years past the Ka-Blam offices will be open the night before Megacon (in this case Thursday March 14th) from 5pm to 9pm for anyone who would like to pickup their Megacon order rather than have it shipped. Ka-Blam will NOT be delivering any orders at the convention itself. So if you were intending to pickup your order from us then Thursday night is the night.

We love the US Postal Service around here. They are our default — and by far our preferred — shipping option. And as is to be expected from time to time they have to raise their shipping rates. They have recently done so. Normally, we don’t even mention this sort of thing. Shipping costs increases are expected …

Thomas and I are back from San Diego and back in the offices. We had a terrific time and really enjoyed meeting the dozens of creators (maybe more — I’m still not …

We’re looking to wrap Comic-Con 2012 orders by end of day Saturday July 7.

Most of the orders designated for Comic-Con have already shipped and the remainder (of which we are aware) are scheduled for print today (Thursday) and tomorrow. Please note that “of which we are aware” part. This is where we need your help …

UPDATE: We’re going to extent the ordering window yet again. All orders of new items for Comic-Con International 2012 received before 6pm EST on Wednesday June 20th will qualify for standard pricing (with …

I felt it was time to re-post this little diddy. This was originally posted in June of 2011. I think you may find this very useful.
So…read on!

We worked pretty much round the clock over the weekend trying to get the site to the point we wanted it to be at launch. As of 9:00am this morning … it went LIVE … and then about an hour later we had to take it back down again when a problem was discovered with the free downloads area. We don’t think it’s too difficult a problem to fix and hope to have the site back up momentarily.

Provided that our webhost can manage to keep our server online consistently (see the previous post) we have rescheduled the launch for 9 am EST Monday February 6. Why a week instead of a day (as we’d hoped)? Mainly because …

It frustrates us deeply to announce that we’re going to have to push the launch of IndyPlanet Digital back by at least 24 hours. An unexpected server outage over the weekend — completely out of our control — prevented us from being able to make the final site adjustments that needed to be made, not to mention preventing us from being able to upload ANY of the gigabytes of files we’ve got still waiting to be uploaded.

IndyPlanet Digital will allow creator/publishers to include video promos in their comic’s listing. This is a feature we had intended to add to the site later, but we managed to get it done in time for launch so we’re going with it.

The Ka-Blam offices will be closed this weekend for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day — no shock there I’m sure — but we’ll reopen on Monday December 26th. Production will be a bit slower next week but the offices will be open …

The Ka-Blam staff will be taking a couple of well-deserved, long-overdue days off this week to spend some time with family and loved ones — and to gorge on the flesh of genetically-engineered freak-birds that bear almost no resemblance to the actual turkeys from which they descended. Oh, and yams. Lots of yams.

Our webhost is migrating our site to a new server tonight (11/7). Hopefully — once the migration is complete — the service hiccups we’ve been experiencing for the past couple of days will be a thing of the past. But until then (and maybe even for a little while after that or so we’re told) the service issues will probably persist. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope to have this all put behind us as quickly as we can.

OK … so forgive a shameless plug … but our own Jenni Gregory’s Dark Mischief project is presently at Kickstarter.

The campaign has a little more than a week to go and as you can see there’s still a long way from reaching the goal. This project has contributions from great creators such as Mitch Byrd, Dani Jones, Kim Holm, Dirk Manning, Mark Rudolph, Sara Turner, Dave Flora, AP Furtado, Thomas Hall, and others.

OK, so it’s one of our all time worst-kept secrets, but to make it official … for months now we have been working on an IndyPlanet sister site that will offer downloadable versions of IndyPlanet titles for the iPad, Android Tablets, plus other portable devices, as well as notebooks, desktops, etc.

I haven’t done one of these in a while but, my Ka-Blam mates and I, have been noticing in the message center that a lot of people seem to be having similar issues which need to be addressed.

First off, everything I’m telling you can be easily found by reading through our FAQ’s and Technical Specs pages …

Well … it was a lot more difficult to judge than we had ever anticipated — but we finally have a winner in our Design a T-Shirt contest! We had a LOT more entrants to choose from than we’d expected and not only that, but we had more really, excellent designs than we’d expected. Our hats are off to all who entered the contest. You guys are awesome!

But there can be only one winner and that’s — Heather Scott! Congratulations, Heather! Her design was chosen as the favorite of our staff and she’s the recipient of the $100 in Ka-Blam print credit.

We’re doing much, much better than a couple of days ago. Much better. You never get rid of technical problems altogether, but for right now things are running pretty smoothly. We’re still a bit behind schedule, but we’ve put the most troublesome orders to bed. To the best of my knowledge we’ve wrapped Wondercon and are on to finishing up orders for next weekend’s MoCCA.

We’ve talked about this a LOT before, but it bears repeating … a LOT. The ONE thing that you can do — beyond ANYTHING else — to speed your order effortlessly through our process is to provide PRINT READY files at the time your order is placed. “Print Ready” means … well, ready to be printed. It means that …

We’re going to allow anyone attending Megacon 2011 to stop by our offices and pickup their books. Now there are a couple of caveats to this offer however so please read this next bit carefully …

We’re now once again offering full color, full process T-Shirt printing on BLACK shirts. To celebrate this we’ve not only reduced our pricing and launched an all new IndyPlanet T-Shirt site. There are a few dozen great shirts there already, but we want a few hundred great shirts there so we’re kicking off our first ever contest to make that happen.

We’ve decided to launch a monthly print catalog of sorts at ComicsMonkey. This won’t be an all-inclusive catalog. It won’t be a phonebook-sized thing and it will not contain every listing at comicsmonkey.com, but instead will be a much slimmer, printed supplemental. Our intention is to put something spotlighting a handful of titles in the hands of retailers each month.

We promised we’d be announcing new stuff regularly this year and our first announcement is a pretty big one! From here on reorders — without any changes — are no longer subject to 28 day turnaround times and now ship in 10 days.

The first day of February 2011 will mark the official end of our Fifth year of operations and the beginning of our Sixth. Yep, it was February 1, 2006 when we flipped the switch on Ka-Blam.com and announced that we were open for business and accepting orders.

A hearty “Happy Holidays” from all of us here at Ka-Blam to all of you who make this whole thing possible! 2010 was a banner year for us … far and away our best year yet! Orders were way, way up and we had almost as many new user registrations in 2010 alone as in our previous four years combined! So thank you all very much! But … as the cliche goes … you ain’t seen nothing yet!

We try to pack your order as tightly and as a safely was we can so as to insure that your comics or books arrive in crisp, sale-able condition, but from time to time a box will arrive with a crushed corner and dinged or damaged books inside. We’re sorry, but it happens.

The good news is …

Every order is unique. It’s not really fair to compare the look of one book to another. There are just too many factors that could account for the difference. And of course our presses simply don’t always print exactly the same from day to day. Some days for some inexplicable reason the contrast is sharper, the blacks are richer, or the brights are brighter. Sure, we can make adjustments, but some days the adjustments work better than others and that’s something that we just can’t control.

We’re processing dozens of payments a day and there are at least a few payments every day that reference no order number and often the names and/or email addresses attached to the payments are not the same as those attached to the order …

When assembling your files for submission to us please, please KEEP IT SIMPLE. Keep it intuitive. No creative file structuring or creative file naming please. No pagination guides are necessary. Succinct — and sequential — file naming works beautifully.

The front page here at Ka-Blam is not just about us … it’s about YOU as well! Don’t forget that we’ll happily post your latest news and information.

If you’re not listing the books and comics you print with Ka-Blam at IndyPlanet, then you’re missing out on the greatest advantage of digital printing — print-on-demand order fulfillment!

Did you know that you can get a 5% discount on most orders simply by putting one of our Ka-Blam created button or banner link on the main page of your website?

If you’re ordering a square-bound paperback book of over 80 pages, then don’t forget to include a spine file with any text or graphics you want printed on the spine to be included.

While we always send out a link to a digital proof of each new item ordered, we strongly recommend that you order a physical proof — a quantity “1″ order — whenever possible.

Wear your Ka-Blam promo T-Shirt to a comics con — any comics store event such as a signing or FCBD, etc. — send us photos, and we’ll add $10 of print credit to your Ka-Blam account!

We never promise that you’ll have your order in hand by a certain date … only that we’ll get the order into the hands of the shipping company (UPS or USPS) by a given date. That’s what ship-by date means.

Are you selling your comics from your website? You should be … and we can make that process a breeze for you! You don’t have to buy in advance or stuff any envelopes or take anything to the post office. We can do it all for you … at no additional cost!

Here at Ka-Blam we don’t charge you anything for building a printable document from your spec-compliant files … however, we DO charge for making customer-requested changes to that document once it’s already been built.

You can avoid expedited printing charges by working from a schedule. Know when you’re going to need your order in hand and then set reasonable deadlines for when you can have the job completed and submitted to us.