I want to publish but....

[Galaxia]

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[Nighthawk]

That is what I would try. Shop for the best deal, look around on the internet, but many places want a ton of $$ to do it. Good fortune.

[Galaxia]

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[Nighthawk]

Yup, save all you can. Do as much in black and white as you can. The printers/copiers are cheaper.

[Galaxia]

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[Nighthawk]

Good, good. Now, if you could find a way to get two pages per print page, it would cut the cost in half also.

[Galaxia]

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[Nighthawk]

Right on!!! Yup, Office depot and that type are even cheaper than Kinko's

[Galaxia]

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[Nighthawk]

Cool cool cool. There you go.. Right on.

[Ben Gruagach]

If you have your work in digital format, you can have it professionally printed at places like http://www.cafepress.com (http://www.cafepress.com) or http://www.lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com)

They are "print on demand" places so they only print and ship them when they are actually ordered. And they tell you up front how much it costs to produce a single copy, so you can choose how much profit you want to make (or make no profit at all if you want) and set the price accordingly.

Other "print on demand" places will often require you to place an initial minimum order, or else pay some fee up front to get them to put your work into their system to make it available. CafePress and Lulu.com do not do that. It's free for you to put your work in with them. The people who pay money are the ones who purchase copies. And the whole purchasing, printing and shipping is also handled by them, so you don't have to worry about that. All you need to do is advertise so that people know it's available, and how to get a copy.

http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/products/books (http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/products/books) gives the info on how CafePress does magazines and books.

http://www.lulu.com/help/node/view/1713 (http://www.lulu.com/help/node/view/1713) gives some basic FAQ info about their services that could help you.

[Ben Gruagach]

By the way, there is a cool program available for Apple computers called "Comic Life" (the website is http://plasq.com/ (http://plasq.com/) ) that makes it really easy to create comic-book layouts using scanned art or photos. It costs something like $25 US for a full copy.

There might be something similar for Windows computers. I've played around with "Comic Life" dropping in photos and it really is easy to use to create instant comic books with captions, speech balloons, etc. with all sorts of creative layouts.

You might be able to do similar things with other layout programs like Microsoft Publisher or whatever, although they won't have it as automated to do comic book layouts specifically.

[Galaxia]

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[SilverClaw]

My friend just got his book published through cafe press and from what I have seen they do a really nice job.

[Ben Gruagach]

Whatever method you choose to try, if you can just do a single copy first so that you can see what's involved and whether you like the quality of the result. If you don't like how it turned out then you won't have spent a lot of money to find out!

(That's one of the reasons why I think the CafePress and Lulu options are great -- it's free to set it up, and as the owner of the work you can buy a single copy and pay just the cost of producing it. If you don't like how it turned out you won't have lost a lot of money. If anyone else were to buy a copy off the system they pay the full price that you set.)