Q&A: Publishing schedule

Recently, a Patreon backer asked:

I do not remember what the voting was. Are you going to do a fill-in between Book 9 and the re-boot?

That's a great question, and it leads into so much that I learned over the weekend at PatreCon... so let's talk about it.

Schedules and deadlines and shipping — Oh, my!

Despite the fact that I consider myself pretty good in the area of time management, I've failed myself two years in a row. For the last two years, I had three books scheduled to produce... and for the last two years, I've produced one book per year. Here's a look at some of the books I'd like to produce in the short term:

• Evil Inc Annual Report Vol. 10 — This is the missing book between EIAR Vol. 9 (Ruby of Ragnoor) and the book that collects the first comics after the reboot (Evil Inc: Under New Management).
• Evil Inc After Dark Vol. 2 — Picking up where Live Fast; Thwart Hard left off. This book would probably incorporate some commissions, as well.
• Evil Inc After Dark: Under New Management — This would combine the first several chapters of the new Evil Inc with their corresponding EiAD storylines and illustrations.
• Webcomics Handbook, second edition — The information in the first edition is badly in need of an update
• Courting Disaster Uncensored Vol. 2
• NSFW Commissions collection
• Evil Inc 2019 — This would collect Chapters 5-9 of the new Evil Inc... focusing strongly on the relationship between Cap and Miss Match. Chapter 5 is the storyline currently in progress.
• Creativity on Demand — I'd love to do a book that just talked about creativity in general, and how we can harness our brains to do amazing things.

You get the picture. There's a lot of stuff out there that I want to publish. And if I'm missing a possible angle — like a collection of work you don't see listed above — let me know!

Growing pains

Here's the problem. Aside from Alex Heberling, my astute colorist, I'm a one-person show. And I'm nearing the limits of what I can accomplish. During PatreCon, I was able to pull aside a data specialist to talk about what's working and what's not, and she made it very clear that I need to start thinking about an assistant.

And that's probably going to happen in 2019. I'll need someone to oversee a publishing schedule, work on book design, deal with printers, and ship orders. Meanwhile, I'll be concentrating on comics.

I've already arranged an internship with a student from the University of the Arts to come in and help with culling the raw material for the Webcomics Handbook, and that's probably going to be high on the list for 2019. Equally high will be the second EiAD book (and possibly the adults-only version of Under New Management). Providing those go well, I'll tackle Annual Report Vol. 10, and finish the year with the second book from the "new" Evil Inc series. Of course, those two would fit nicely on the same Kickstarter... so that's a possibility, too.

All in all... it's a bit of a headache, but what incredible problems to have! And it's all because of support from backers like you that I get to grapple with these happy challenges. So thank you — and stay 'tooned. I think next year is going to be a pretty good year.