Remember how I said that I was bringing two new books to Beaglefest? Here’s why…

When I got the rights to publish Schulz’s Youth, the collection of cartoon panels that Schulz had done for Church of God (Danville) publications, they included the right to sublicense reprints, translations, abridgments, and so forth. As a publisher, I could reasonably reach the comics specialty shop, but I felt that the material could also find a home in the Christian book specialty market… but only in that hands of a publisher actively involved in that market, which I was not.

For that market, I didn’t think the thick, all-in-one-volume approach I used for the comics market would work. Schulz’s Youth is a good book for folks who are serious about their comics, but for an impulse buy, you want something thinner, cheaper, and with a specific topic that might interest a customer. I made up a couple of example books, figuring that six to eight different titles could be extracted from these cartoons without duplicating strips; that would be a nice little line of books. While some publishers were interested, the only one to take the bait just wanted a calendar, which came out a few years back.

Now that I’m getting heavily into print-on-demand publishing, and since I had the files for those sample books sitting on my hard drive, I figured “what the heck!” So here’s the first:

God’s Children is the first of the two sample books, a black-and-white 64 page square book of cartoons about the younger set and their unique take on Christianity. Most of these are taken from the book Two-by-Fours, although there are some from the magazine Youth. The book is laid out with the text on the left of each spread, and the images on the right, a style of presentation that worked well in such books as Happiness is a Warm Puppy.  Without color, it comes forth as simple and straightforward:

As I said, I’ll have ten copies of this with me at Beaglefest at Saturday’s sale thingy (still trying to nail down the price, probably $7.99.) I expect it will be available for ordering through Amazon shortly thereafter.

Cartoons © Warner Press. Used with permission. All rights reserved.

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