Tag Archives: Comics Biz

How My Project Budget Works

In 2014 I created a spreadsheet for project management that allowed me to be a little more realistic about what I can and cannot do. The result was that I had a very productive year in spite of losing four full work-weeks to influenza, and we went on to deliver two books, two slipcases, and a calendar in time for the holiday shopping season. And that last bit? That’s kind of a big deal when it comes to the bottom line here.

I’m doing it again in 2015. Here’s how it works:

  1. I carve my time up into twenty-hour blocks called, intuitively enough, “half-weeks” of work.
  2. I make a list of projects, and I guess how many half-weeks each of them will take. A convention weekend is a half-week. A big convention like GenCon Indy is a full week. The Writing Excuses retreat was 3 half-weeks, and I budgeted exactly right that time. Each project becomes a row in the spreadsheet. Each is assigned a priority based on the month in which it needs to be complete.
  3.  I include the comic, 52 weeks of which will take 52 half-weeks of work (This assumes that I’m able to bang out a week of strips in 20 hours. This is increasingly an unsafe assumption.) This got a priority of 9, because I needed it at the bottom of the list. I know that one has to get done each and every week. Duh.
  4. Oh Magog, the math. The spreadsheet balances my projected half-weeks of work, and subtracts it from the pool of 104 half-weeks in a year. The spreadsheet then tells me that I have too much on my plate, so I revise the estimates or prune projects. This happened in January of 2014, and after careful revision I had a year’s worth of work that fit inside a year, except that 8 months of work needed to fit inside of 5 months. But I could SEE this, and knuckle down accordingly.
  5. Each week I update the amount of work remaining in the tracking column for each project, and I input which week of the year it is in a cell that determines the size of the pool of remaining half-weeks. The spreadsheet then automatically calculates the balance, and usually it tells me that I need to cough up 60 hours or 80 hours of work during an upcoming week in order to catch up.
  6. I color-code the projects based on whether they’re scheduled items (Conventions or vacations that chop time out of my schedule), and whether they’re complete (lime green, with grey text — these are items I don’t need to look at or be distracted by, because DONE!)
  7. The spreadsheet sits in my Dropbox where I share it with Sandra. She can review it and see how I’m doing. She can also update it, though she never actually did that.

I know there are other tools for project management, but when I looked into them I realized that the amount of time I would spend learning how to work something I paid for was about equal to the amount of time I would spend building a spreadsheet I knew innately how to use, and could quickly reshape to fit the way I want to plan things. I don’t have a sanitized version of the spreadsheet to share, but maybe at some point I will.

The Massively Parallel Shipping Schedule (Alternatively: “Why We’re Not Doing NaNoWriMo”)

The calendars are arriving here at Chez Tayler tomorrow (Wednesday, November 19th.) I have a few hundred sketches to do, and those will be queued up on my game table so I have stuff to do when I want to take a break from working on the comic itself.

(Yes, I take a break from work by doing different work. No, I do not have a workaholism problem. I work, I fall down, no problem.)

The books and slipcases will be arriving at the Hypernode Media warehouse sometime the following week, hopefully on a day where they do not collide head-on with Thanksgiving plans. Regardless, as soon as they’re in hand, the hundreds of to-be-sketched books will get queued up on my game table, and I’ll go straight through on those as quickly as possible.

This sequence of events, which features me as the prominent bottleneck (which in turn means that no, this operation does not feature enough processes running in parallel [and certainly not massively so]), means that the contents of the box you ordered will dictate when that box ships.

Here’s the schedule: 

Unsketched calendars (but no Massively Parallel books or slipcases) will go out starting on Wednesday, November 19th.

Orders with sketched calendars (but no Massively Parallel books or slipcases) will go out starting on Thursday, November 20th. The last of them should be out by Monday, November 24th.

Unsketched Massively Parallel orders (including those with slipcases, calendars, and book bundles) will start shipping sometime between November 25th and December 1st, depending on when the merchandise arrives. All non-sketched orders should be out the door by December 2nd.

Orders that include Massively Parallel sketch editions (including those with slipcases, book bundles, and sketched and unsketched calendars) will go out as soon as there are sketched books to go in them. They should start shipping by December 2nd, and the last of them should be out the door by December 9th. 

What does this mean for delivery in time for Christmas?

Per the USPS site, Domestic Priority-Mail orders will all arrive in time. We plan to ship them by the 9th, and USPS says we need to have them out the door by the 20th. No problem. The 11-book bundles will ship in two packages, though, so don’t panic if only half the books arrive. The rest are probably right behind them.

International Priority Mail: We’re going to attempt to fill these orders first, and according to USPS we should hit the delivery-by-Christmas dates for all packages except those going to Central and South America, and Africa. We’ll do what we can to move those to the very top of my sketch pile, but they have to be out the door by December 2nd.

This will be our biggest and most complex shipping event ever. The amount of material arriving at the warehouse, if stacked precariously upon a single, indestructible pallet, would be about 10cm lower than an Olympic high-dive (10 meters [forty-ish feet.]). Most orders contain at least two things, and across all orders there are exactly 80 separate inventory items to be queued up for inclusion.

We’ll get pictures. Also, we’re not going to build an Olympic high-dive in our warehouse.

Are we two weeks behind our original schedule? Yes. Yes we are. Funny story…

Both the calendars and the books were delayed by errors we caught and fixed in the proofs. The calendar error wasn’t that big a deal. The printer’s software munged four pages of the file, and they fixed it. It only cost us four days.

The book error, however, was a hair’s breadth away from disaster. One of the page images slid down during a copy-edit (totally our fault) and we didn’t catch it until after the pages were printed. Fortunately, we caught it before they’d glued bindings on any of the 5,000 bundles of pages, and we were able to have them reprint the final signature (16-page section) of Massively Parallel. It cost us about $1000, plus two weeks and three anxiety attacks.

We caught that one on the Friday night (Eastern Time) before the Monday morning (Hong Kong time) when 5,000 covers were scheduled to be attached. Which means the breadth of a hair is about 44 hours, or zero business days, and please please pick up the phone before you pick up the glue.

“Funny story” indeed.

And speaking of stories, as much as Sandra and I both love to write, NaNoWriMo hasn’t worked out for us in the past, so we didn’t even consider it this year. Those of you who are doing NaNoWriMo can lord it up over us all you want.

Telling the Printer to Take My Money

Page proofs and slipcase blanks arrived this morning. Hey, look what I can build!

SlipcaseBlank-6thru11

Book 11 (Massively Parallel) and the 6-11 slipcase (Munitions Canister 2) are go for printing along with a re-print of the 1-5 slipcase (Munitions Canister 1.) This means we’re about to spend five digits of dollars on printing, and that digit in the 10,000’s place is not a one, and might not get to be a two.

On a related note, pre-orders for Book 11, both slipcases, and the 2015 calendar will all open on October 15th (Patreon supporters will be able to pre-order starting on October 13th.)

Banner Tweaking

Here’s a quick comparison between drafts of my GenCon 2014 banners. On the left, the banner I thought was the final one. On the right, the one that we used after I let the design “bake” in my brain a bit.

GenCon 2014 Banner, designed by Howard, using cover art from Privateer Press, Carter Reid, Julie Dillon, and his own hand.
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press
HowardBanner-5x7-2014-WEB
GenCon 2014 Banner designed by Howard. Art by Howard, Julie Dillon, Carter Reid, and artists at Privateer Press

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can you see  the difference? The big change was swapping XDM and SHADOWS BENEATH. For branding purposes, the original layout made it look like SHADOWS BENEATH was a Schlock cover. With XDM running interference, though, SHADOWS BENEATH gets to be its own thing.

I also changed the text effect on my name. The wavy effect was cool, but on a fabric banner it will make people thing the banner is hanging badly. The slight arch with the forward lean (the one on the left) will look much better, especially since people will be looking up at that spot.

This project killed an entire day, and that final tweak was made during three hours I could have spent writing. But I needed to make the tweak, and I didn’t know what exactly it was until I started nudging things around.