At 405 pages the The Ultimate British Comics Gold Collection was designed very specifically so that, rather than five separate volumes that you might need to search through you had everything in one big volume minus any in-houise adverts. Yes, it had a cover price of £25.00 (it is available around the world in local currencies) but that still meant it was cheaper that the £45.00 total it wpould cost to buy volumes 1-6.
In fact the collection has sold, I believe, 5 copies since 2012. The single volumes have not sold a single issue and I began publishing those in 2010.
I never really expected to make a lot of money out of these because they were meant to promote UK comics history and keep their memories going as, really, a work of love. Now that sounds very sad!! I think the fact that the late Brian "Bib" Edwards got a copy a year or so before he passed away and praised the Collection brought a real feeling of joy.
Apart from the money spent gathering all the old comics together (which I'll never make back) there was a month or more worth of work put into each book. I've [posted before about the difficulties in cleaning up 70-80 year old art pages and even at times had to zoom in to 300 to 500 times to repair damaged lettering. The emails of encouragement from people who were (not) going to buy the books and all the talk of finally getting very hard to find (and often expensive) Golden Age British comics in new collected editions -iot was encouraging.
With the large membership on the old British Comic Book Archives and Britcomics Yahoo groups I did think a few copies might sell.
Even the number of views on the two blogs dealing with this period (both recently made defunct by me for similar reasons) you might assume would ;lead to one or two sales. No.
Unless it is for free no one is interested. Enough of my scans have been taken and used from the old blogs to prove that. Those scans then get used elsewhere by people claiming they are the scanners or have no idea who the original scanner was...after removing the BCBA (British Comic Books Archive) and "Hooper" identifiers from pages!
At around 0200 hrs I was looking through the Ultimate Collection and m,ade a decision. If there is no interest in the single volumes at lower prices then the Ultimate Collection is a time waste. As of 30th March the Ultimate Collection will no longer be available on the Black Tower store front -it will not be deleted but will be Private so that only I have access to it and if I do decide to sell the price will not be as low as £25.00!
The single volumes will remain on the store front and remain at the same price as for the last ten years -these are minimum prices since the printer and print on demand company get bigger cuts of sales than I do. Fact of POD sadly -I'd need to sell 10 copies of a single book to actually earn the cover price listed!
Black Tower Super Heroes has caused some confusion -from people who never buy the books...but they are all potential customers. BTSH will not be publishing solely British Golden Age material. The whole purpose of the title is to reprint a mix of Golden and early (PD) Silver ages material along with contemporary material -mainly rare early Black Tower strips to mark next year's anniversary. Or this year's. I get confused after all of this time. More in a later post.
I gave the Ultimate Collection more than my best shot and it is listed by sellers around the globe and the total views of posts about the book on Twitter/FB and CBO etc totals hundreds of thousands -you can see why I get slightly frustrated.
So, The Ultimate British Golden Age Collection is removed from the store front on the 30th April, 2020.
Volumes 1-6 of the British Golden Age Collection will remaion listed and available at the store front.
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