White Lightning Productions

... yes, I broke my old resolution not to make resolutions.

I made two this year: first, clean up WLP's record keeping, and second, catch up on paying royalties.

I just spent the past six hours making a first pass through WLP's computer records, plugging them into Excel, seeing what I owe to who, and the bottom line is... WLP currently owes <B>$11,646.20</B> in royalties to artists.

About double what I thought I owed.

Yow.

I have a plan to devour this elephant (how do you swallow an elephant? One bite at a time), and you can read it [url="http://community.livejournal.com/wlp/31438.html"]here[/url] on the WLP LJ community.

In the meantime, I need to contact the individual artists, get up-to-date addresses, and see what options they're willing to take...

I've reduced the amount by about two grand in 2007; in 2008 I've only treaded water, really, although I'm reducing the number of people I owe money.

The reason I got that far behind, to be blunt, was low sales. WLP's print comics use wholesale prices to cover the print bill, and that's about all they did- in fact, in a lot of cases they didn't even do that. The only reason WLP didn't go bankrupt about 2003 or so was it costs money to file for bankruptcy.

WLP's current business plan is to produce the comics as a loss leader and to use donations and merchandise sales to make the profit. That means

if you want the free comics to continue, folks, keep donating.

(Or, rather, restart donating, since only about $50 or so has been donated, TOTAL, since Labor Day...)

edit:

i mean thats good news the whole being in debt part sucks tho

could you use free merchandise stuff like ideas or pictures for T-shirts?

i drew this tshirt for an author who was suppose to sell them but never got around to it. I was just happy at the idea of having My pictures on a Tshirt.

might even be a fun idea to have a contest sorta thing were people send in there ideas and the winner gets a free shirt or somthing that way you get a bunch of stuff comming in to choose from. even stuff like "If you dream it, it probbably keeps you up at night."