We Are in the Amazon Now

I’m very happy to say that Results Not Typical is finally available from Amazon.com as a physical CD! I didn’t think this was going to happen after CDBaby’s snafu with it. But in the end, this has been a good thing as it’s made me re-evaluate how I handle CD building and distribution entirely.

One of the biggest problems in being a smalltime independent artist is the upfront cost of the production of physical media. This is especially a pain to me because I really like physical media, and I really want to make it available to people who also like it. For both The Mathemagician’s Riddle and halt, I did absolutely everything from my home. I burned the CDs, printed the labels using lightscribe, printed the insert cards, packaged them all up into cases, and sent them off to CDBaby for sale. For Results Not Typical, I tried something a bit different: instead of printing my own cards, I got a small batch printed by a poster/cd printing place. I still printed the CDs on my own and packaged it all up by myself, but I was overall pretty happy with the quality.

CDBaby, it turns out, wasn’t quite so happy. They claimed that their distributor wouldn’t distribute a CDr, which was odd to me since my first two albums were also CDrs and went through fine, but who’s counting. Upon further pushing and digging with the aid of a very cool and friendly customer service rep from them, I found out that if I bought duplicated CDrs from CDBaby’s parent company, they’d be happy to sell them. Handy, that. 🙂

After moping and despairing for a bit, I set out to find a real solution to the problem and came across CreateSpace. These guys are a little print-on-demand service that has the added benefit of being owned by Amazon.com directly, so anything that you produce through them is made available through that storefront without further hassle. I also tried another print-on-demand service, which had decent results as well, but I liked the interface, packaging options, and integration with Amazon available through CreateSpace a bit better.

Roll this all up to say that as of right now, you can buy all three Psycliq albums almost anywhere you’d want to. And you know, it’s never too early to start your Christmas shopping…