By Shaenon K. Garrity
Our columnists are independent writers who choose subjects and write without editorial input from comiXology. The opinions expressed are the columnist's, and do not represent the opinion of comiXology.
Of the conventions I do every year, the Stumptown Comics Festival in Portland is my favorite. People always talk about "doing" comic conventions. "Attending" sounds too passive for what most people get up to, I guess. I would usually say I endure them, but I do like Stumptown. It's small and friendly and full of people in beards, like Portland at large.
When I did Stumptown the weekend before last, I was on a panel called "Self-Publishing Like a Rockstar" with Lucy Knisley, Meredith Gran, and moderator Erika Moen. You can hear the audio of it here:
http://erikamoen.livejournal.com/379564.html. I'm not sure that I self-publish like a rockstar, but I made a book once, so I was able to say "ISBN" and sound like I knew what I was talking about. The other panelists were indeed rockstars, and I learned useful things from them, like which print-on-demand services won't scam you and how to get a guy to sell your stuff to stores.
The panel covered a lot of good nuts-and-bolts information, but afterwards I thought of some other things I could've said. So.
Five Things To Know Before You Publish Your First Comic
1.
It won't change your life. Some people will buy it, some people won't, some people will care, most people won't, and before you know it you'll be moving on to the next thing. Very few cartoonists make a big impact with their first book. Put it this way: how many people read
Lost at Sea when it came out?
Gordon Yamamoto and the King of the Geeks?
Goodbye Chunky Rice?
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron? How many of these books have you even heard of?
Maybe you'll be one of those
wunderkinder who blow everyone away with your very first graphic novel. In that case we all hate you. More likely, no one will love your work the way you do, and you'll have to keep proving yourself over and over until, mostly by chance, something catches on. Yes, it seems like it'd be nice if the world acknowledged, celebrated, and nurtured you right from the start, hailing you as the genius you are before you even bothered to publish anything. That happened once to a guy named Al Columbia. It's taken him twenty years to recover from it and actually draw a book. You don't want that situation.
2.
It's not really that hard. There are a lot of publishers. If they turn your book down, self-publishing is pretty easy and not impossibly expensive. There are two basic ways to go: through a regular printer, which involves a bigger up-front cost but a lower price per book, or through a print-on-demand service, which is the opposite. Which one you use depends on what kind of book you're making. Listen to the panel, we talk about it.
The rest of self-publishing is just fiddly stuff like finding a friend who knows InDesign and deciding whether you have room in your apartment for 1,000 copies of a single book. Oh, and you should make the cover really appealing. It's okay if it looks a lot better than the interior art. You want to sell this thing. That's about it.
3.
Most comics publishers are kind of dumb and don't have a lot of money. They publish a lot of bad stuff. They turn down a lot of good stuff. Sometimes it's for stupid reasons. Other times it's for reasons that make good economic sense but still suck. There are two ways to deal with this situation. One is to draw the kind of comic that appeals to comics publishers. This is a great way to go, except for one thing: you can't fake it. A cartoonist who cynically crafts a comic to fit a market can never compete with a cartoonist who draws a comic about the same thing because
he genuinely loves it. You know why
Scott Pilgrim and
Penny Arcade are blockbusters? Because those guys genuinely love jokes about Super Mario. You know why their dozens of imitators are less successful? Because they're imitators.
The other way to deal with the situation is to forget about comics publishers. I know it's hard to remember sometimes, but there's a world outside of comics. Jason Shiga's choose-your-own-adventure graphic novel
Meanwhile got turned down by comics publishers because it has to be printed with dozens of precisely-cut paper tabs, and none of the publishers could afford to do that (they don't have a lot of money, remember?). So Shiga sold
Meanwhile to a children's book publisher. Children's publishers print pop-up books and puzzle books. They have access to equipment that can cut tabs into the pages of
Meanwhile. Also, now
Meanwhile can warp the minds of children, and if that wasn't Shiga's plan all along, it should have been.
4.
Be realistic about how many people will buy your book and how you're going to sell it. That's where it gets hard: after the book is out, after the press releases have been sent, you have to actually sell the damn thing. Even if you have a publisher, you may not be able to trust them to put a lot of effort into selling the book. Any cartoonist who's been in the business for at least ten years can tell you stories. Ask them. You will see slow, bitter fires burn behind their eyes. So be ready to be a salesperson.
If you're self-publishing, it's even more important to have a realistic idea of how you're going to get those books out of your apartment and into people's hands. Your goals need not be spectacular. This won't change your life, remember? If, say, you do a standard print run of 1,000 copies through a standard offset printer, you'll probably have to sell about 300 copies to break even. Can you sell 300 copies of your book? Then go for it. Is it just going to be your aunts and your stalker down at the Kinko's? Then you need to spend more time drumming up buzz. (Also, don't trust your aunts to buy your books. All your relatives will expect a free copy and almost none of them will bother to read it. Unless your family is psychotically supportive like the parents of the
Eragon kid, but if that's the case you're probably too well-adjusted for the comics industry.)
Do book signings. Do events. Go to conventions. Sell stuff online. Keep trying until something clicks. You might luck out and get a sympathetic editor or publisher or agent or crazy fan who sells your work for you and does it with panache, but you might not. Plan accordingly.
5.
Draw a comic. I mentioned this on the panel, too, but it's still my favorite piece of advice from Kyle Baker's
How to Draw Stupid: "To be a cartoonist, you must actually
make cartoons. I bring this up because I've met a lot of people who say they want to be cartoonists, but they don't have any cartoons." Before you do any of the above, have a cartoon. You get to worry about the rest later.
Shaenon K. Garrity is a manga editor at Viz Media and is best known for her webcomics Narbonic and Skin Horse.
All the Comics in the World is © Shaenon K. Garrity, 2010
