An occasional online diary into the trials and tribulations of an independent comics publisher.
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10 June 1998 "I should have..." Last night I was talking to another self-publisher about his upcoming book. He's got a great line-up of artists, just got a dynamite cover from a well-known animator/illustrator, and is seeing a lot of interest from the small group of indy-friendly retailers he mailed advance info to. "I should have just mailed that info to the whole list of 1,000 retailers," he said. Personally, I think he did the right thing, if his message hadn't been so effective to 50 retailers, then mailing 1,000 isn't such a good idea. The ad industry often tests ads over a small sample before blitzing the public. The only thing he might have done differently is to initiate the small sample of retailers further in advance, so he could do a bigger mailing once he got feedback. As it is, he's not totally painted into a corner. This strategy of targeting a few dozen retailers isn't so bad in general, as most indy sales come from those very stores. He'll get probably 70% of his sales from those retailers, at least to start. If the response is as good as he says, he will likely have no problem getting Diamond to let him relist the book a couple months later, which will let him do a mailing to everyone he wants, and which will also have the added benefit of a track record for the book. But that's not what I'm writing about, I'm writing about the Self-Publisher's Mantra. I Should Have. I Should Have insured that package. I Should Have sent this mailing two weeks ago. I Should Have called the artist to make sure they mailed their pages. I should Have spent more time designing my Previews ad. I Should Have studied computer programming instead of art... Too often we find ourselves caught in that mantra, and like most mantras it will induce a mindless trance, usually on the eve of some deadline that I Should Have prepared better for. As self-publishers, we are our own bosses, but if you think about how hard we seem to be on ourselves most of the time, we are our own really critical, demanding bosses. None of us would choose to work with someone who nags us the way we nag ourselves, right? We need to remember that publishing is a fairly complex venture, one which requires thorough knowledge of some pretty technical areas, and on top of that all the other requirements of running your own business. It takes a while to learn the ins and outs, and we're not going to get everything right the first time. If we write a list of the things we're doing well as well of the things we'd like to have done differently, we'll probably see that we're getting better, hitting more of the shoulds each time we go to bat. What we really Should Do is give ourselves a little slack. This isn't a major motion picture, the amounts of money we're typically dealing with are miniscule in the scale of most entertainment projects, even if they seem big to us. And if we aren't measuring up to our own expectations in some aspect of our projects, perhaps its time for us to bite the bullet and hire the talent we need. Either way, we need to be a more understanding boss, else we find ourselves undergoing employee burnout. I don't have a big concluding point to make here. I suppose I Should Have, but I'm going to cut myself a break this time. |
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5 June 1998 Let me tell you a bit about our new book, Spawnfeld. We haven't yet set a date, but we are busy working on the writing, and you may have seen the very first Spawnfeld strip in our online comics section. If not, go there now. Writing this book is an interesting story in itself, at least for process junkies. Richard lives in London, Lance Gueck is in Vancouver, B.C., and I'm in Los Angeles. Everything is done either by the phone or by e-mail, and we communicate much more by e-mail than we do by international long distance. The whole concept arose during one of the rare times when Richard, Lance, and I were in the same room, in this case our booth at San Diego last year. We were all talking, and someone said something that sounded like 'Spawnfeld.' "Spawnfeld?," I asked, and the three of us looked at each other. Richard grabbed his pen and a sheet of bristol. The result is the Spawnfeld gag cartoon on the online comics page, which was going to be a one-pager in the Flies in Black book. We decided to take a crack at a full-length comic around the time all the hype was flying around surrounding the last Seinfeld episode. By taking Spawnfeld off the stage, and putting him into a typical sitcom episode about nothing (rather similar to Spawn, frankly), we saw rather a lot more possibilities to skewer both Spawn and Seinfeld. And that's how parody is born... So, much e-mail is flying, as is the occasional international phone call. You should get to see how it turns out this fall, but you get some darned good hints on the page, as we plan to tease you into ordering it. Now, where'd I put that feather? |
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04 June 1998 It's been a long time since I've weighed in here, a long period of time during which we haven't published anything, but have managed to stay pretty busy. Just got interviewed by a writer for Comics Retailer magazine, about comics and the Web. Not sure when it will be printed, but it should be interesting. I may post some of that here later, but probably after the article runs. In the last 4 and 1/2 months, I've done much coloring, particularly our online comic, Flies in Black. We've been fleshing out a new series to be announced eventually. The Aviatrix story is now penciled, and in the process of being lettered and inked; I'm quite looking forward to showing that to people. We've also got a one-shot that we're going to schedule soon, Spawnfeld. This may be done as a flipbook with the Flies in Black story. So, now we start the process of promoting a book even as it gets written. Should be interesting to watch. Almost done with a major addition to the site -- a FAQ for comics-pro. It's the start of a pretty good book on self-publishing issues, I think, and I think it's somewhat more relevant than the Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing, which I and others found pretty disappointing. The redesign of our site has been a mixed success, in my eyes. On one hand, we've gotten a very good increase in traffic, now that we are putting Rich's Ramblings on the site. Whenever the column raises a controversy, we tend to get more traffic, and in all we've upped our traffic severalfold, sometimes as much as 10 times our daily traffic from last year. Where I'm not happy is that we haven't come up with more interviews, articles, and reviews. It's proven harder than I'd hoped to create exciting content for the site with 2 people working part-time on it. Plus, Richard doesn't have a computer to update his columns himself. |
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15 January 1998 Got the second installment of our online comic up, two days early in fact. I nearly missed this deadline, though, and probably rushed the work more than I should have. Still, there are some pretty nice looking panels, and I think the discipline of doing all this coloring is going to help me quite a bit. I recommend treating your Web page more like a magazine, and setting deadlines. There are several publishers who could benefit from that focus, and not all of them are one-horse operations like ours. Got a phone message from the APE folks -- I sort of wondered about this when I registered, but their form didn't include any space for listing our titles. They finally realized this, and were kind enough to call to rectify the error. Just goes to show you, everyone messes up a detail here and there. I emailed the info tonight, which should get it into the program. Naturally, I could have saved them the trouble by sending a press pack with the application in the first place. I don't have one, however, and there are a lot of things I don't have which will help present our company more professionally in these situations. We will get this right before I send another solicitation out, I swear. This seems like it should be some sort of Law of Publishing: No matter whose screw-up it is, there was probably something you could have done to prevent it. Corollary: It's your problem to fix now, anyway. I do practice this rule in some cases; when I send something to the printer, I now include a pagination guide. I got through 9 books without doing it, and never had a printing error. I got lucky, and when we did Bug Hunt as flip books (which really are a pain, but are great when you have a backup feature you want to emphasize, so we'll likely do more of them), I couldn't take any chances. It's also nice to make a couple of extra ones up, so you can show people the book while it's at the printers (did that at APE IV). My color printer makes it possible to put together an impressive little mockup. Received JPGs of the first three penciled pages of _Aviatrix_ the other day. Monique is doing a great job, and I'm looking forward to the rest. It's the first script I've worked on, so I'm learning a lot about the process as we go. It's making the script a lot more real for me, and what is particularly encouraging is that the pages look like I'd expect them to look, only better. That is, no weird surprises; the script was clear enough for someone to draw. It's hard to know that when you are writing it... |
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13 January 1998 Received some interesting story ideas/series concepts from Richard. One in particular seems to have a lot of promise, artistically and commercially, and I asked Richard some questions about what he had in mind, and brought up some historical events that could be explained by the story line. I'm looking for a series to be narratively interesting, but to have also what I call 'texture,' an added dimension that makes the story more authentic. If the internal logic of the story dovetails with what we know about reality, or the interactions of characters are real enough that you could identify the behavior in someone's self-help book, or the story parallels some laws of nature, economics, politics, or thermodynamics, these are all examples. I always enjoy stories that manage to do this. For one thing, I think that the Cameron movie 'Titanic' layers the story very well. The contrast between the haves and have-nots on the boat, the passengers and crew, etc. tell a substantial story about that moment in time, and without preaching. But, anyway, my aim is to exchange ideas, and look at where the book can go. It's Richard's story -- he'll be writing and drawing the book, and it's his name that gets attached to it if it falls short of its goals, so he has final say about what to write or draw. My aim as editor is to ask the questions the story leaves unanswered, so that Richard can decide if the answer is necessary to the story he wants to tell. That, and of course, the more mechanical stuff like grammar, spelling, consistency, and in some cases continuity. But my main point is that it isn't an editor's job to tell the writers what to write, at least not here. Ran into a furry artist at the CAPS meeting tonight -- she's from Australia, and actually remembers seeing X-Flies Special in the comic shop she worked in. Wow. Like everyone else, though, she didn't know there were 5 more books. The other interesting thing from the CAPS meeting was that one gentleman brought in a pile of framed artwork. Jack Kirby originals. From the Kirby house. Apparently, the family is selling the house now that Roz is gone, and asked this gentleman to take care of the artwork. There were some fabulous pages -- my favorite as a 2-page spread of a Prohibition speakeasy, but Marvel fans would have probably been awestruck by the Thor and Hulk work, etc. These were the pieces that Jack himself felt were worthy of hanging in his home, his personal favorites, and they were all great. I recommend that you join one of these cartoonist organizations if there is one in your town. Here in LA, the crew includes Sergio Aragones, Mike Vossberg, Stan Sakai, and a ton of others who come in from time to time. CAPS was conceived as mostly a social club for cartoonists to get away from the drawing boards and get away from the isolation a bit. It's also a good place for networking, and a great way to get exposed to the wide variety of work being done in the industry. |
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7 January 1998 Got in touch with Richard, and he's agreed to draw a special print for the APE V X-Flies packs. He'll draw it, copy 15-20 of them, sign and number them, and send them to me. I shouldn't have a problem getting them in time to make the packs for APE. We like doing this kind of thing, giving people a little something extra. We did this with the Flies in Black print for SDCC, and sold all the packs we had made up. We ended up making more packs at the booth, and having Richard do an original one-of-a-kind sketch for each pack. That was fun -- people liked the sketches (Richard must have done about 100-150 drawings at San Diego, as we completely used up the big pack of blank index cards we'd brought, and had to buy another at the convention survival center ), and those packs sold pretty well, too. We still have a couple left over. It's tricky trying to do some of this stuff when you have to mail things back and forth across the Atlantic. We don't have an account with an express mail place like DHL yet, so we are somewhat at the mercy of the post office. We usually make out okay, though we often end up shipping things twice when something doesn't appear to be coming, then having both copies arrive at their destination about the same time. Weird, and nerve-wracking. |
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6 January 1998 Finally invoiced Diamond for our December shipment. If I'd invoiced when I shipped, I'd have a check by now. It's really important to follow up on these things, particularly when someone owes you money like that. The $500 or so we'll get isn't going to make us rich, but it will make a good dent in a printing bill. Procrastination is not good, and this is one of those places where it could hurt you. Other thing I'd put off was sending in the APE registration and check. We'll make the deadline for the cheaper table price (Jan. 15), but my procrastination has hurt us a bit in that we didn't get listed in any of the advance publicity materials for the con, or the Web site. Eternal vigilance, and all that, or maybe I just need to get a better calendar. The Monday after APE is also the deadline for applying for a Small Press Area table for SDCC this year. This time, since we won't have any new product, and won't be making much money between now and then, the Small Press table makes sense. We can move packs, and not worry about making back the table price, which was definitely a problem with the booths the last two years. It's nice to have a booth, though -- if I can somehow make that happen, I will do so. Time to start talking to prospective booth partners, particularly Dreamwalker Press, our partners from last year. We had a great time, a pretty good booth, and a good flow of people. This year, I also want to make sure we can get something in the SDCC Souvenir Program. Deadline is in May, IIRC. |
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30 December 1997 Got written notification from Diamond that Flies in Black was being canceled due to being late. Duh -- I called them a month ago and told them we were canceling. I didn't just leave a message either, I talked to our brand manager. No wonder we're still being listed on the Late Comics List. I guess I should have checked Diamond's site to make sure the cancellation had gone through the system. When I talked to the brand manager today, he didn't remember anything about the cancellation. I suppose he's managing so many companies that he wouldn't, but it's still annoying that I was considerate and professional enough to call them instead of waiting for them to contact me, and they still ended up contacting us just before the cancellation date. Almost done with Web page -- still have to complete coloring Flies in Black. |
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27 December 1997 The Web re-design is going pretty well, though Adobe PageMill crashed in the middle of my work on a couple of pages, and I hadn't saved yet. It took a while to retrace my steps and redo the work, but there wasn't so much stuff done yet anyway. I'll have something to show for all this by January 1st, even if everything isn't perfect. Still haven't invoiced the December order from Diamond, though I made the packs and got it shipped promptly on December 1st, and the books did hit the stores. The pack sales won't make us rich, but it did clear out a couple of boxes worth of space in the warehouse (i.e. my closet), and the proceeds from selling 106 X-Flies Bug Hunt packs will more than cover the money I spent sending out pre-order cards on Flies in Black, so that's not such a loss. The number of packs ordered doesn't lead me to believe that Diamond will let us relist the books in the future, however. It's up to us to sell them, I guess. Still need to sign up for APE V. Randy Reynaldo (WCG Comics) may share the table with me, which would help out with expenses. Neither of us have any new books in print since San Diego, though. I expect we can move some packs, and Randy will certainly sell some TPBs, now that he's signed with Image. Last year's APE was a big morale booster for me, and sales were good. This year, the expansion to 2 days should be good, but the additional expense may make it a wash. I need to go anyway -- there are a bunch of artists and publishers I should talk to, line up stories for our upcoming books. |