by

(#144 – May 2006)

They say publishing comics is hard.  I’m not sure I really agree.

Publishing comics well is hard, though, and I’m constantly surprised by how few people even get the fundamentals right.

So this month, let’s look at some of those fundamentals.

First off, be realistic about your assessment of your skills and marketability. You’re probably not as good as you think you are. That’s not a dis, but a manifestation of Sturgeon’s Law (perhaps, more accurately “Sturgeon’s Revelation”) – to whit, 90% of everything is crud.

Even a cursory look at the Diamond Previews catalog seems to bear this out – the overwhelming majority of the comics offered each month are uninspiring, inartistic, formulaic, and just generally poor quality.

There’s a reason that most comics sell so poorly, and it isn’t that other publishers are stealing your market, or that comic retailers are dummies who don’t know how to order, or that the audience is too unsophisticated – it is that the basic quality of the work just isn’t very good.

No one really ever wants to discuss that, because it really is so much easier to blame someone else – but it is the hard truth.

A few weeks back I went to APE, the Alternative Press Expo, and while I only showed on Sunday, and only for a few hours at that, I was struck by the same thing I’ve been struck by at every one of these events since the very first one: most of the unpublished work in the room (that is, the stapled mini-comics) is sub-professional work.

That’s not to say that they aren’t done with enthusiasm and passion, or that people with the interest shouldn’t try their hand at minis – at the very worst, minis are still a good exercise with which to hone your craft and skills – just that they weren’t ready to make the leap from an audience of scores to an audience of thousands.

There’s no shame in only appealing to an audience of scores – heck, we have a firm and open consignment program for any mini that comes walking through the door of Comix Experience just because we think it is important to encourage people to create on a micro or local level – but don’t confuse that with being ready to take it to the national stage.

I tend to believe that the first and most important test of whether a work or a creator should make it to market is if someone else has offered to publish you. Is someone else offering to pay you, or, at least, to pay for the printing costs, so you can create? Then your odds went up a bit.

This does not mean that you have to be published by someone else! Unlike the traditional book-selling world, the comics market doesn’t have any natural bias against the self-publisher. It does, however, take a rare individual who has the creative and business acumen to manage both sides successfully.

If you do have the talent and skills to both generate creative work, as well as manage the business affairs (print management, publication design, marketing, promotion, working with distributors and retailers, etc.), then self-publishing can be a lucrative venture – Dave Sim and Cerebus, Jeff Smith and Bone, Terry Moore and Strangers in Paradise, these are all fine examples of individuals (or teams) that easily handled both sides of the equation. But for every example on the “plus” side of the column, there are ten more that crashed and burned because they didn’t have the aptitude for one aspect or another; where time dealing with, say, printers, meant time away from the drawing board that the creators couldn’t actually afford.

Just as you need to be honest about your actual creative skills, in order to succeed in comics you also have to be clear about which business aspects you’re capable of (and interested in!) dealing with. Even if you don’t have the skills or patience to deal with printers, you’re almost certainly still going to have to deal with a certain amount of your own marketing and promotion, and of your own career management.

There’s a lot of different models for Direct Market publishers to follow, but virtually Direct Market publishers fall into one of three basic categories. First there’s the traditional full-service publishing model, where the creator gets either a page rate, or an advance against future royalties, for creating. While there’s always the possibility of those royalties, the larger percentage of talent on the larger percentage of works are probably only earning their contracted amount. If you’re drawing, say, Supergirl for DC, it is conceivable that the periodical will sell over the threshold needed to earn your royalties (or “incentives”, or whatever the legal speak at the individual company is), and it is also conceivable that eventually the material will be collected in TP – however, you wouldn’t do well to count on those kinds of sales; they’re more a windfall than anything else.

I think what most distinguishes this first tier of publishers is that they are (generally) fully (or near-fully) financing the creative work in advance (or upon receipt) of its completion. They’re also paying for all of the printing in advance, handling marketing and promotion, and doing all of the legwork you’d otherwise have to handle. On the comics side, DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse are all examples of this traditional full-service publisher.

What is important to remember, however, is that the larger the operation, the less they can handle your individual career management and promotion, because, individually, you’re such a small part of their publishing output. DC and Marvel each offer over one hundred new items each and every month, and they can only really focus any promotional effort on a small percentage of that at one time.

The second tier of publishers can be referred to, rather awkwardly sometimes, as the “Small Press”. Very generally speaking, this level of publishers is doing it because they really like the work they are publishing, not because they want to find something profitable so they can exploit it in other media. However, they’re typically small, under-funded, and overworked. Very generally speaking, these publishers are handling the printing and marketing costs, but they’re not providing the kinds of upfront royalties, or page rates their larger counterparts are. Instead, they (mostly) are paying substantial backend royalties so that the creator can make a significant percentage of the long-term eventual sales of a work. That’s not to say that there are never any advances, just that they tend to be nowhere of the same scale as the majors.

You can get a lot of personalized attention from the “Small Press”, but they generally just don’t have the resources to get the widest coverage for marketing and promotion.

Finally, there’s, hm, let’s call them “publishing services” publishers who take care of the printing and production work, perhaps some of the marketing efforts, but charge only a flat fee (or series of fees) for their services. The creator keeps the majority of the backend, and most, or all, of their rights to the exploitation of the property. Image is probably the best example of this style of publisher, and will probably always be the most viable one because of their favorable status as a brokered publisher.

However, the problem with this type of operation is that the more creators are involved, the more you are associated with their failures (but, seldom, their successes!)  While Image is now publishing a pretty decent percentage of “like clockwork” releases, there’s not a month that goes by that they don’t also ship a few massively late titles – and so “Image Comics = late comics” in the minds of the majority of retailers and fans, and overall initial orders suffer for it.

The worst of these types of publishers seem to act effectively as slightly wider “Author Mills”, having no editorial standards, or quality control. They tend to not last very long, however,

Ultimately, for any publisher, regardless of model, the fundamentals play out the same way.

Rule #1 is: Produce quality work, with distinct and exciting ideas. Easier said than done, I know, but sales ultimately rise or fall on the work itself. Market forces can and do cloud this (You’ll sell more copies of a work with, say, Jim Lee art, than without, regardless of the actual individual content of the work), but at the end of the day the content is the main driver of long-term sales.

Rule #2 is: Don’t break your promises, explicit or implicit. Once we’ve crossed the “Is it any good?” question, the next question a retailer asks is “Can they do what they say?” Most obviously, this is about shipping books on a sane schedule. If you can produce an issue in six weeks, but solicit them to ship monthly, we’ll figure that out really quickly. If you put your first 2 issues out monthly, then it’s 4 months until the next one, we’ll react to that, too.

Rule #3 is: Don’t crap where you eat. Well, it’s a part of the implicit promise above, really, but if you undercut me in direct sales, if you sell directly to my customers before I even have the opportunity to, if you give another market an exclusive superior version of the same product, etc., well none of those things will make me happy, either.

Rule #4 is: Market your work, at least minimally. Hell, market it to me, at least! The overwhelming majority of books on the market don’t have a clear audience in mind. “People who like comics” isn’t an audience! It is extremely difficult for a retailer to order a work if they don’t know who it is intended for. If we have to wait until the book is released to find out who it might be for, you’ve lost most of your momentum. If the audience doesn’t know the book is out there, you’ve lost most of your opportunities for sales.

Listen: the overwhelming majority of comics released in any given month rely solely on the retailer to market and promote them. One shouldn’t be surprised by poor sell-in, in that case.

Follow those four Rules, I think it is fairly “easy” to be a comics publisher. Of course it isn’t actually easy at all (you don’t see me trying it, do you?), but breaking those basics will make it harder than it has to be.

I, and, I believe, every other retailer really are looking for quality work, delivered on time, on a level playing field, where we’re not solely responsible for promoting it – do that, and you’re halfway home.

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Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since 1989. Feel free to e-mail him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama can be found right here.

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