Three videos to get you revved up, to motivate you to do the pro thing and demand pro compensation for pro work.
First, illustrator Steven Silver.
Now some Harlan Ellison. Hang on to your hat!
And me!
Comments from the Peanut Gallery on Youtube.
What this guy doesn’t know about Jack Kirby…well, whatever. What a maroon.
Crossposted with minor edits from my Facebook page.
I just had an interesting exchange with a pro friend of mine that I wanted to share before I forgot.
First thing: Lots of people assume that the reason they can’t get hired is because publishing is some kind of closed circle. It’s really not.
Clients are always looking for new talent. Really. They are dying to hire the next JK Rowling, the next Jim Lee, the next James Patterson. Who doesn’t want another money-maker?
The truth is, almost everything that comes over the transom is not very good. When I write this, aspiring creators cringe thinking, “Oh, she means me.” No, I don’t. If you got a look at just how bad submissions are, you would be appalled. It is rare to see anything of quality. I don’t know anyone in publishing who enjoys going over submissions, because it’s depressing.
If you are good and if you’ve got something to show, DON’T GIVE UP. Trust me, clients are DYING to find you.
Second thing: a major reason clients don’t like to hire new people is they have a tendency to screw the pooch at an alarmingly high rate. The joy of creating for fun evaporates when you HAVE to create. Creating all the time: not so simple. And, especially in comics, the workload is awesome.
Almost everyone in graphic arts will try to steer you away from comics and toward advertising because comics pay is usually terrible and advertising is less work for more money.
Also, I can’t tell you how many people I’ve tried to hire up from fandom who have completely vapor-locked when they actually got that job they said they wanted, including people I’ve tried to hire from other areas of publishing.
A guy I tried to hire to archive my art seemed enthusiastic at first, but when faced with the daunting prospect of digitally archiving THOUSANDS of pages, he just looked at it all one day, put it in some boxes…and sat on it for two years, without archiving a page. He could not face me, he could not face the fact that he procrastinated me into a corner of having to beg him to give the job back. He just flaked out.
Everything in comics is labor intensive and often techy and boring these days, since artists have to do their own production work. You have to really know what you are doing. Most people don’t.
Even pros like me have had to learn today’s industry ass backwards because computers didn’t exist when we learned our skills; we’ve had to learn a whole new trade as production people in addition to being cartoonists. Not fun, really.
So, next time you think that publisher isn’t going to give you a chance, think of it from the publisher’s point of view. If your portfolio is good, and you show a real, steely willingness to produce, there’s a publisher looking for you. Really. Don’t give up.
Follow up from comments:
One person asked if they should encourage kids to start submitting portfolios at age twelve like I did to “get their name out there”.
No, not really. I recommend you send work to publishers when you have professional quality work to show. I have no doubt a kind editor was amused to get that package from me, but if every 12 year old did what I did, editors would be jumping out of the windows of every publishing house in NYC. These people are professionals, don’t waste their time with “get your name out there”. You may make them remember your name in a way you won’t like. You want to be a professional? Learn what that is and go do that.
Also, while it’s cute to tell the story of sending samples to an editor at Random House when I was twelve, I followed up the rejection letter with a phone call, and got a fairly icy response from the editor who was a lot nicer in print than she was when confronted with a goofy kid taking up her work time. Which is perfectly understandable.
Getting your name out there is worthless unless you’ve got something good to put your name on. So, work on your art.
After getting a taste of Real Publishing, I decided to do it like the grown ups do, and study Writers Digest and learn something about the business before I annoyed another potential client. It’s easy to find any number of these books at the library.
Delays are not denials. It may take awhile, but I swear to God, publishers are really, truly looking for talent, ALL THE TIME.
Don’t be shy if you think you’ve got chops. It seems like the people with the weakest chops have the biggest voices. I know rejection is hard, but that’s part of this business, and you have to face it. And please understand that the talent pool isn’t as wide and deep as you think it is. Most submissions are incredibly bad.
If you have ability, you will stand out. Maybe not now, but someday.
Hang in there.
Today, authors and publishers increasingly rely on services like Bookscan to track their sales, to commodify popularity into a contract for the next gig. If a publisher thinks you have “millions of fans,” naturally a publisher will want to sign up your new novel.
But we’ve all seen our fair share of creators who claim “millions of fans” who have 1500 followers on twitter. Many people fib, publishers and authors alike. So, one hopes, sales lists you can purchase from stat companies will give accurate info.
I track my own sales as listed by Amazon Author Central (which gets its data from Bookscan) against my actual sales as listed on my royalty statements, and I find Bookscan is so far off as to be completely useless. I’ll show you what I mean with examples below. These Bookscan numbers can have a serious effect on an author’s ability to sell a project, and if they are as wrong as I know they can be, this muddle can cripple a career.
From the Amazon Authors page:
There was an interesting article in the Canadian Globe and Mail about the plight of the midlist author, and the trouble with track records:
And once reduced to pure numbers, those track records determine the fate of proven writers looking for cash advances to begin their next books. “Everybody knows the numbers now,” Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski said in an interview. “You can’t lie about the numbers.” Retailers don’t order books from authors whose previous work sold indifferently, she added, so publishers respond by cutting them loose.
The upheaval is such that an author like Dan Brown “would never get published now, because his first three books sold nothing,” Bukowski said. But as everybody knows, Brown’s fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 80-million copies.
The article flatly states that these stats are accurate and reliable.
There was a time when only her publisher knew for sure. But today, anybody can pay to find out exactly how many copies of any book that any author has ever written have actually sold.
Except they’re really not. And, in my experience, not even close, especially if a chunk of your sales went to the comic book market, or to libraries, or digital. The vast majority of those are not tracked by any of the “Nielson-like” numbers. And even when I’ve worked on major projects for companies like DC and Marvel, on books which have been in major bookstores outside comic shops, and with major authors, the Bookscan numbers came in at less than 10% of my actual sales.
So, have some screen shots.
I am not going to give you all the gory details about all of my projects, because I don’t think my clients would appreciate my divulging this proprietary information. I will, however, start off with one Bookscan number that is so far off the mark that anyone can see it’s just wonky, and I don’t think I’m poking my publisher in the eye by doing this.
According to my Bookscan stats, Spider-Man: Died in Your Arms Tonight graphic novel sold only 188 copies, in all editions, over the last two years.
Does anyone believe that? I sure don’t. I got a royalty check for more than $188, for crying out loud. And we’re not getting $1 per book sold, OK?
A goodly portion of this low number is due to the fact that Authors Central only got linked to Bookscan back in 2010. So, all sales aren’t showing up.
OK, so let’s have a look at one of my books published after Amazon linked to Bookscan. I am not going to tell you what this book was, just that it is a book from a major publisher.
According to Bookscan, it has sold 542 copies in hardcover. Ouch. What a bummer! This is accurate as of yesterday.
Except I got a royalty statement on this thing. And according to my royalty statement, this book sold 7181 copies by end of the accounting period, which was last summer. As of now, it has sold over 10,000 copies in hardcover. Respectable numbers. Not tearing up the charts, but enough to issue a new edition.
So, the accumulated Bookscan numbers are a good 93% off my actual reported sales from my publisher, as of my last royalty period.
That’s pretty scary, especially if you’ve got clients looking at your next project and seeing data that’s this far off the mark. Ten thousand sales isn’t a bestseller, but it is considerably better than many books are selling these days. It’s a solid number for a graphic novel. (Exactly what a midlist book is, or what constitutes a winner to your publisher is a matter of endless debate. You can read more about it here. Also, read the comments – especially about the “appearance of success” due to “speed of sale” as opposed to backlist sale over time. Which is where an author like me makes most of her dough.)
Here’s another one of my projects which is from a B-list publisher (not an insult, just giving some context). According to Bookscan, we only sold less than 400 copies. (EDIT: my publisher has asked me to be a little less revealing and I have complied. So I’ve rounded off the number and removed the screen shots.)
But according to my royalty statement, we sold just under 11,000 copies as of last summer.
This is not, by any means, the best selling stuff I have done, it’s just the stuff I got in the last accounting period, and it’s at hand. Some of my books sell a heck of a lot better than this. A Distant Soil, for example, moved tens of thousands of graphic novels as a backlist item, but you’d never know to look at Bookscan.
I can’t tell you what this book is, but I can tell you it is from a major author. And according to Bookscan, the work we did together moved a sad 3010 copies.
This book came out after Bookscan was added to Author Central, so I have to assume those are the numbers Bookscan sends to clients. I’ve cashed royalty checks for this thing, and I am not getting anything like $1 per copy on this anymore than I’m getting $1 per copy on Spider-man. I’m not even getting 10 cents per copy.
These wildly inaccurate Bookscan numbers can be used to dump an author. And that’s a bummer.
Here are more screen shots of my Bookscan sales on projects that I know for a fact have sold more than 100,000 copies each. Those books pay some bills every year, and that is very nice. But according to Bookscan:
I’ve been told many times, and have often repeated here, that Bookscan numbers are half to one quarter of what your actual numbers are. But in my experience, it is 90% or more off on every single one of my books. No exceptions. (EDIT: I checked one other book after writing this, and it fared a bit better: about 80% off.) The numbers are so far off, at first I assumed that these Bookscan numbers were just showing me books sold on Amazon. But not according to Author Central:
Currently, Author Central obtains the sales data from Nielsen BookScan, which collects the print sales report from over 10,000 retail book sellers. In order for Nielsen BookScan to report sales data for a book, the book’s seller must participate in Nielsen BookScan and the book must appear in BookScan’s bibliography. This bibliography is generated from a number of third party sources including the Ingram Book Company.
I’d love to give you a complete look at all my sales and compare them to all my Bookscan numbers, but that’s not fair to my clients. But if Bookscan really does provide this information to Author Central, and what I see there is what others are seeing in their Bookscan data, then the numbers are about as useful as hiring a psychic to figure out what sales are. Voodoo would be more useful; at least you get to eat the chicken after you cut its head off.
Is this discrepancy unique to graphic novels because of comic book market distribution? Is Author Central not getting all the Bookscan data? Or is Bookscan really that off the mark?
I have no way of knowing if other author’s Bookscan data is as far off as mine, but one thing’s for sure: the idea that anyone can now subscribe to a data provider and get accurate information is bunk.
Just take a look at the Spider-Man GN sale there, and look at some of the big-name authors I’ve worked with.
And do your own math.
The only accurate numbers you as an author are ever going to see are on your royalty statement. And with some publishers, not even then.
Hope this is of some use. Have a great New Year.
With big book sales.
c
Here is an extensive post I wrote on the self publishing service iUniverse, which charges ridiculous amounts of money for baseline services, squeezing newbies out of vast amounts of cash. Aspiring pro authors hope they’ll get a bestseller, and all they really get is a big bill.
iUniverse charges you $699 to tell booksellers they can return your book if it doesn’t sell.
Returnable books is standard in publishing, except for the comic book direct sale market. Why on earth anyone would charge you $699 for this service I cannot fathom.
Except they want to make a buck from your ignorance.
First off, you guys gotta realize that once booksellers see your book coming from iUniverse, they know it is self published and are far less likely to stock it. Booksellers know Vanity Press when they see it. OK? Let’s just get that out of the way right now.
Scour the shelves of any retail bookstore outside the direct market, and I defy you to find five copies of anything self published. I’m not saying it never happens, I am saying it is sort of like, I dunno, having a meteor hit your house.
You know what all of this stuff is, don’t you?
These people convince wannabe pros that the only real difference between them and a bestselling author is big money, and that big money will buy you fame. It’s the Kim Kardashian school of accomplishment.
For only $799, we’ll make you go viral!
Say, folks, don’t you think that if $799 was all that stood between you and instant internet fame, everyone would be doing it? You think?
When I originally posted my little review of the services of iUniverse, some internet asshat tried to dismiss it as me being a big bully on behalf of my good friend Arlene Harris, who approached me about her bad experience at iUniverse, and asked me to make it public.
Folks, I’ve probably met Arlene three times in my life, and I consider her the same kind of internet friend I consider many of the people who come to my blog: good conversation, and some fun posts. I am not her personal sock puppet to make shit up and post bad things about honest publishing companies. No conspiracy here, but thanks for playing.
But you don’t have to take my word about iUniverse, or its parent company Author Solutions, now the property of Penguin.
Have some fun reading these articles over at Suess’s Pieces blog.
iUniverse Complaints: The Complete Index
I’m a midwestern, polite-to-the-point-of-death person (you could be stabbing me and I would ask you to please stop), and I ended up shouting over this woman, “Gracie! Gracie! Gracie! I am not buying any more services!” She was going on about how iUniverse was the number one self-publishing company. I said, yes, I have already published my book with them, and I’m not doing any more for it. In a very accusatory manner, she said, “So what do you expect me to do with your book?” I said, “Nothing. Let it go.” “You want me to ignore your book?” She seemed very angry.
You really REALLY need to read this.
What I find funny is that even with all the promotion I did, iUniverse tells me that I haven’t sold but a total of 49 books in the 3rd quarter (July, August, Sept, 2011) and 70 books in the 4th quarter (October, Nov, Dec 2011). I know this is a lie, and I have proof that I have sold more then was being reported through Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
In fact, after I called customer service at least 50 times to no avail, I finally got a call from Pamela H. She was completely incompetent and downright mean. She said, “We will publish anyone’s book, we are not going to market and hold an author’s hand. That is the author’s job; we are simply a POD [print on demand] company.”
I got mad and reminded her that I hired her, and that IUniverse was working for me, not the other way around. iUniverse did not represent themselves as a simple POD when they were selling me their services. I insisted she send me proof of my sales and royalties and explain where their 80% was being spent.
OK, I will tell you that being on a television show will not necessarily bring in big sales. I speak from experience. Being on one episode of a show on the SyFy Channel will not change your life.
But the kicker there is the royalty is a net royalty agreement. In accounting speak, net pretty much means nothing.
For added snaps and giggles, here’s a fake id and fake account from an Author Solutions consultant.
Now off to the Attorney General of Indiana.
Because the fun never ends, one of my old Very Bad Publishers has now entered the self publishing racket. For the princely sum of $7000, they will now publish your self published book!
This is what happens to publishers how are very very bad at their jobs, and who end up selling their own building to do business out of their own basement.
You know I can’t wait to write that blog post.
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