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.
About a year-and-a-half ago, I found a discrepancy in the accounting on one of my book royalty statements which showed the publisher had not calculated my income correctly on a major book.
I reported the discrepancy, and it took the client over six months to forward the shortage, which was about $2,000. EDIT: Yes, it was an HONEST mistake. They agreed with me within ONE hour of my pointing it out. I don’t believe they were trying to rip me off. However…
Since then, royalty statements at the company have been revised. It is no longer possible to find the mistake I found with the new accounting system the company uses.
Just sayin’.
Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch has an excellent working writer blog, and there are two posts you must read about some major discrepancies she found in her ebook sales statements. This is very important information.
How many e-books did the traditional publisher say I sold? 30. That’s right. 30.
When the novellas, which had worse sales rankings from Amazon, sold 300 each.
That 30 number didn’t pass the sniff test for me. So I talked with other writers who have books in the same genre with the same company. The writers I talked with also had some e-book savvy.
These writers compared the sales of their self-published e-book titles to the sales of their traditionally published e-book titles, and found startling discrepancies. Even adjusting for price differences (Big Six e-books were priced higher than the self-published books), these writers discovered that their Big Six publishers reported e-book sales of one-tenth to one-one-hundredth of their indie-published titles.
FYI: Amazon doesn’t tell what your sales are. They only show your sales ranking in relation to how you sold on Amazon on that particular day.
You can get into the top 100,000 by just selling 2 or 3 books in a single day on Amazon, and you can be bumped down to the 1,000,000 mark by only selling one book on Amazon that week. You may be selling lots of books elsewhere, but on Amazon, that won’t show.
When I wrote an article about book piracy some months ago, a few folks rushed to Amazon to see the sales rankings on my books, stopped at A Distant Soil rankings, and looked no further. Why, who’d pirate her book! Her work doesn’t sell anyway! Look at her Amazon ranking!
I have about 2 dozen books on my backlist from which I derive royalty income. Looking at the Amazon sales ranking of only one of my books as some kind of objective measure of my entire backlist is dumb. Assuming only one of my books (this one) gets pirated is dumber. Since the majority of my sales via libraries and comic book shops wouldn’t show up on Amazon anyway, making much ado about my sales ranking on one of those books (a book which has sold $3,000,000 at retail, BTW) by noting the Amazon ranking as the sole measure, is amateur night analysis.
Yesterday’s Amazon rank for A Distant Soil Volume I was 335,000. The Amazon rank for Spider-man: Back in Black was 379,000. Therefore, A Distant Soil sells better than Spider-Man.
See how dumb that is?
More FYI: Bookscan is a service which tracks sales, but only covers about 50-75% of those sales. It covers NO digital sales, no mail order, no sales of books which don’t subscribe to the service. I track my Bookscan sales every single week. EDIT: FYI, these are book sales, not periodical sales. So, these are graphic novel numbers, not pamphlet comics.
It may surprise you to hear that one of my most solid backlist titles is Girl To Grrrl Manga. It certainly surprised me.
Here is an honest to gosharootie screen shot of eight weeks of my Bookscan backlist, with combined totals for my royalty-producing titles.
No, I will not give you any more specifics than this. I don’t think that would be fair to my clients.
As you can see from this graph, little me, the lowly creator of A Distant Soil who clearly doesn’t sell anything because I am such a loser for whining about illegal downloads, actually moves between 350 and 450 books EVERY SINGLE WEEK, via Bookscan alone. If you add in that extra lot that Bookscan doesn’t cover (25-50% more via other resources,) that’s a whole lotta books. EDIT: I haven’t had a new, original graphic novel out in years BTW. Very much looking forward to seeing what happens when my new GN’s are released, starting this fall.
Naturally, I do not get as big a cut from every sale as I do when I sell direct here on my website. Some of these books pay a pittance. Some of them have yet to earn out the advance. Others pay more than a pittance.
One creator who got a load of chirpy publicity from pirate – I mean, tech – websites, went on to rave about the big blip in his sales, which, it turned out, were only a couple dozen copies. If your baseline is zero, then any increase is a huge blip, I guess.
After literally millions of page views on articles about the “huge blip,” he went on to sell 150 copies on his website.
As you can see, 150 copies is, for me, a really bad week. More economy of scale reality check for you. Not to knock anyone else, or how they toot their horn, but what other people consider a step up is, in my universe, sinking into a black hole of suck. JK Rowling would probably weep buckets if her sales ever got to my level. Other people would think they died and went to heaven.
Online exposure does not necessarily translate to fame or sales. Just ask Huffpo bloggers.
As musician Rick Carnes once said, “People die of exposure.”
Here’s what works for me:
The combo of website sales, and big publisher support – the digital and traditional publishing combo, with authorized online publication of my work so people come directly to my site. That’s the ticket.
And it’s working better and better, thanks to the great readers who support the artist. YOU! Thanks to YOU, I grow flowers and make books, and make pictures! Whee!
A few years ago, the horizon looked bleak. Now, it’s shiny and sparkly. I think I see a unicorn!
Something else to think about: many of these self publishing services are de facto publishers. Don’t assume a major traditional publisher will rip you off on your sales accounting, and a Print on Demand service won’t.
Just sayin’.
Looks something like this:
I finished this up weeks and weeks late. The rest of the creative team is saintly, because I am not dead.
I have corrections on about a dozen pages, none of them major, but should have that all loaded by tomorrow. Remember kids, check your scanner for erasure pills. My pages appear to have acne.
And since the brand new Cintiq seems to have a problem recognizing my pens after a few hours of work, I’ve had a frustrating finale on this book.
It is done but for the pockmarks and one embarrassing page where there is no finger on the trigger of a gun.
I turned in some Gone to Amerikay finished art today as well. So, all good. If I can figure out what is up with the Cintiq, anyway.
To see more work from the Mystery Graphic novel, go to Barry’s blog for a few character shots.
Also, be sure to check out Steve Bissette’s outstanding blog currently running a 14 part series of letters between Steve and Dave Sim. Part 13: transitioning from print to digital, with comments from ADistantSoil.com
Steve has also found the digital world difficult and largely unrewarding (financially, that is,) despite his lengthy and important contributions on comic creation and self publishing.
While I sold a fair number of Vermont Monster Guide copies when it first came out (100+), those have dwindled to a trickle (one every two-three months), and Blur—all five volumes—barely sell a dozen or so copies per year. The limited availability of the Tales of the Uncanny preview booklet in the spring of 2010 was successful, but again, that meant about 100 copies. Period. Long term, for the books that are always available via mail order at Myrant, Tyrant sales are very occasional; about one set every three months. T-shirts sold not at all, so I abandoned that merchandizing. Taboo sales are, essentially, one or two copies per quarter, one full set per year (at my collectible prices, since I’m the only online source for a partial set—Taboo 6 sold out four years ago—that annual sale pays the mortgage for one month). About a third of all sales, including sketches, are to foreign readers/buyers. But only the sketch sales have proven worth continuing aggressively.
The takeaway is that free thing isn’t working out for almost everyone who tries it, no matter how much you “engage”.
I wonder how much of this is about first mover advantage? Is the blogosphere so glutted with new material that being seen is almost impossible without massive support?
I sent Steve screen shots of the traffic of webcomics and blogs that got big boosts from tech websites touting the “Everything Should be Free Caring is Sharing” model, and without exception, after an initial blip, the traffic plummets. Some drop so far traffic cannot be measured by independent sources. Now, any external traffic graph is going to be dicey, but if Alexa tells me your site ranks 1 million or lower two months after your boost from Boing Boing, you have a problem. Your readers didn’t stick around. And if you have lots more free content than I do, you really, really have a problem.
The entire series of posts between Steve and Mr. Sim should be read by everyone who pursues comics as vocation.
I have done much better with income from the website over the last six months. The site makes a profit, and it is now making more money than the book makes in royalties. The biggest earner is original art, but books move steadily. We need to go back to press with two graphic novels, but I am going to put that off until the fall. I dread the print bill.
I was saddened to see a number of webcomics artists who posted income on their sites of only $15,000-$20,000 per year, after between 5 and 10 years of work and at least 20,000-30,000 daily page views, which is more traffic than I get. Per page view, I actually make more money than they do, probably because original art is higher value than a knick knack. But with 1/2-1/3 the traffic, this site is more profitable. Not dancing in the rain profitable, but enough to finance future work profitable.
A recent discussion with another creator over whether or not most webcomics artists make a living had us trying to pin down the definition of “make a living”. A recent survey claimed a number of webcomics artists “make a living”, but never quantified that. Since we have different standards for what that means, based on what creators have freely posted on their sites, most don’t make a living: they get by.
After business expenses and taxes, what does $15,000 get you?
Here’s my social security statement from the 1980′s.
Adjusted for inflation, the webcomics artist who makes $15,000-$20,000 a year now – before deductions and taxes – makes less than I did in the latter part of the 1980′s.
What cost $9000 in 1988 would cost $16112.50 in 2009.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2009 and 1988,
they would cost you $9000 and $4809.84 respectively.
$15,000-$20,000 per year now, before business expenses and taxes, is poorer than I was in 1988 when I had less than $10,000 in taxable income.
Consider that with my very low income, I was still able to get a low income home loan in 1989.
Getting by is not good enough. You don’t get what you want out of life by lowering your standards. The standard should be to thrive, not to get by.
And speaking of creator financing, Tony Harris is on Kickstarter trying to raise $20,000 for his next project. Less than two days to go, and less than half raised. Check it out.
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A Distant Soil is © and ® 2011 Colleen Doran. All rights reserved.
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