Writer or Publisher?
All right, so I’m just about half an hour away from doing my interview for Comic Industry Insiders Live, and this is all part of the whole Prana ecosystem. It’s a thing about getting From Parts Unknown into the direct market and talking about the history of Pesto Comics and all that.
And this morning it has me thinking: Am I a publisher or am I a writer?
And the answer, well, without spoiling it, is kind of both.
As an indie comics creator, you’re going to find yourself wearing many hats a lot of the time. If you’re sending your scripts out there with hopes that someone else is going to pick it up and run with it, you are going to be sorely disappointed.
Even if you’re working with the Big Two or any mid-sized publisher out there, there’s an expectation that you are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing. So that’s something that you have to be comfortable with anyway.
Maybe you’re not as involved in production—although if we’re talking mid-size, even Image, which I would argue is not mid-size, it’s much bigger—but even if you’re working with them, you’re expected to put together the book and bring a finished product to them.
And who’s spearheading that? It’s typically the writer. (Sometimes you have writer-artists and there’s exceptions to every rule.) Most of the time as a writer, you’re not just a writer.
The Writer vs. Artist Argument
And that’s why this writer versus artist argument we seem to be having all the time—I know it’s click bait and I know it’s just nonsense for people to get online and have something to talk about—but really it’s a silly argument because the artist is focused on actually doing the production of the work and making the book look the way it looks. In a visual medium, that is critical. It’s critical that the artist is at the highest of their capability and focused on what they’re doing, but the writer kind of gets stuck with everything else: doing the project management, the production management, marketing, all of that kind of stuff.
And although, again, some artists are more than happy to be involved in the marketing, at least on my end, it’s not always an expectation.
I have folks like JP who are more than happy to do more than their share of the marketing. If you follow JP anywhere online, you know that he’s always pushing not just Pesto Comics projects, but everything that he’s touched; he will let you know about it. It will not be a secret.
However, that’s more the exception than the rule. Most artists are pretty quiet. Most artists are focused on their craft. They’re focused on getting the work together. And that’s totally fine.
The Writer’s Workload
For me to whip this script together, I can, if I’m very focused, do it in a couple weeks.
Usually it takes a lot longer.
Usually I need to step away from it and double-check and ensure that I am doing things the way I expect, and even my expectations of a project change every time I go back to it.
So it’s not something I would say that I can definitely do within a certain amount of time. Ask any of the artists I work with when I tell them I’m getting them a script and then months later I’m still working on it.
But the truth is, if I really was disciplined and focused, arguably the amount of time—fingers to the keyboard—that I’m doing something takes a lot less time than it does an artist to get a page together, especially if it’s a really detailed page.
So I understand the workload’s a little different.
So what do I do with all that free time?
I sell the book. I talk to you guys on the newsletter.
I do socials. I am out and about.
I’m doing the Pesto Comics roadshow, going to shops and telling them in person, “Hey, pick up this book.”
I’m all over Kickstarter launching campaigns.
That’s where the bulk of the work is for an indie writer.
The writing part is not much of the actual percentage of the work you’re doing.
I don’t think that’s a problem, but it’s the reality. If you are looking to get indie comics made, you are going to do it by force of will.
You are going to do it by actually putting the books together, and that’s something you need to be comfortable with if it’s something that you want to do.
Herding Cats
If you truly want to see your words become a comic book, you need to make it happen.
You need to reach out to the artists.
You need to find letterers.
You need to find production designers.
You need to be the one herding the cats and getting everyone together to make this piece of art and see it through to the end.
And that’s really where you earn the credit.
Yes, you come up with the characters and the plot and all that, and that’s of course critical. You get nothing if you don’t start from there. But that’s just the beginning.
You’ve laid the foundation and now you’ve got to go source everything else.
You may not be putting together the house, but you’ve got to a find all the people to do it, and you’ve got to find all the material to do it, and that’s all on you.
So at the end of the day, the way you earn your name on the cover and on the mast of the book is by doing all of that and not just writing it.
“Job Your Love”
And my point is I love doing all that. I actually enjoy it just as much as the writing.
I have a weird problem in that way that I really enjoy organizing things and I like being the studio executive looking at the slate of books that are coming from now through 2028, which I keep talking about.
I have plans well into the future and I love making sure that all these projects are on board.
Even when problems come about—we have a couple issues with some artists not being able to get things quite on time and that’s fine—being able to work with that and being able to adjust, even though certain promotional materials have gone out for certain things that I thought would be ready for a certain time, and pivoting and dealing with all of that.
And although I would love for everything to go smoothly, that we lock things in place and we just go, finding creative solutions to these challenges and finding ways around it, and finding how to balance the direct market side of things with the crowdfunding side of things now and all of the interesting challenges that come about—this is what makes all of this so interesting.
I love the art of it.
I love writing.
I love seeing the art coming back based on the words that I’ve given the artist.
I love seeing what JP does with the colors.
I love seeing all of it.
However, I also enjoy the business, and I think that is the secret sauce to all of this.
If you don’t enjoy the business of indie comics, if you don’t enjoy the business of comic books as a whole, maybe you need to look at writing novels or short stories or something like that, and then seeing if you can sell that off and let somebody else do the comic bit of it. Because if you just want to write and forget about the rest, maybe comics aren’t for you.
And I’m not saying any of this to gatekeep. I’m not saying any of this to say that you can’t do whatever you believe you can. If you can make it work, if you could find someone to shepherd you through and do all this for you, all the power to you.
However, you’d be the exception and not the rule.
If you really want to be successful as a writer in indie comics, you’ve gotta be willing to wear more than one hat.
You are not just a writer, you own the project from end to end, and that means making sure that everyone else sees your vision through.
And if you’re not willing to do that, you’re going to have a much, much steeper road to getting where you want to get to.
Comics are a Group Effort
And all that said, that’s why I’m not just writing comics right now. I’m in the comics world, I’m 100% focused on comics. However, I have books coming. I have Backlot Babylon; that’s a novel series that I’ve been working on for quite a while.
I’ve relaunched the Kickstarter page. I thought I was going to do it on BackerKit, but given all the changes with how the art’s coming through, I have a bit of a gap in the summer that we can launch Backlot Babylon on Kickstarter.
That is my opportunity to just do writing, to just be my own voice (with the editor making sure that I’m on track) but my own voice 100%.
Where comics is more of a “band” thing. It’s more of a group melody.
It’s something that you’re all working on together that even though a lot of my voice shines through, someone else is going to have their say and it’s going to change exactly what I had in my head, which is wonderful.
That’s the magic of it. That’s why I love comics, but sometimes I just want my own voice out there, and I think that’s where novels and novellas and short stories and all that stuff comes through.
So if that’s what you’re looking for, there’s a home for it.
It’s totally fine, but you just have to appreciate that different mediums have different expectations and different ways of delivering them.
So if you’re working on comics, it’s a group effort and it’s never going to be your vision alone, and you can’t expect somebody else to just take your words and make it happen on your behalf.
You have to still see that through. If you do a book, you can just send it to a publisher and maybe they put it together, or you can just throw it on KDP and see what happens. But you can do that—you can write it and then forget about it, move on.
You can’t do that with comics.
It’ll always just be a script, an idea that never saw fruition, if you aren’t willing to push it through and make sure that people can see the end product.
The Truth
So I feel like I’m saying things that anyone who’s ever put together a Kickstarter or finished a comic already knows very well. So this is for those of you that are still on the fence; this is for me five, ten years ago that really wanted to make a comic and didn’t understand how to do it.
I’m talking to that guy.
I’m saying, “Hey, you can. It’s totally possible. Look how far we’ve come with Pesto Comics.” However, it’s a lot more work than you think. It’s not just writing and sending it to somebody and boom, comic.
It’s making it happen step by step, and each step is grueling and each one has its own level of risk involved.
And yes, you’ve got to put a lot of money into it. So be ready for that because artists and all them need to be paid.
And we’ll talk about that in the future, about how writers are paid last, and that’s the truth of it all.
But you need to be comfortable with all this and you need to be willing to accept that you’re not just wearing the writer hat.
The writer hat is many hats stacked on top of each other, and you’ve got to be willing to accept that and be happy with it.
And more than anything, you’ve got to love it.
You’ve got to enjoy all of that.
If you don’t enjoy the marketing, if you don’t enjoy the production and the project management of it, you’re going to have a really hard time in comics. So make sure that you learn to love it.
And if you don’t, that’s okay.
There’s other places to get what you need.
It doesn’t even mean that you can’t be involved in comics. It just means that your path might be a little bit different.
You’re looking for one of the exceptions, meaning that your road’s just going to be a little bit harder than what most of what you see with the guys on Kickstarter and some of the guys on the indie shelves.
Hustle and Risk
So you might be asking where’s this all coming from.
And the answer is, since I received that contract from Prana Publishers to get into the direct market and doing all that work, I’ve been getting a lot of proposals from writers, unsolicited, which is always a bad idea.
Make sure you check out the website [of the places you’re contacting]. I do have a part on pestocomics.com—if anyone cared to read—under the “About” page saying that we’re not accepting unsolicited submissions.
However, that doesn’t stop anyone, artists and writers alike, from just sending me stuff, bombarding me with things, looking for me to give them a leg up, to help them see their vision through when I’m still struggling to get my vision through.
It’s not as though I don’t want to help people.
It’s not as though I don’t want to help as many folks as possible get their things out there and have people see what is possible and all of that.
However, if I’m putting in the effort and doing all of this, I feel like anyone else can do the same thing.
They don’t need me to just do it for them.
And I don’t want to say that I get frustrated about it, but it’s just that idea of, you know, I wasn’t looking for anyone just to do it for me. I had to build this from the ground up. I had to risk a lot in order to get here.
I’m still taking a lot of risk.
I’m still waiting for, frankly, for this to pay off in a lot of ways. I still have a lot invested just to see this happen and now to take someone else’s idea and take a risk on them without them bringing anything to the table in the sense of, “I’m bringing a name that’s established, I do all this marketing, I do all these things to make sure that your company will be a success.”
Instead, they just want me to take a chance on them. That’s always frustrating.
You see the amount of work that is involved in doing all this, and you decide it’s not for you, it’s for someone else. I always find that interesting.
It’s always a recipe for disappointment in a sense.
You’re always wondering why people won’t take a chance on you, and it’s because you’re asking them to take a chance on you.
You have to bring something to the table.
You have to show them that you’re willing to hustle, that you’re willing to do more than anyone else to make your story a success, and you’re not just resting on the laurels of your story.
I’ve read all kinds of good stuff and all kinds of bad stuff. And the reason that any of it gets made is by sheer force of will.
It’s by people taking the risks and pushing things and making it happen.
And that doesn’t happen unless you try, unless you’re willing to take the risk on yourself, unless you’re willing to gamble a bit and see it through.
So if you’re not willing to do that, why would I?
And that’s just the truth of it, right?
I know it seems a little bit harsh. I usually try to stay pretty positive. I’m not a big fan of all the clickbaity, “let’s just be negative for the sake of it”—there’s too much of that, I hate it.
However, sometimes I just have to be honest. And that’s just the truth of it.
If you want to see something exist in the world, you need to make it happen yourself. Nobody else is going to take as much of an interest as you have in it.
And if you don’t have that level of interest, why would I?
So I just really wanted to put that out there and say, “Hey guys, writing isn’t writing; writing is writing plus.”
And that’s really the key to all of this.
Fruits of Labor - From Parts Unknown #1
But hey, here we are. I’m going to end it here because I’ve got to talk to Atom Freeman and we’re going to sell From Parts Unknown.
By the time it’s posted, I think it’ll be like three days before FOC. Right now we’re about 11 days away from FOC. It’s on March 30th.
So if you haven’t pre-ordered From Parts Unknown from your LCS yet, you have 11 days to do it and it’s critical.
Right now, tell them to look into Lunar or Universal catalogs; there is a deal in there for retailers to make it very easy for them to get you the books.
If you tell them that, maybe From Parts Unknown is very successful and we do really well, and then I can actually get writers on board down the road. It is something that I have on my roadmap. It’s something I would love to do down the line.
However, right now I’m trying to make the foundations work. I’m only going to do that with the books that I’ve put together, that I’ve worked with the artists that I’ve handpicked and we’ve worked so hard to make happen.
So I want to make sure that those things are successful before I start taking risks on other people, because right now my risk tolerance is very high. I’m right at my limit. So I need this direct market thing to go as well as possible.
And that only happens if you go to your stores and you make sure you pre-order. If you listen to this, you probably already have, and I thank you for doing so.
And as always, I want to thank you for being here. We’ll talk again next week. Have a good one.
