ECLECTIC PROJECTS BLOG

Yesterday, I sat down to read Zoe York’s Romancing Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series, and she impressed me immensely with one of the most incisive opening salvos ever included in a writing book. To whit: The truth is, writing is hard, and publishing is a brutal business—and not always a meritocracy. To survive, and thrive, you need to be tough. You need to believe in yourself and trust your gut. You need to see through smoke and mirrors. You need to shut out all the noise, and find your own path. But it’s just not that simple, because that takes resources and support. You need a solid platform in life in order to get a really good leap. I know that. I struggle with the reality that there are a lot of asterisks on good advice. Mental health, physical health, financial stability, access to opportunities—they all factor into our ability to do what someone else has done. Publishing is a weird formula nobody has ever quite figured out, and privilege weighs heavy. Success takes a lot of hard work. But it also has something to do with the position you start from. And privilege is often called luck. York, Zoe. Romance Your Brand: Building a Marketable Genre Fiction Series (Publishing How To Book 1) . ZoYo Press. Kindle Edition. It’s not like I’m unaware of this, as I’ve acknowledged in the past, but I honestly think York’s intro should be a foundational statement for any discussion of

It’s May, 2009. Approximately four years after the release of A Feast of Crows, the fourth book in George R.R. Martin’s Song of Fire and Ice. Readers are getting antsy about Martin’s insistence on doing other things: editing books in his Wild Carda universe; writing stories that are not A Dance of Dragons; consulting on the HBO television series made from his work; writing blog posts all of the above, rather than working on the now overdue fifth volume which turns out to be two-and-a-half years away. A phrase rolls across the internet, a little viral moment shared by booklovers: George RR Martin is not your bitch. We know this, because Neil Gaiman told us so, responding to a fans question about what readers are owed when a series is plagued by delays and gaps the Martin’s series is. It’s still another two and a half years before A Dance of Dragons drops in June, 2011. The final two volumes are still forthcoming, nine years after the last release. Adaptations of the series have reached their conclusion, before the source material. Martin’s readers hit the ragged edge and found themselves waiting, hoping, struggling. Sitting with a prolonged ellipsis, looking towards an uncertain future with no idea when the story may resume. The ragged edge Martin leaves at the end of each novel is not so different from the cliff-hanger at the end of a comic book. It’s a waypoint on the character’s journey, not a definitive ending. Satisfying without being

On her Wednesday blog post, The Trainwreck, Kristine Kathryn Rusch laid out her vision for just how bad COVID will get for traditional publishing and the next steps she recommends for authors working with that business model. Her prognosis is fairly dire: traditional publishing is in grave danger, and likely won’t really understand how grave for months after the pandemic is over. It’s also touched with a longstanding, negative around agents and traditional publishing practices that runs through Rusch’s non-fiction work. Not necessarily a reason to avoid reading it, but something to be aware of before you go in and maybe treat this is as a useful data point rather than a gospel advice for what to do next. I don’t know that I see quite the level of gloom that Rusch does for traditional publishing, but I do see an awful lot of bad coming down the pipe. More importantly, I see a space where lots of business assumptions will end up being questioned and new stuff will be tried. Which is half the reason I find myself writing things like the scratchpad series about publishing and comics, trying to pull apart my own assumptions about publishing, and figure out opportunities that are being overlooked.

There’s an augment to be made that comic books are a disposable medium, but that’s talking about the history of the form more than its present. Comic books on newsprint paper, printed in four colour. Cheap to produce, cheap to buy, and easily disposed of, which is half the reason old comics gained value as the brands attached rose to prominence. Shake free the cobwebs of old, outdated thinking and the defining trait of comics books is their collectability. As a young comic fan, I preserved thousands of individual issues in longboxes, each comic wrapped in a mylar sleeve with a backing board to ensure they weren’t creased. A collection that provided a sense of pride, a bourgeoning curatorial instinct sending me through back issue bins to find issues I might have missed. As an adult, I prefer the issues collected in a different way, reading comics once the individual issues are bound up into trades and graphic novels, or produced in leather-bound omnibus editions. Serialised narratives transformed into books, narratives with recognizable beginnings and middles and ends, even as there’s a new arc underway in the latest issue. Books that can sit in bookstores, rather than being sold into a specialty market serviced by comic shops. Single issues of a comic book haven’t been cheap in a long time, and they’re rarely produced on cheap paper. Digital colouring achieved more than the four-colour press ever could, allowing for nuances in art and design that hadn’t been there fifty years

Eleven years ago, Warren Ellis released Shivering Sands: a print on demand collection of essays, columns, and other content he’d produced over the years. No real distribution, no real stock on hand, just a book set up and ready to print if a reader wanted a copy. A few days later, they included a PDF edition. Three months later, they’d sold around 700 copies. 664 of them were print editions. As Ellis mentioned in the three-months-on post where he charted the numbers, “now we enter into the long tail.” I missed the book, first time around. I was an Ellis fan, but I was broke as fuck back in 2009. Two years unemployed, scraping by on sales of short stories and loans from family that kept me from sliding off into a world of credit card debt. Yesterday, I bought my copy. Put the effort in to go and buy it from the archaic print on demand service Ellis and co originally used, because the only copy that showed up on Amazon Australia was over a hundred and fifty bucks. And this is what the long tail means, when folks talk about it in relation to publishing. Ellis didn’t promote the book back then, and he sure as shit isn’t promoting it now, but I found myself dredging up old blog posts on his former blog and realised that it existed. Since I’d been on a bit of a Warren Ellis kick, and a lot of what I was reading

The poetics of comic book narratives are indelibly bound to the page. Each issue of a 24 page comic will contain twenty-four pages of narrative, give or take a few spaces for advertising. Which means a smart comic book writer is always thinking about layout and using pages to generate effect–pitch this sequence across two pages that open together so it reads a particular way, pitch this reveal for the end of an odd-numbered page and the start of a new scene when the reader flips over. I’m using the word writer loosely here, as befits a collaborative medium where an artist will bring scripts to fruition, but it’s not exclusively the artists deal. Go read interviews where the folks who script comics talk process, and the obsession with pages is there. Neil Gaiman hassled DC editorial because he wanted to know where the advertising sat in upcoming Sandman issues, because he knew they’d affect the way the story was consumed. Alan Moore put forth a theory he learned from an editor: comic book characters are limited to twenty-five words of dialogue, with 35 words maximum in an a panel. Anything more, and the words take up too much of the panel, giving too little space to the art. The conventions of comic book storytelling were built around the physical object, the production tools used to create it, and the economies of scale in the marketplace. This is true for fiction, although it tends to be a little less obvious.