Tips for new comics publishers

Over the years, I've seen a lot of new comics publishers float onto the scene like dandelion seeds; some of them put down roots and become part of the landscape, but most of them get blown away on the wind. They make the same mistakes over and over again, as if they knew nothing about what their predecessors had done -- and maybe they don't; maybe that's the problem. Maybe we don't talk enough about failures, or about the reasons why publishers fail. Maybe it would be useful to have a list of do's and don'ts for aspiring publishers to refer to. Here are my observations, for what they're worth.

First, the don'ts:

1. Don't run before you can walk.

It seems to me that the #1 biggest cause of failure among new comics publishers is a mismatch of ambition and capacity. Either they're undercapitalised and can't follow through on their initial plans, or they start well and then expand too quickly, becoming victims of their own success. For example: Archaia Studios Press did a terrific job with David Petersen's Mouse Guard, among others, but it's been running into problems lately: its publishing schedule got so big that the people running the company couldn't handle it any more, which resulted in delays. It's too soon to say whether ASP will be able to recover from this setback, but more judicious planning would have saved them from it in the first place.


2. Don't try to compete with the big boys on their own ground.

It's probably not a good idea to try to break into superhero comics publishing. It's definitely not a good idea to try to create an overarching "universe" from a blank slate. DC and Marvel fill that niche so thoroughly that there isn't as much as a millimetre of wiggle room. If you can manage to snag an artist, or (better yet) a writer who's known for their Big Two work, maybe you might be able to make some headway (Boom! Studios did reasonably well with Hero Squared by Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis), but otherwise, try something else. Horror, or autobiography, or spy fiction, or children's comics; anything that doesn't belong (lock, stock and barrel) to competitors with more money, more experience, and infinitely more reader loyalty than you have at your disposal.


3. Don't screw the talent.

I would put this in blinking sparkly 72-point type if I could do that without breaking my layout. Don't screw the talent. Do NOT screw the talent. DO NOT SCREW THE TALENT!

Do not offer work-for-hire contracts to new creators who don't know any better. Do not offer contracts that look like creator-ownership contracts but are so hedged around with conditions that they're effectively work-for-hire. Do not tie up subsidiary rights that you're probably never going to have the time or resources to exploit on your creators' behalf. Do not hide nasty surprises in the small print. Do not make promises about marketing and promotion that you have no intention of fulfilling. Do not cap royalties. Do not delay payments. Do not refuse payments. Above all, do not lie.

You may be tempted -- after all, screwing the talent is almost a tradition in American comics. DON'T DO IT. Firstly, although you may be able to bamboozle creators who are new to the industry and haven't heard the horror stories (or have heard them and are naive enough to think "well, that's not going to happen to me"), if your contracts are bad, the more experienced creators will run a country mile to get away from you, and they will tell their friends. Secondly, nobody stays naive forever. Even the apple-cheeked youngsters who willingly sign away their firstborn creative children will figure out how restrictive your contracts are as soon as they start being restricted by them -- and you can bet your ass they'll never sign another one. Do you think Ross Campbell's ever going to work for Tokyopop again?

You may want to make some objection here, based on the way [famous creator] got treated badly by DC or Marvel and then made nice with them a few years later. And it's not really fair that the Big Two get to act like bastards and then still hoover up the big name talents they were screwing last year, but, well, life isn't fair. The Big Two are The Big Two: they have money, they have prestige, they have history, they have reader loyalty, and they have an unassailably dominant position in the Direct Market. They can get away with stuff you should never even think about trying. As a new publisher, you need to be able to attract talent, and you won't do that if the talent gets a whiff of exploitative intentions.


4. Don't overestimate your audience.

I don't mean that you should assume that your audience are idiots; I mean that firstly, you should have a realistic assessment of how many people are potentially interested in what you're selling; secondly, you shouldn't bank on your initial audience remaining loyal if you screw up; and thirdly, you shouldn't assume that your audience will be flexible enough to accommodate shifts in the nature of what you publish. If you decide to change directions, you'll need to find an entirely new audience, because the chances are the old audience won't come along with you.

It is probably safe to assume that your audience is small, fickle, and easily distracted, with annoyingly precise desires that are constantly changing in unpredictable ways. Welcome to publishing: we never said it was going to be easy.


5. Don't rely on verbal contracts or expect anyone you deal with to accept verbal contracts from you.

If you are in a position of power, a "verbal contract" is a wonderful thing -- for you, that is. Because, if you're in a position of power, your verbal contracts say whatever the hell you want them to say. You're like Big Julie from Guys and Dolls, who always wins when he plays dice because the dice he plays with are blank, and nobody is going to tell Big Julie that that's not how the game's supposed to work.

You may have already detected a theme in this list, which should give you a hint as to why I don't think this applies to you. Yup, you guessed it: the reason why you shouldn't act like Big Julie is because you're not Big Julie. As a new publisher, you do not have the kind of leverage that can make verbal contracts work for you. And that's only considering the situation from a pragmatic point of view; from an ethical perspective, verbal contracts are highly dubious. It's just wrong to expect people to work with you or for you without giving them a concrete and legally binding guarantee that you'll hold up your end of the bargain. It's not fair, and it's probably going to harm you in the long run (see #3).


And the do's:

1. Do put as much effort and thought as possible into marketing.

See this guy?



You don't want to be this guy. Granted, if you don't have the right personality for it, marketing is tedious and irritating and exhausting. Sometimes it can be like asking ten thousand people out on dates and getting replies from ten of them. Unless you're one of those miraculous people who enjoys marketing, you are going to have to force yourself to do it, but you must do it. Too many comics publishers attended the Field of Dreams school of marketing -- "if you build it, they will come". There's a grain of truth in that phrase, in that good quality work doesn't need to be elaborately hyped in order to attract an audience -- but people still need to know that it exists, and they won't unless you market it to them.

You have to be intelligent about it, though. Johanna Draper Carlson has a list of stupid publisher tricks, most of them marketing-related: spelling the name of the book wrong in the press release, sending out press releases to report events that are not newsworthy, attempting to guilt-trip reviewers into reviewing your book, maintaining a website which does not include the most pertinent information, et cetera. It's not enough to throw hype out into the void and hope some of it sticks. You need to be professional about it, or else your efforts may end up doing more harm than good.


2. Do take risks on work that looks good, even if it doesn't look like anything else on the market.

Nobody knows what the next big thing is going to look like. Nobody. Not even the readers know what's going to capture their imaginations; it's a question with an unfathomable answer. A lot of the time, readers are conservative and happy with something that's very like what they got yesterday; but the really lasting works are often the ones that break new ground. As such, it's often worth going out on a limb for a work that looks odd or even freakish, provided it's good enough. There's no way to be sure that it is "good enough", of course. That's what your judgement is for. You need to be able to trust your judgement, otherwise you have no business being in publishing.


3. Do get distribution outside the Direct Market if you possibly can.

Non-DM distribution is riskier for a publisher because unlike in the DM, products sold through bookstores are returnable. All the same, the DM is so small by comparison that the odds are the risk will be worth it. The potential returns are much greater, and if you're publishing anything other than superheroes or superhero-slipstream titles (and you should be; see Don't #2 above), the DM is not only much smaller than the bookstore market, it is more conservative and less flexible.


4. Do be in it for the comics.

You may be thinking: "wow, there's a lot of money in licensing comics properties to make movies/T-shirts/TV series/miscellaneous merchandise. I should set up a publishing company to handle comics so that I can use them as a springboard to get into Hollywood!" If you think you're the first person to have this idea, you're wrong. If you think you have a snowball's chance in hell of making it work, you're also wrong. One of the most frequent warning signs that a new (or new-ish) comics company is about to go down the tubes is the declaration that they're shifting attention to focus on licensing, or getting investment from a media development company. There are a couple of reasons why this is bad: firstly, until a publishing company has been around for a good while, they typically don't have many products to license, which limits the amount of money they can make from licenses to "less than they need to stay afloat". Secondly, if you're in comics to get into movies, your attention won't be firmly on the books you're publishing. Your passion will be elsewhere, and that will be reflected in the way you run your business.

Speaking as a reader, a critic, a fan, a person for whom comics are her primary passion: if you're not in it for the comics, we don't need you. The comics market does not need indifferent publishers who don't care about comics as comics. The comics market needs publishers who love comics for themselves, not as a stepping stone. There's nothing wrong with being in it for the money, and licensing properties is certainly a legitimate way to make money, but if you're the kind of publisher the market needs, you won't look at the licensing money as an end in itself, but rather as a means to keep your business going so that you can support your creators and keep publishing comics.


5. Do seek out advice and assistance from people with skills and experience you lack.

Anything you don't know can harm you. It is highly likely that there's somebody out there who knows the stuff you don't know and need to know. Ask questions, take notes, do frequent Google searches for things that other publishers are saying -- comics publishers are strangely willing to give advice on how to become better at competing with them -- and above all, pay attention to the histories of companies that failed. Watch out for the warning signs, figure out what they mean in terms of what's happening behind the scenes, and try to avoid falling into the same traps.