I’ve received many supportive letters about the Very Bad Publisher posts. I truly appreciate the notes and tips in my donation jar.
Many warm regards to:
Val Trullinger
John Sisson
Jerry Gilligan
Katherine Ayers
Jonathan Baylis (check out his work, here)
Jackie Furman asked if things got better after the Very Bad Publisher drama, and how I did self publishing. Everyone wants to know why A Distant Soil doesn’t come out more frequently.
Things got much better, thanks.
The cumulative sales on A Distant Soil are well past the 700,000 copy mark. A good 300,000 of those sales came about when I self published. That included new comics, and my old publisher’s inventory.
You have to sell a lot of $1.75 comics to make good money. While an $1.75 cover price seems cheap for comics these days, in the early 1990′s, $1.75 was expensive. At 40 pages, people got more for their money. However, I would have been better served with a lower page count and more frequent publication.
Mainstream comics at 32 pages and $1.50 (with lots of ads) were not a better deal than 40 pages at $1.75 (two cover paintings with few ads). Most fans don’t notice, though. They just saw a higher cover price. They don’t stand in the comic shop and count the story pages and compare to a standard mainstream comic.
What I should have done was put some kind of bullet on the cover noting the page count value. Didn’t do that. Bummer.
A huge mistake: keeping my cover price low did nothing for my sales. If I nudged it to $1.95, I would have made enough of a profit on those extra pennies over 300,000 sales to produce the comic for another 2 1/2 years. Boy, am I annoyed with me. When I went to Image, we raised the cover price. My sales went up. Go figure.
Anyway, the standard direct market discount on those books was 60%, so I got 70 cents per copy. Out of that 70 cents per copy, I paid the print bill, warehousing, shipping, phone bill, etc. I think my personal take after expenses was around 30-35 cents per copy.
So, on 300,000 books, I earned $105,000 profit on the comics alone (not including GN’s, prints, signed limited editions, etc.) Amortized over the five years I self published, the income was modest, but any independent comics creator would have been very happy to have it. I also supplemented my income with mainstream comics assignments.
However, the direct market crashed in 1995, and that put a serious kink in the finances of most of the small press creators.
A Distant Soil continues to sell. The bad news is, that even though it earns me income every year, it does not earn enough for me to work on it full time. If I get $10,000 a year in income (which most small press books can only dream of), I can’t live on that.
I made many mistakes: money management, advertising, and time management. The holy trinity of business.
But I will say this much: I am nowhere near the worst publisher I ever worked for.
I recall one of the more egregious slurs against the self publishers was that we were so greedy that we wouldn’t even share our book money with worthy publishers!
I don’t have an objection to publishers: the problem is, the majority of the small press operations out there are so amateurish they do far more harm than good. One of my small press publishers was a low-midlist trade book company (not a miniscule press making comics in their basement), but they were still terrible at business.
If I could earn a modest but comfortable living, and sell hundreds of thousands of books self publishing my book, why couldn’t my publishers? I’m not a genius, I had no business experience, and I had few resources. ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
