I wasn’t going to blog today, but I can’t let this go. Genyooine quotes:

I recommend looking through art sites such as Deviantart…First of all, they’re cheaper…

If this enrages you, think hard next time you ask a friend to help you move or to fix your computer instead of hiring a ‘professional’. Pizza and beer cost less than ‘professional’ movers, so clearly you are exploiting your friends. Or the kid down the street who mows your lawn. Or whomever it is you hire to do a job you don’t want to or can’t who isn’t a “professional”.

I’m dazzled that these brain trusts don’t understand the difference between unskilled manual labor and a skilled professional who has spent many years in training. Since he is the type who equates computer repair with pizza delivery, I fear for the state of his hard drive.

There have been several times I’ve been working on a game with an artist only to have him/her walk out on me halfway through.

That’s what you get when you hire amateurs.

Keep them in the dark:

This relates back to what I talked about earlier. If an artist knows how much their artwork will increase the value of the game they will then feel they deserve that amount of money.

An ill-informed beginner is easily exploited.

Many people claim about this being unethical, but in reality it’s how all businesses work. When a company makes a profit, does it take that profit and evenly split it up among all of it’s employee’s?

Thank you for the straw man, but that is not how all businesses work. Profit sharing and transparency are not equivalent. A failure to pay fair market rates and to engage in ethical business practices is not a call to profit sharing or socialism.

These dude’s complete and utter lack of self awareness is repulsive. Only someone who is wholly comfortable with their skeeze level would ever post something this obnoxious. They clearly believe they do no wrong.

Sorry for any poor grammar, I typed this up fairly fast.

The amateurish quality of the writing accurately reflects the amateurish quality of everything else you get that you are too cheap to pay for.

Remember kids: without you, these dudes don’t have a product to sell.

Feel the power.

I hope you will take the time to peruse the Very Bad Publisher tag for more tales of clients of this sort.

The new edition of the Graphic Artist Guild Handbook of Pricing and Ethical Guidelines isn’t out yet, but I helped work on it. Someone should get Mr Gregorio a copy for Christmas. Perhaps this book and the Christmas spirit will help him exorcise his inner Scrooge :

When I was a self publishing tadpole, self publishing meant printing thousands of copies to distributor order. Total newbies who didn’t understand how the business works lost big bucks printing what they thought distributors would order in the future, only to find their prose books/comics/graphic novels taking up space in the garage and attracting nothing but hordes of silverfish.

Print on Demand seems like the perfect solution. Print on Demand allows you to print exactly to order, even if that order is as low as one copy at a time. The cost per copy is much higher than printing in bulk, but there is little or no risk.

I’ve spent many exhausting hours trying to convince people that printing 2,000 copies when you don’t have any up front orders will not save you any money, even if unit cost is lower. Printing 2,000 copies over 500 copies will give you a discount of 50 cents per unit. However, you still spent $2 per copy for orders you didn’t get.

A friend of mine who would not take my advice printed $12,000 worth of books and six years later is still five figures in the hole on her project.

You minimize risk with POD, but all Print on Demand services are not created equal. Some which started out as printing services have grown into vanity presses which charge fat fees for tasks you can easily perform yourself.

Let’s take a look at iUniverse.

My friend Arlene Harris is an award-winning author who has a long-term interest in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. She spent years researching and writing sequels to the book, three of which she self published through iUniverse.

When she first went to iUniverse, the up-front POD fee was a reasonable $100. Later it increased to $300. Now the minimum package fee is nearly $600, and the contract appears to be a co-publishing agreement with term rights clauses, and high prices for basics that are easily performed for free.

Arlene decided to take her business elsewhere. She sent iUniverse a short letter of termination in response to their upselling more of their (IMHO) expensive packaging services to her.

Thanks, however I am not about to call you and get upsold services I do not want. Any messages you have, unless they are sales messages, can be relayed through this email address. If they are sales messages, kindly refrain from sending them. I’ve wasted enough money with this company and am not about to throw more money after it.

Arlene C. Harris

From iUniverse, a finger-wagging tour de force of patronization (emphasis within text is mine.)

Hello Ms. Harris,

I wish there was something I could say to pacify your hurt feelings. But seriously, you need to take time to ponder about what you have done so far to market your book because I don’t see anything about it that’s remotely significant or serious.

The authors that have made significant strides in promoting their book rightly deserve what they reap because they take action instead of complaining and blaming others for their failure.

We are here to help but if you don’t like our gesture, we will as you say, kindly refrain from doing it.

However, we are here to serve everyone without prejudice so we will continue to be available to you in case you’ll need our help someday.

With kind regards.
Jed Michael “Luck happens when opportunity meets preparation!”
Marketing Consultant

Perhaps iUniverse will require something from me to pacify their hurt feelings after I post this review of their services.

Let’s examine a few, shall we?

The $599 “Select” service package includes:

One on One Author Support!

I guess that’s supposed to be priceless. But, you know, this is what salesmen are for.

Non-Exclusive contracts!

It’s nice that what is essentially a printing and packaging service would allow you to go elsewhere for your business, but exclusivity shouldn’t even be an issue for this sort of thing.

Volume Book Discount for Authors!

Well golly gee whiz, no kidding. Volume discounts for wholesale purchases!

You do realize this is standard practice for just about any business on the planet. Buy a lot, get volume discounts.

Custom Cover!

The sort of cover design just about anyone with a computer can do these days.

Worldwide Distribution!

I hope you realize this doesn’t mean much. Your book gets worldwide distribution the minute you put it on a blog.

Just because some salesman presents your book to a distribution company – crammed in with all the other self published miscellany in their catalogue – this does not in ANY WAY OBLIGATE THE DISTRIBUTOR TO PLACE AN ORDER FOR THAT BOOK. This Worldwide Distribution “service” is worthless.

But don’t despair! That’s just a few of the TOTALLY AWESOME GOODIES you get for your $600, none of which you cannot do for yourself without paying $600. I didn’t see diddly squat in the $600 package that was worth the price unless you are a complete computer deficient, which means you would not have the skills to even format your material sufficiently to send it in to iUniverse.

A quick examination of their a la carte menu reveals jaw dropping prices for extras.

The Copyright Registration Service:

It’s not standard with your $600, so if you don’t upgrade to one of the more expensive packages – nearly $4200 top tier, discounted down from nearly $6,000! What a sale! – you have to pay an extra $170 for this.

Or, if you have even one iota of internet savvy, you can just go right here to the US Copyright office, download the form, fill it out, and pay the $35 fee, saving yourself a whopping $135 for five minutes of effort.

The Library of Congress Control Number:

It will cost you $75 at iUniverse. Here’s a post that explains exactly how to get one for free.

The Social Media Setup:

A laugh-and-a-half. They will charge you to create your Facebook, MySpace, yadda yadda, all for only $799! I didn’t pay diddly squat for “social media” because almost all social media is FREE! But iUniverse will only set you back $799 for this free stuff!

Everybody who managed to figure out how to set up your own Facebook page in 15 minutes, raise your hand!

OK, would you pay $799 for that service?

Lo, the hordes cry “Hell, no!”

Website Set up

But you will want to be a thoroughly modern author, so add $399 for a website!

A website made from a FRICKING TEMPLATE!!!

The fine print says they give you a web design template and then YOU set up the website. So what the hell are you paying $399 for? You still have to do the work! You can get a free WordPress blog with customizable template instead!

But wait! More fine print!

“The template layouts, header images, and operating software are the property of American Author and these cannot be transferred in the event of cancellation.”

If you decide to leave, you can’t really do a whole lot with your website without a redesign.

So, just go with WordPress, OK? Sheesh.

But don’t forget that iUniverse adds a $29 a month hosting fee! Which is EXPENSIVE.

For crying out loud, for less than half what iUniverse charges for one website and “social media”, webgoddess DC McQueen made custom WordPress designs for ADistantSoil.com and ColleenDoran.com. Her price covers hosting as well as tech support, and my sites have far more features.

iUniverse also touts the fact that you can use their service to set up Paypal payments to take orders for your book! Wowee!

This task is not rocket science. ANYONE can do it. There’s no reason to pay someone for this.

The Book Returns Program:

OK folks, this is absolutely ridiculous. I told a publisher friend of mine about this (a real publisher, a big one) and I think he peed himself laughing.

iUniverse charges you $699 to tell booksellers they can return your book if it doesn’t sell.

Returnable books is standard in publishing, except for the comic book direct sale market. Why on earth anyone would charge you $699 for this service I cannot fathom.

Except they want to make a buck from your ignorance.

First off, you guys gotta realize that once booksellers see your book coming from iUniverse, they know it is self published and are far less likely to stock it. Booksellers know Vanity Press when they see it. OK? Let’s just get that out of the way right now.

Scour the shelves of any retail bookstore outside the direct market, and I defy you to find five copies of anything self published. I’m not saying it never happens, I am saying it is sort of like, I dunno, having a meteor hit your house.

I have rarely seen a single copy of a self published book in a bookstore outside of the direct market. Big bookstore chains are not going to order your book in any kind of quantity that will necessitate returns because they probably won’t order 50 copies of anything you self published. If you’re not coming to the gate through Harper Collins, or Simon and Shuster, or Harlequin, you’re not getting through the gate.

Returns happen when stores order in quantity to fill the shelves and to hold on reserve in warehouses for reorder. This is unlikely to happen with print on demand books.

Moreoever, returns are not what you think they are.

iUniverse doesn’t tell you this, but returns can be:

A) a return of the complete book

B) a return of a damaged book

C) a return of the book cover alone to show proof the book wasn’t sold. The rest of the book is destroyed, which means you paid to print a book you can’t sell to someone else. iUniverse graciously absolves you from having to pay for the destroyed book that is unlikely to ever get ordered in the first place.

D) Affadavit returns. The client swears the books were destroyed and you do not get them back to sell to someone else. And ditto about the non-ordered, we-swear-destroyed book for which you are paying $699.

What a deal!

iUniverse sells services to total newbies who do not understand the most basic aspects of publishing. They charge you a lot of money for things you do not need.

Unlike most of the people reading this, I have been a successful self publisher and have sold over 300,000 copies of my works via self publishing, not to mention all the books my name is on that I didn’t self publish.

I would not purchase iUniverse services.

Arlene is not “…complaining and blaming others for their failure.”

Arlene simply does not want to be upsold goods and services when she does not get value for her money.

And Jed Michael, I’m a successful author as well as a successful self publisher.

You’re a Marketing Consultant selling overpriced goods to ignorant hopefuls.

I think that’s cruel.

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you? Sooner or later right down the willy-hole to an unpublishablity that has nothing at all to do with the literary quality of a writer’s work, or the loyalty of a reasonable body of would-be readers, or even the passionate support of an editor below the very top of the corporate pyramid.

If you’re not ready to commit seppuku after that, move on…

I have the wonderful privilege of doing the art for young adult, best-selling novelist Barry Lyga’s first graphic novel. While I can’t discuss the content, I can say that it is one of the most entertaining work experiences I have had in awhile.

Every book I am doing these days is a great one, but some books are marathon runs, and some books are a breezy sled ride.

Yeah, Barry’s book is a squee kind of experience.

He’s got a blog which he updates every week or so, and he has a lot to say about the writing life.

Today, pop on over to read What’s Wrong with Publishing:

The truth of the matter is that e-books are forcing a re-alignment of consumer expectations in terms of books. Readers are re-evaluating what a reading experience is worth to them. There’s a very good chance that hardcovers will lose out in this, that the general consensus of the audience will be, “Not worth it.” And if that happens, then publishers won’t be able to justify publishing in hardcover any longer. I’m actually OK with this.

And a hat tip to Barry and Murderati for Bookstore Signing Blues. Award-winning novelist can’t get anyone to show up for signings and sings about it.

Man, I have been on both ends of this. The great crowds for one signing, and none for others.

I am very careful to avoid any event which has not been well publicized. It’s not worth flying halfway across the country if the organizer doesn’t know how to advertise and promote an event. Or worse yet, if the organizer just wanted to meet you, and didn’t advertise on purpose. This happened to me as well as several pros I know, including Mark Waid.

There. Was. No. Store. Instead, there were, in this town, two comics fans who had pooled their lawnmowing money to pay for a LaGuardia-to-Vermont plane ticket for their very-soon-not-to-be-favorite writer so they could meet him and own him for a day.

There. Was. No. Store.

Most humiliating signing: when the author of the GN ungraciously discussed (loudly, in front of fans lined up to sign) how everyone was really there to see himself and not artist. Goodness sakes.

The A Distant Soil comic went online late January 2009. The current traffic is over ten times higher than our traffic in January of last year. We have approximately 9 times more repeat viewers per day.

That is fact, not hype.

Income has increased, largely due to incentives and donations, which I appreciate very much. It’s early days to see a significant increase in sales. I get royalties on the book. Considering I haven’t had a new book out in awhile, that’s a good sign. I realize my expectation of a sales jump on a webcomic anywhere in the first year was unrealistic. The only webcomics I know of which have done well with sales of physical books have been online for three years or more.

There’s an increase in foreign traffic, but it’s doubtful we’re selling a lot of books in Slovenia. That does not diminish my deep appreciation of Slovenia.

I’ve enjoyed learning how to read stat information, especially how to read independent site meters. Many of them are wildly inaccurate, but my linked stat counter seems to agree with the info at 7Zoom.com.

I’ve compared my traffic to that of other sites, and some people are Liar! liar! Pants on Fire! If their traffic is that low, one wonders where their “millions of fans” are.

They never had ‘em in the first place. Duh.

Anyone can see your book sales, with a little digging. If you run around telling whoppers about how your small press book “sold better than the X-Men”, some gullible blogger may believe you, but the rest of us will wonder where the hell you got those numbers. Especially when we can see that your last graphic novel sold 2,000 copies.

If I had millions of fans one day, and my last book sales dropped to 2,000 copies, I would not be making a public issue of it.

The first time I discussed popularity inflation on the blog, a certain Lying Liar who Lies went to one of those online traffic meters and had their website removed from the system so no one could see that their actual traffic is only a hundred-fifty people a day on one project.

Another who claimed 3,000 unique readers per day showed on their Project Wonderful stats that they got less than 1/4 that traffic. They removed their Project Wonderful ads. One year later, an independent traffic meter indicates the site’s dropping popularity: less than 200 readers per day.

Other sites which show hundreds of thousands of hits per day brag of hundreds of thousands of readers. Hits aren’t unique readers. A single reader can bring dozens of page views per day to your site.

Mr. Hundreds of Thousands of Online Fans really has about 40,000 unique readers. That’s an impressive accomplishment, but it certainly explains why their book sales are less than 3% of their page view count.

Another showed a hit counter with over 30,000,000 hits. I figured their actual total unique readership amounted to no more than 15,000. Independent site analysis came up with an even lower figure.

If your site has been online for years, and you have over 10,000 individual pages (add in chatty message board traffic,) it’s simplicity itself to reach millions of hits, especially if your visible hit counter is set up to show the requests for files from the server, and not actual page views.

I am not naming names here, because I don’t need to rub their noses in it all. If you want to do some digging on your own, feel free. I confess a few friends have had some jolly times passing info back and forth about people who want to seem more popular than they are.

I really must learn to hype me better. Because DAYum, I sell better and get more traffic than the comic with “millions of fans”, and I have a helluva lot more readers than the site which claims 3,000 unique readers per day.

Once upon a time before the internet, lots of publishers and creators lied about their numbers and got away with it. They would add up sales on all editions of all their books and lump that number, and claim huge readerships. And where comics are concerned, we have to wonder just how many of those sales went to shops hoarding books in hopes of selling them at inflated collector prices, and not to individual fans.

Over the course of some 45 books, A Distant Soil has sold upwards of 700,000 copies. Combined. The very highest sales were 40,000 copies for one issue. During my self publishing days, a high average was 20,000, bottoming out somewhere around 7,000.

7,000 copies probably sounds good these days, but at a $1.75 cover price, profits after printing, shipping, etc. were less than $2,000 per issue. Which gave me $1,000 per month income. Ow.

Look at these figures for recently canceled Vertigo books. Fans cry that their faves are gone, but there is Air, not really selling much better than A Distant Soil. How can a major publisher afford to keep paying a penciler/ inker/ writer/ letterer/ colorist on that?

Would my book sell any better with major publisher backing? Hm. I’d have trouble making a living at Air’s sales, and I do all the work on my own book.

The Amazon numbers don’t mean that much. It’s not hard to slip into the Amazon top 100,000 selling only one copy per day. So, you may crow about your ranking, but you can get that ranking on 365 books a year.

Went over my rank on the Diamond sales charts throughout the 1990′s. My book outsold some small press books which claimed “millions of fans” even then. They had to be lying; adding in the sales from trade bookstores would not give them “millions”. It didn’t even give them tens of thousands. It didn’t even give them 5,000.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had millions of fans, but it also had a tv show, movies, and Product Lines of the Gods. If your small press book doesn’t have all that, you don’t have millions of fans.

I understand about the hype machine, and how not letting your project be sprinkled with loser dust makes some people think Hollywood will drop a big check in their lap. But if I can see your website gets low traffic so can Warner Brothers.

While I’m advising my honored readers to question the hype you read online, here’s something to question after San Diego Comic Con when everyone and their cousin Herbert is crowing about a movie deal:

There are a lot of movie deals to be had. You can’t swing a dead cat at a con without hitting a producer. Sometimes I think that’s why we call them “cons”.

I’ve had several movie deals, and one of them helped me buy a nice Donato painting. It’s hanging in my studio. It’s the only time in my whole life I have made what I would consider to be an extravagant purchase.

However, most of these movie deals are hype. There’s no money involved. They don’t mean jack.

The no-money option is a way of getting a blurb in Variety magazine. It’s also a good way of tying up your rights so no one else can use them.

This is dumb.

The whole point of an option is to be paid for the use of your property. If someone is going to take your work off the market – sometimes for years – a serious offer is an offer with some cash to back it up.

Think about the 430 times you’ve heard of this or that movie deal which never seems to go anywhere. While some of these books get stuck in development hell, most of them are just tied up in these loser deals that don’t pay and are only there to tie up the property.

This post isn’t about poking rivals in the eye, because if it were, I’d poke more pointedly. With links.

I hope you will take this as a way to develop a better understanding of the hype machine. Just because someone screams about how popular they are, there are ways to find out the truth for yourself.

Sales are not readers, hits are not readers.

A movie option can be totally bogus.

Lying about your popularity doesn’t make you popular, it just makes you look kind of desperate. Especially when you have yourself deleted from Quantcast.

PS: I’ve received several complaints the comic is too hard to read online. Someone wrote to tell me to crank up the resolution. Sorry, that would kill my server. I’d love to post larger images, but that would mean redesigning the site as well as re-sizing and re-uploading all 400 previous pages. I just can’t do that right now.

Jamie Coville informs me some webcomicker at the Toronto Festival told a room full of people that I had restarted A Distant Soil five times and apparently this is due to some massive insecurity on my part.

For the record:

ADS First Publisher:

The original publishing contract clearly stated that I was to own my own work, but with every couple of issues, the indicia went through a morph, and in the end, the publisher claimed copyright as well as trademark. For themselves. When the lawyer hit the fan, the original publisher also claimed I was just hired to do the art and A Distant Soil was created by the publisher.

Naturally, I was not pleased with this development, and so left the publisher, spent years wrangling for the rights, and got them.

Since the original art was shot (mostly) from pencils, and since I wanted a clean break with the old company, I decided to redo the book from scratch. This would also preclude further claims by this old company to authorship.

ADS Second Publisher:

This is the only time I rewrote and redrew my book from scratch.

I would have been happy and content with this situation, but THIS HAPPENED.

I repeat: this is the only time I redid my book. From the beginning. From scratch. Period.

Three years after I signed on, the publisher closed its trade line, and sold all our contracts. Illegally. Lawsuit ensued. Authors got their rights and a financial settlement.

However, the graphic novel editions were in color and there was no way to recover those color negatives. (EDIT) Original plan was to publish black and white comics and to have these dudes publish color GN reprints. Instead we got a perfect storm of bummer.

What to do? Do I walk away, or do I try to give it another go – which could not possibly have anything to do with two publishers who violated the contracts of a dozen authors! When you take your book to another publisher, you’re showing signs of emotional insecurity, OMG, the horror?

This has nothing to do with wanting to finish your project, economic concerns, or legal rights issues!

I decided to give self publishing a go. I touched up the art to make it more attractive in black and white, added some pages to flesh out a couple of scenes and make chapter breaks, and soldiered on.

That was in 1991.

I went to Image Comics in 1996, and did not restart my book. I picked up the series at Image with issue #15.

I have published a trade paperback edition (which is not restarting the book,) and online (which is not restarting the book. A new edition is not a restart. It’s a reprint.)

There have been more editions of Sandman than there have been of A Distant Soil. More editions of Bone. More editions of Finder.

TWO comic book editions. TWO graphic novel editions. Since 1980. This is excessive?

I am very sorry some people feel vast amounts of inconvenience that I have not finished my book.

I’d love to just sit around and draw whatever I want, but I can’t do that. I have to make a living.

The income on the last issue of A Distant Soil was about $200. Which means I worked on it for two months for $200.

Which means that the money I had to live on for two entire months and to finance any book overhead took about $8,000 out of my savings.

Let me repeat that.

Last issue cost me $8,000. The issue before that cost about $7,000.

I don’t have spare time to work on comics. This is what I do for a living. If a book is not bringing in profit, that money has to come from somewhere else.

While I receive royalty checks on ADS graphic novels, this modest income I chose to use to bring the book online for everyone to read in hopes of creating another income stream to finance further work. It took almost two year’s of ADS GN royalties to pay for a web tech to design and build my sites, deal with the hack back in January, cover online access and registrations, advertising, etc. It took one royalty check to pay for my booth at San Diego. I get two checks a year.

And I am sure this webcomicker person didn’t mean any harm, so I am happy to have the opportunity to clear this up.

I wonder if they will put a tip in my donation box. They haven’t so far.

Seriously, if I had enough money to do nothing but sit down and draw A Distant Soil, I would very happily do nothing else. Not to say my other work isn’t fulfilling and wonderful, but it’s dead annoying to have other people act like they have somehow been harmed by my failure to perform on cue for free. To add injury to injury, a failure to perform while incurring HUGE FREAKING DEBT.

I’m sorry if this is cranky.

Well, not really.