Self-publishing and digital books

[sevenswells]

There's still a beautiful weather outside, and I'm still stuck inside my room working!

Here's a link all you authors and artists on my fpage will find very useful, I think:

http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/03/ebooks-and-self-publishing-dialog.html

It's a dialogue between two writers who have switched to self-publishing and are happy about it.

The way I see it, the book industry is facing an unprecedented crisis, and publishing houses are part of the problem, as it's very well explained in the interview. And in my trade, which is comic books, it's even worse, because it's such a ghetto culturally speaking, with such a lack of proper recognition in France that things go even slower and are even more fucked-up (I won't even talk about the royalty rates which are, for a regular comics author, completely ridiculous). Needless to say I'm extremely unhappy with the way things are in my business, and that I'm thinking more and more about the self-publishing solution. The only problem is that it's a bit different with comics than with literature, but it seems these days the switch to self-publishing and, more importantly, to digital media, is becoming an important debate amongst the authors I know, all of which are pissed and tired of their publisher's bullshit, and we're all working on a viable solution together. The only thing I know for sure is that I want to be part of the change, and I hope we'll see the light at the end of the tunnel.

"For hundreds of years, writers couldn't reach readers without publishers. We needed them.

Now, suddenly, we don't. But publishers don't seem to be taking this Very Important Fact into account."
(Joe Konrath)

Comments

[sevenswells.livejournal.com]

Thank you for reacting darling!

I know I have the unpopular opinion here, but I thought I'd throw my two cents in.

Not at all, it's an opinion and it's interesting. I can only speak from my perspective too (actually I published a fiction book, like, with words and only words, when I was younger but the experience had been a painful one for me, and I never wanted to go back to the world of literature after that; now I only write fics, and I'm only interested in producing comic books professionally)

As a comics author, the situation, in France at least, is extremely stuck and it's a bit too specific so I'll try to make this rant as concise as possible, but I won't hold a grudge against you if you just skip the whole thing -- I am aware that it doesn't concern everybody and it might be tl;dr

*three hours later*

Okay, I started to write something but now I think it's too long, too complicated, I'm boring myself out and it makes me a bit depressed, too. So I'll sum it up quickly, it all boils down to this:

-the main objection I have about self-publishing is that it is indeed a whole different job, and it's not supposed to be mine. I consider being an author a huge task already, and I just don't have the time and mental space to also do all the rest of the work which consists in reaching the public you're supposed to reach with your production; I prefer writing, and inventing stuff, not doing PR and marketing work. So I would have to be pretty desperate to start thinking about self-publishing as a solution. Which I am. I don't think I have much of a choice, actually.

-70 to 80% of the price of a comic book goes to the publisher, the distributor and the retailer, while the author gets 6%. Which is already ridiculous as it is, and as they explain in the interview (something that is true in France too), for digital versions of your work, it's the same rates. And that is downright scandalous.
But what is more scandalous is that today in France, those guys who take 80% of your living money don't do their jobs. You're talking about editors, and I agree, I'm sure they are helpful. What we have today (again, I'm just speaking from my perspective) are publishers and nothing more. People who take what you did when it's finished, give it to some guy who would print it and then just fling it into the great big nowhere hoping someone would eventually buy it.
After that, your book has maybe two weeks (that is, if you're lucky) to survive in a saturated market. Most of the time, it doesn't. Something is very wrong with that.

-I've been on both sides of the fence; I've worked for nine months as a PR for a major comics publishing company in France, and I could see from the inside how things worked. They don't. Publishers today put all their efforts in supporting titles that they know will work, stuff that is already popular. As for the rest, they have to survive by themselves. If it works, good for you. If it doesn't, they stop your series. Which has happened to me last year. I got one of my series stopped, because it didn't "sell enough". Nephyla, the drawing artist I've been collaborating with, and I, got zero support from our publishers. We did the promotion work all by ourselves, we also contacted the press by ourselves to get interviews, we practically went from library to library to sell our stuff, in other words, we did a job that wasn't ours because nobody else would do it. And it still didn't work. We still got sacked, and the story we wanted to tell will never get finished. The readers who have been reading us until last year won't ever know how it ends. Maybe now you can understand why I'm so angry at those people. And the most horrible thing is, they're not an exception these days.

-So in the end I figured, why not do all the job, since I've already done that, except that I'll know that on the price of my book, 90% of the cash will go to me, and not to some wanker who will sit on his thumbs all day

[sevenswells.livejournal.com]

Fucking shit my reply was too long, I have to cut it in two parts O___o So here's the rest, while I'm at it, but it's okay if you're already gone to do someting else somewhere else:

-But then some other problems appear, especially when we're talking about digital media for comic books. How can you sell your stuff? What kind of public are we talking about? What will they read your comics with? Publishers in France have been treating their authors as enemies, not allies on this matter, and as they say in the interview, they've been trying to slow down the process and are keeping everything locked with a key. Now it is possible to bypass this lockdown and get your stuff out there on your own, but then it's not sure that copyright would be respected. So basically, on the subject of digital media for comic books, French authors are stuck between a giant wall, and the jungle. No middle ground. That's why I said some of the authors are working on a viable solution these days, and I want to be among them. It's a delicate and complicated matter, but there might be hope.

-Finally, the other problem about self-publishing comic books is that if we're talking about quality work, the production of pages costs a lot of time and money. So you have to be able to invest a certain sum of money at the beginning of the production (which is usually the role of the publisher), but we can't all do that. There are solutions to that problem too nowadays, but I can't go over them, this reply is too long as it is already and I really don't want to bother you.

Sorry; I forced a whole exposé about the French comic books business upon you even though you haven't asked for it. I feel a bit stupid now, but I just wanted to explain the reasons of my outrage, so it wouldn't look like it just came from nowhere and I'm being ungrateful and unsatisfied for the heck of it.

So far in my business I've only met one editor who deserves that title and whom I respect a lot; I'm (well, me and the drawing artist I'm collaborating with) working with him on a project that I love and everything up until now has been great. The sad thing is, that guy really is one of a kind in this business. The rest of them, I'll do everything that is in my power to be able to never work with them again and tell them all to fuck off.

Arrrrh, too long, too long! >_____<;;