Very Bad Publishers Part I

My comic book art life is your teachable moment.

The Very Bad Publishers saga is a book-length work detailing my early years in comics, mostly centered around a small trade press publisher named Donning.

The original publishing house is no longer what it was when I was there. The Starblaze line is long gone, and the entire company was bought out. It's now in Missouri. It only produces local, company, and family histories for set prices as a packager. Which is how Donning started out in the 1970's.

I wrote these essays more than 15 years ago on my old public blog, and they were some of the most popular posts I ever wrote. When I tried to write follow ups later, the memories gave me anxiety attacks. But I feel distant and centered enough to bring it all back now. Not to relive it, but to alert readers who may have missed it the first time around. While this was archived on my Patreon many years ago, it has not been publicly available in over a decade.

There is solid talk about publishing contracts, clauses and practices that are STANDARD TO THIS DAY and that will burn you big time if you don't know what you are doing.

Read and heed.

Also, some of it is screaming funny.

With time and distance, almost everything is.

So, here’s one thing I learned from my unhappy experiences with a woman in publishing (no longer in publishing, as far as I know) who shall be known only as The Woman. An editor and a fledgling writer, she had approached me about not only publishing my space opera saga A Distant Soil, but illustrating her GN project as well:

Small presses are very, very concerned about size issues, in the same way that some guys can get insecure about size when they are exposed to the big guys in the bathroom.

They would rather not appear small and vulnerable, even though that is what they actually are. They sometimes try to exploit their little guy status by passing themselves off as friendly mom and pop companies who will embrace you with their warmth and serve you cookies besides. But in the end, most small presses have one very important thing in common with most big publishers:

They are out to make a buck.

If they can’t woo you with the big money that big companies can provide, then they will try to compensate by giving you a better contract than you might be able to wrangle at a major publishing house.

Of course, if you are a newbie or you don’t have a particularly good sales track record on previously published projects, you will still get a crappy contract.

When wooing you away from a project at another publisher, they will often try to inflate their sales records and ability to promote your project. If there is any chance that you have something that might make them really good money, the sales record and promises for promotion may stray into the realm of fiction.

When I was a tot working in the 1980’s, the great unknown realm of publishing for comics was in the bookstore market, also known as the retail trade. If you were not doing superhero comics, you were probably getting a lukewarm response to your work by retailers and fans in the direct market, which is where most comics and graphic novels were sold.

The retail trade allows for returns of unsold product. It is a risky thing to accept returns on unsold product, but it’s a venue everyone in comics wanted to crack because there were tens of thousands of potential outlets for graphic novels that the comic book industry could not reach. The growth potential was unlimited, but no one could really seem to break out of the direct market paradigm.

The direct market allowed for comics and graphic novels to be sold in comic and gaming specialty shops to a very limited market that was, at the time, about 3,000 outlets. Later, it inflated to 10,000 outlets, but is now back down to about 3,000 outlets.

If a direct market retailer does not sell a book, too bad. He cannot return it for credit. However, the discount at which he orders the book from the distributor would be significantly higher then the discount a retail trade bookstore might get to order the same product – to reflect the greater risk of carrying a book he could not return if it went unsold.

OK. So, back in the day, I was pretty certain that my audience for A Distant Soil was somewhere out there in the retail trade, and the comics shops would always find my work to have limited appeal. I was anxious to find an outlet that would get me into retail bookstores after I left my first publisher.

I had several publishers approach me about picking up A Distant Soil including Marvel’s Epic division, and the fledgling Dark Horse.

But there was one publisher willing to promise me what the others would not: retail trade sales.

In fact, they promoted their company as being the biggest seller of graphic novels in the world, and the first to do it besides.

This was a blatant falsehood.

This publisher had not begun selling GN’s until the 1980’s and graphic novels existed long prior to that, obviously.

Also, many publishers including Marvel and DC had major GN’s that sold into the hundreds of thousands of copies per volume. However, most of those sales were within the direct market.

I didn’t really know much of this information until later, but since the publisher was offering me a chance to do two projects – my own and a project with The Woman – it sounded like I would be able to get the kind of distribution I wanted if I went with her company.

Her company told me they had average sales of 30,000-50,000 copies.

Boy howdy, was that a whopper.

Actually, they had only one GN that had ever sold in that sales range and it had taken almost 6 years to accumulate those numbers. They were good numbers, with the first volume in the series moving 120,000 copies and the last volume (released about five years later) moving 80,000. But one series doesn’t exactly reflect the performance of an entire company, and the track record of the rest of the company was not nearly so impressive. Consider that I was able to get those cumulative numbers myself years later when I self published A Distant Soil in the 1990’s, and you see how this was an accomplishment that didn’t reflect the publisher so much as what they were publishing.

A couple of art books had sold well, as much as 30,000-50,000, but those were not GN’s.

However, I had made my commitment to work with this company after crunching the numbers and scoping out my potential income which looked pretty decent at 30,000-50,000 sales – about what my sales on A Distant Soil were at its peak. I expected I’d be able to reach those sales again with new stores to sell to in the retail trade, as well as my direct market sales.

Alas, by the time I learned what to really expect from the publisher, I had already affixed my name to TWO contracts.

Hoo boy.

My first shock came the day I found out that even though you are with a publisher that has retail trade distribution, those retail trade distributors are not necessarily going to order your book. At the time, the direct trade market distributors like Diamond carried almost everything, and that was what I was accustomed to. 

After being told by my publisher my work would be in major bookstores like Waldenbooks (a major chain at the time) I found the retail distributors weren’t even ordering most of the GN’s the publisher was producing – or anyone’s GN’s for that matter. I do not believe they made any orders on my first GN created by The Woman for this publisher at all, and when the combined orders for both the direct market and the retail trade came in, the book had only moved just over 3,000 copies.

This was a disaster.

I had committed to The Woman’s project for a dead low advance on the expectation of orders and sales promotion that would produce some real sales in the aggregate. In fact, the publisher did promote the project well (due in no small part to the fact that the writer was also the editor in chief). A great amount of time and effort was expended to sell this book.

And few were interested in buying it.

Since the advance was so low, and since reorder activity was not forthcoming, I kicked myself in the butt on a daily basis for making the most basic and stupid mistake of my career: taking a publisher’s word for their sales.

The actual sales on other GN’s in their line amounted to no more than this:

One book had sold 20,000 copies, but the fourth volume in the same series had sales that plummeted to 2,000 copies.

Ouch.

Even though I knew the GN I had illustrated by The Woman was a flop, I had already been committed to producing A Distant Soil with this publisher. I crossed my fingers, hoping beyond hope that my sales would not be as low as they were on The Woman’s GN.

A Distant Soil did fare far better with final sales on volume I at 16,000 copies and volume II at 12,000 copies, but still less than half of expectations.

Only one other GN in their entire line had sales of more than 10,000 copies.

The others routinely sold less than 10,000 copies with the majority at sales of less than 5,000 copies. A few of these books even sold only 1,200-1,500 copies, and a few of those books were by major name authors like CJ Cherryh and Mike Grell.

The publisher simply didn’t have the clout and the track record to push those books into the retail outlets that they claimed were their playground.

 The retail market was indifferent to most of what they produced and found the publisher to be unreliable about release dates to boot. They would often refuse to order this publisher’s books until they actually saw the finished product. No advance orders were forthcoming on many of the titles and after most of the books were released, the distributors were not impressed with what they saw. My project with The Woman was woefully unimpressive and I ought to know, I drew the damned thing.

Keep in mind that almost all of these books sold by this publisher were original graphic novels, not reprints. A reprint volume might be able to make expenses at those sales figures and would be well off. And considering the much higher price point of GN’s today, most of these books would have been profitable.

But these were original GN’s selling only 3,000 copies with cover prices of $6.95 to $12.95. No royalties would be forthcoming for the authors at those numbers.

How could the publisher make any money? Well, the publisher was owned by its printer and got amazing volume printing costs on its books with most books having a cost of no more than $1 for a full color book. Nice!

If $1.5 – $2 per book were invested in producing it (advance, advertising, etc), then even at 5,000 copies with a cover price of $6.95, this book would be in the black for the publisher, but in the red for the author. The publisher wouldn’t make much at that price, but it would still make a profit even for an original GN with those low sales.

At a $12.95 price point, the publisher would actually be profiting about $15,000 per book, but the author, again, would not make a penny in royalties. On a $3,000 advance for a single book (and that would be considered VERY generous for this publisher) the author could put six months work into an original GN but would never make another penny after the advance was gone…$3,000 for six month’s effort.

Since the publisher usually issued GN series contracts (that is, an advance was paid but it was to cover FOUR books in a series, not one), the problem was even more pronounced.

$300 a month would be paid for one year as an advance against royalties for four volumes. In that one year, you MIGHT be able to produce two 120 page books or four 64 page books, if you worked full time. On $3,600, it’s unlikely you’d be able to afford to work full time on the book.

Regardless, for one full years’ work, unless your sales increased exponentially, you’d never see another dime for your efforts.

Expecting 30,000-50,000 sales and getting 3,000 sales was a shock. I was in BIG trouble.

Later when the initial sales on A Distant Soil came in and I saw that Volume I had moved 12,000 (in advance orders), I was relieved and sad at once. Those were much better sales than my previous GN written by The Woman, but still not enough to allow me to ever see a dime above my cruddy advance which, by that time, had been bumped to a whopping $350 a month.

I had made a serious beginner’s mistake.

I had not researched my publisher. I had failed to contact other authors for their opinions. I had not asked retailers or done market research at all. I had simply decided that the people I was going to work for seemed very nice, they were local, and they had big sales.

Only, you, the author, are responsible for fact checking your publisher’s claims. If you have an agent, they will also do this for you, but there really wasn’t a call for comics industry agents back then, and fact checking was problematic before the internet. I took my publisher at their word.

Big mistake. It cost me a lot of money.

Next time, I will tell you about another big mistake and how you can easily avoid it. 

---