Very Bad Publishers Part IV

We haven't hit rock bottom on that misery mine yet.

Now, in an ideal world, if my book with The Woman had been getting an 8% of cover price royalty, it would still have to have sold over four times the 3,000 copies it actually DID sell to earn out the advance. My original understanding was that my advance would have been amortized equally over the books in the contract (instead of being lumped against the first one) and, of course, I had no idea that the accounts would be cross collatoralized over all books in the series and all books on contract I had with the company.

Unfortunately, after deductions for net costs, my meager advance, and slashing half the royalty for sales at discounts of 50% or greater, and cutting another half for holds against returns, there was no way that a 12,000 advance sale on A Distant Soil would bring in any royalties either.

But things get even worse when you realize that, because The Woman was entitled to a half royalty share on the GN I had illustrated for her, I wouldn’t be getting 4% of cover, I would be getting more like 2% of cover, or about 14 cents per copy sold.

Now, to be fair, The Woman took no advance on the book herself which was generous of her, but then, she sure as hell didn’t need an advance, either. She not only got royalties on several books she edited at the company (even when the creators did not), she also got a salary that made her New York editor counterparts envious.

She was permitted to work half days at home writing. She often didn’t come into the office until 1PM. The publisher was subsidizing her writing ambitions by paying salary for her to stay home and write at least a half dozen projects only one of which, to my knowledge, ever saw the light of day – the book I illustrated. (EDIT: To clarify, mine was the only fiction project she had published there, that I know of. I think she had one or two non-fiction projects.)

So, simply to earn out the entire advance which was paid out over the course of a year and a few months (one year’s advance plus a short extension), the book would have had to sell almost 35,000 copies JUST TO PAY OUT THE ADVANCE of $300 a month and that DID NOT COUNT all the net deductions, 50% held against returns, etc. That was just to earn back what I had been paid even though what I had been paid amounted to the worst page rate I ever received in my entire career.

35,000 copies is good sales by any standard and I didn’t see that happening on this book.

To ALSO earn out enough to pay the colorist and letterer – and to pay the writer their 50% share – for me to even begin to see any more money on the project, it would have to sell between 60,000-70,000 copies - a solid sale metric, even by mainstream standards.

Moreoever, for the entire time the book was earning out at a loss, any and all losses would be deducted from profits on A Distant Soil. In the end, A Distant Soil would be forced to subsidize the book I was illustrating for The Woman.

That’s a genius level screw job, have to say.

With 3,000 initial sales and no reorders on The Woman’s book in months, the project was a loss for everyone. I went to the publisher and he agreed to release me from the contract. Any further volumes would obviously lose big bucks and he was glad to be rid of it.

The Woman, however, was absolutely furious with me, and spent many a year after complaining about how I had ruined her dream book, had gotten paid big bucks (!) for poor work, and how heartless I was to kill her project.

You know, if her writing was all that and a bag of chips, she could have found another publisher and artist in all these years, but from that quarter we hear only the sound of chirping crickets. So, draw your own conclusions.

From my end, despite all this there was one glimmer of hope: a publishing contract is a personal services agreement. There is a limit to what a publisher can expect a person to produce while not getting paid since involuntary servitude is against the law. It would have been possible (maybe) for me to legally break the agreement if I could prove that there was no way the project could earn income while doing the book.

Maybe.

Fortunately, I never had to go that far and the publisher, anxious to end a bad deal himself, let me off the hook. (There is more than one publisher out there who pays chump change or who simply fails to pay monies due, then still expects creators to produce.)

One of the ways I learned as much as I did about publishing at this company (aside from learning from my own mistakes) was by spending as much time talking to the money people as possible: marketing types, accounting, etc.

For a brief time, I rented a room from my editor (big mistake in so many ways I will not relate them here). The only place I could put my drawing board was on the porch as there was no space in my little room to work. It got cold on that porch, so the publisher offered me space in their half empty bullpen to work. The good news was, I had work space. The bad news was the publisher decided that I should earn my wonderful work space by doing odd jobs at the company. So, they put me to work in the office.

Without pay and without benefits.

Now, I have worked without pay before, and I don’t always consider it a bad thing. I did a lot of unpaid work - for nearly a year - for artist Frank Kelly Freas, and I never got a dime. I never complained, either. I considered it an apprenticeship.

I mostly did his cooking and cleaning while listening to his tales of the glory days of illustration, but that was worth it for me. I adored him.

So, I scrubbed Frank Kelly Freas’s toilet for Golden Age of Pulps Illustration biz gossip.

One of Kelly’s most famous works was this Queen: News of the World album cover. A copy of it, signed by the entire band, was unceremoniously propped up on a bookshelf amid piles and piles of memorabilia. Kelly was a bit of a hoarder which made my housecleaning job a bit of a task.

Anyway, back at Donning, I made absolutely certain I spent as much time as possible asking people about their jobs. I was happy to discuss distribution, marketing, sales, etc. These people were very open with information and even let me look at other author’s contracts, sales charts, projections, marketing reports. There was nothing they weren’t willing to tell me.

(Which was kind of improper of them, let’s just call that out. It was years before the boundaries-crossing levels at that company really sank in. No freelancer should have access to that kind of company info.)

In the art department, I spent time learning paste up and other basic tasks. Alas, most of what I learned was obsolete already, but I did get to develop some skills.

In short order, the entire office had me working as their unpaid gofer. While I was supposed to be drawing my comics, I had little time to do any of that during the work day because I was photocopying, running to Fedex, cleaning the office, organizing files, doing cleanups in production, proofreading, paste ups, art corrections and coloring on everyone else’s books, all unpaid for and uncredited. I must have worked on a dozen books at that office. I would often stay in the office until 8PM to get my drawing time in on my own book.

I knew I was being taken advantage of (and I wasn’t happy about it,) but I took the opportunity to learn everything I could about publishing and about my publisher, because I also believe in keeping your friends close but your enemies closer.

When things finally went too far (The Woman had a habit of throwing screaming fits at me in the office over a job I was not hired to do for which I was not being paid,) I screamed back, told the publisher I was leaving, packed up my belongings and walked out.

Months earlier, I’d moved out of my editor’s rental and back home. And I was getting work at Marvel and DC Comics again, so I’d be spending my extra time making mainstream comics money instead of doing free art production work for a cheap small trade publisher with grandiose plans for GN world domination.

The Woman was fired (laid off permanently?) a short time later, and the publisher called me back in to help sort out the mess she had made.

Part of the mess was a pile of unpublished and unpaid for art samples that would make your eyes pop. Did you know that Jim Valentino did work on Captain Harlock? No one else does, either. The art was buried in The Woman’s office along with works by Charles Vess, Tim Sale, Mike Grell, and Mike Kaluta. It made for some fun times going through all of that!

And…some not so good times. The art department at Donning had zero respect for the hand-made original pages. So they had a tendancy to do things like, you know, paste logos and other copy on paintings using rubber cement.

I recall the art director snapping at me, “It’s not like it’s real art!”

I was able to get around the issue by emphasizing the fact that regardless of whether or not it was “real art”, it was “real property” to someone else, and it was a bad idea to use rubber cement to glue things to other people’s property.

Oy.

Why would I, yet again, go back and do their dirty work for no pay?

Because I had a pretty good idea that lots of my missing art would be found there…and it was. I also got to take my galleys, promo sheets, posters and lots of other goodies. I sold a lot of these things later for good prices, so it was worth the trouble to go back and help out. I would not have gotten my stuff otherwise, I am sure.

One of the best experiences working for that publisher was getting to meet some interesting authors like Harlan Ellison.

Harlan was not very pleased with this publisher himself and did not get along with The Woman. In the acknowledgements page of one of his books, he mentioned that she was “significant” as an editor but does not say how, as he chose to be merciful to her in print: she was an ant before his atom bomb and he reserved Fat Man and Little Boy for bigger targets.

Me and Harlan on a panel during the Donning days. I’d be out of the editor’s rental in just a few months, and be out of the office for good just a few more months later. That room was cold, so Harlan let me wear his Armani jacket. What a mensch. My hair wasn’t really that dark back then, that’s just how old pics faded, folks.

Harlan Ellison took some time to give me some advice, and that one moment of generosity on his part paid off for me big time. More on that later…

In the three years I worked for this publisher, all my income combined from ads, book advances, miscellaneous illustration, etc, grossed no more for me than about $5,000 per annum, well below the poverty wage. I had no expectation that I would ever see another dime from my work.

A major flaw in my publisher’s paradigm was in trying to produce original graphic novels. Original GN’s were never that successful for them. Only reprints of existing works paid off with the comics covering most of the production costs. Even adaptations of the work of well-known SF authors bombed badly with best-selling prose authors producing GN’s that moved no more than 2,000 copies. Over the next two years, all their sales dropped precipitously.

A Distant Soil had been one of their best selling titles, because it had been published before and had a built-in audience in the direct comics market. Even though the publisher did almost nothing to support the book with advertising or promotion, still the books sold decent numbers (especially by today’s standards), even though I was never going to get any more money for them.

However, I figured that if I began publishing my own work in black and white first (as had been done before,) and then fulfilling the terms of my contract with the publisher by having them do color reprints of that work, I might be able to make A Distant Soil earn decent income. I’d learned plenty about distribution and publishing when I was working in the office and thought I could do it myself.

The publisher was in bad financial trouble by then. They had been bought out by their printer some time before all this went down because they could not pay their printing bills.

Donning had started as a book packager, producing made-to-order company, family, and regional histories for set prices. They moved in to trade publishing with a New Age division and a science fiction graphic novel line named Starblaze. Donning published Kelly’s first retrospective Frank Kelly Freas: The Art of Science Fiction before it opened the new Starblaze line in 1978.

But even with names like Michael Whelan, C.J. Cherry, and Harlan Ellison, and properties like Robotech, Donning could not turn a profit. While I heard The Woman argue that the SF and graphic novel books brought in the most money, they also ate up the most money. Gross is nothing, net is everything. Only a handful of books like mine sold over 10,000 copies.

No company is making any money on books that sell 1,000-2,000 copies in the retail trade.

Months before Donning finally closed up shop on their trade division, I had the publisher sign a release for ALL black and white rights to my work, as well as licensing rights. My publisher freely signed the release in triplicate. He didn’t see any use for those rights himself, it looked like the GN market was dying a slow death for them, and he didn’t see any reason to hold on to rights he didn’t think were worth anything.

In fact, the original plan when I went to his company was to publish black and white comics and then have Donning do color reprints. That was a major reason why I’d agreed to go there.

Shortly after I signed the contract they declared, “We are not a comics publisher. We publish graphic novels!”

I know this sounds dopey, but back then there was a common weird cognitive disconnect people had about comics being junk and “graphic novels” being some elevated “new” art form.

It’s totally not.

Whatever.

Well, then, I decided I would be a comics publisher and looked forward to making use of my newly released black and white rights.

However, when they finally announced they were throwing in the GN towel and closing their trade division, the publisher became openly hostile to me. It was quite bizarre. In fact, when I popped into the office one day for a scheduled meeting and mentioned that I was hoping to publish my book in black and white again, he not only denied ever having signed the rights back to me, he berated me for being a no-talent and told me to get out of publishing. I had never heard the guy even raise his voice before, so this was just plain weird.

I walked out of the office in tears. Donning told me to come back the next week and pick up a bunch of my stuff in the office files, but not to let the door hit me on the way out.

Weirder still, a week later when I showed up to get the stuff, he was all smiles again. He loved my work. He loved my book. Why, they had just sold through another 5,500 copies of A Distant Soil and were going back to press again! I was a great talent and he did not have any recollection of ever saying otherwise.

What the hell was going on with this bastard?

Well…

Harken back to those halcyon days when I worked in the office and used to chat with all the folks who handled the money and business.

Seems a couple of years before, they had had a little dispute with one of their authors - you know, Teh Crazy - over the term “reprint edition”. Donning contacted me to talk about it and had even come to me to ask me for New York publishing people contacts to be their witnesses to define the term “reprint edition” in court. Even though I was an industry pipsqueak, I knew lots of people in the New York comics scene.

Reprint in publishing is a specific term of art. A reprint is a book that is virtually identical to the original edition of a book, intended to be sold and marketed in the same arena.

A reprint edition is a significantly different printing of a book intended to be sold and marketed separately to appeal to new readers in some way. For example, a hardcover edition is a separate edition from a softcover, or a manga/digest-sized printing of a comic is a different edition from a standard sized graphic novel.

However, your publisher can sometimes sell these reprint edition rights to third parties. For example, if you did a softcover book with one publisher, they can sell the hardcover reprint edition rights to another publisher. Naturally, you, the author will get less money on this deal because your publisher is acting as a licensor, not as publisher. This cuts your take on your own book in half (at least,) yet again.

While reprint editions can expand your audience, they can also cut your paycheck. The idea is to sell into that new market well enough to make everyone even more money than before, but it doesn’t always work out that way.

Some publishers routinely sell these rights not to expand the audience for the book, but to publish separate editions of it at low risk to them, maximizing their take on the books at minimal administration and zero publication cost, while cutting further into the take an author can expect to receive.

In this case, Donning had published a digest-sized version (manga-sized) of one of their earlier tabloid-size graphic novels. My publisher had reprint edition rights to the book. (Edit: a factor in the legal argument was whether or not Donning had the right to publish reprint editions or if they only had the right to license reprint edition rights to third parties. Donning claimed they did, Teh Crazy claimed they did not. I honestly don’t remember the contract details on that point. I tend to think Donning was telling the truth over this because of how I recall the legal arguments went, re: unfair competition, but whatever.)

Teh Crazy was furious, and did not want a digest-sized version of their book. They also did not want to remain with this publisher as their contract was not much better than mine (I know, I read it, even though I can’t remember it in detail, and I didn’t make a copy).

So, Teh Crazy decided to sue Donning for contract violation declaring that the reprint edition did not meet reprint edition standards and was competitive with the original edition. (Ironically, many years later, Teh Crazy got a new publisher that came out with manga/digest-sized versions of their comic. They all touted the wonderfulness of the format, the same format they excoriated years before. Ho Ho. UPDATE: The manga-sized series was canceled shortly thereafter due to shockingly low sales.)

So, while I was in Donning’s offices working as the drudge, I learned the definition of reprint edition.

I heard about reprint edition a lot, from my publisher, and from all my New York publishing industry friends who were going to testify as expert witnesses as to exactly what reprint edition meant.

I had no doubt about what reprint edition meant because I had been hearing nothing but REPRINT EDITION for something like two years while the lawsuit dragged on.

So, when I found out that my boss at Donning - the guy who had, within a week, gone from telling me to get out of publishing to telling me I was like a daughter to him - had sold my reprint edition rights to A Distant Soil to another publisher, a move that would, yet again, cut my near non-existent royalties in HALF, the shit really hit the fan…