Very Bad Publishers Part VI

Enter J. K. Rowling. Sort of.

Donning first approached me about my work A Distant Soil when I was in high school when the Woman saw my art in a science fiction convention art show.

With Archie Goodwin and Mark Hempel. Very early in my career. About age 19-20. Years later, Hempel would go on to draw Sandman, and so would I.

I also worked through a series of other unfortunate clients before I signed with Donning in 1986. A few of them were also Very Bad Publishers, in particular Teh Crazy, the Worst Publisher Ever, creepy in a hedonistic 1980’s science fiction convention sort of way that got ignored then but would be Cancellation Central now.

The only good thing I got out of my contact with those jokers was a lot of squicky subtext in A Distant Soil, information and experience I was able to use to make some dough on my project, and some terribly weird fandom cult drama I only hinted at before, but will get into detail about later.

But for now, back to Donning.

The first 5 parts of this series were written prior to 2003, but this segment was written and updated from 2006-2009. I was fuzzy on dates in earlier installments, because the blogs where they were originally posted are long gone.

Donning’s trade division shut down in 1989, and a lawsuit was filed about a year later. Can’t recall exact dates anymore. It took years to settle the lawsuit. But soon after, they called to ask me to help sell their backlist in the direct market. 

I think that’s a riot.

Anyway, flash forward to 2005.

Another thing I’ve learned in publishing is that no matter how acrimonious your split with someone, no matter how much you hate each other, or how badly someone has treated you, or how hurtful they claim you have been to them, there is one thing you can always expect from your former adversary:

They’ll be back.

Years after The Woman was gone from Donning, she approached me and tried to chat me up at a convention. This didn’t go over well with me and I gave her the cut direct. To put it mildly, she was furious.

She chirped, “Hi Colleen! It’s (insert dreaded name here)!” repeatedly from the other side of an art show pegboard display. I responded with stoney silence.

After a few more attempts at cheer, and a few more black holes of nothing from me, she walked up to me in the dealers room, took her meaty arm, and gave me a thwap in the side of my back.

She is not the only disgruntled industry whackadoo who has done this. It’s like attempted murder for really passive aggressive people.

I continued to ignore her. Because if I didn’t, I knew she’d go full DARVO.

I bet this pissed her off even more, I dunno, but in the Donning days, she had a habit of balling up her big fists and shaking them in my face, which is exactly the kind of behavior every freelancer dreams of from the perfect editor.

She was three times my size, so it was a bit threatening, but I figured I could outrun her, so whatevs.

She was using a cane at one point, so I’m pretty sure.

Several years after I’d cut her off and she was long gone from Donning, she spotted me in the crowd of a local concert. Just like in the old days, her face twisted with fury and those big fists balled up shaking with the impotent rage of one whose Mission from God to be the Grand Dame of Graphic Novels has been forever thwarted.

I burst into laughter, and so did my compatriots, which probably did not endear me to her any further, either.

Anyway, as I wrote in my last post, some ten years after I last worked with her, she was still fuming. She sent me an 8 page letter threatening a lawsuit over about half a dozen things, primarily over her extremely deluded belief that I had done an illegal reprint of the GN I illustrated for her.

I’d bought the books fair and square from my publisher for resale like any wholesaler.

In addition, she was writing A Distant Soil fanfic and selling it, and was making extremely bizarre claims that I was plagiarizing her fanfic. Some may recall that I used to be extremely touchy about fanfic. Now you know why.

One of my former editors was writing and selling fanfic of my work, and ten years later, was claiming I was getting all my ideas from her…and if that isn’t ballsy, I don’t know what is.

To make matters even stranger, she claimed she had not actually been reading the comic series. 

Hunh? 

Wow, that’s some amazing skill, to know what I am writing and drawing without having actually read it.

OK, IMHO this was just a pathetic attempt to get my attention, but only the infantile think bad attention is better than no attention.

I turned her letter over to my attorney just like you are supposed to with this sort of thing, and in the absence of a sufficient personal response from me, she began calling me on the phone.

She got my unlisted number from a fan (remember that sentence above about weird fandom cult drama? More to follow). I dismissed The Woman with some choice swear words. She wailed, “At least I don’t have to call people names!”

Holy cow, what, are we in elementary school? 

I handed her back to my attorney again where this kind of nonsense belongs. I still recall her screaming “Why do you need an attorney? Why do you have an attorney on retainer? I bet you get sued all the time! You’re that kind of person!”

OK, that part was actually both funny and pathetic at once, so I laughed.

I don’t have an attorney on retainer, but if I was rich enough to afford one, I’d probably need one because where money is, lawsuits follow. And to be perfectly frank, I have been involved in exactly two publishing industry lawsuits in my entire career - a career lengthy enough that I am sometimes loathe to admit it - and both involved her.

After being turned back over to my attorney, and getting some more sad and weird mail from her, she finally made a noise like a hoop and rolled away.

Later, she boo-hooed on message boards about how mean I was and how we’d just had “a misunderstanding” and how I “overreacted” to her fanfic. Actually, I reacted appropriately to her outrageous claims and threat of a lawsuit by turning her over to my lawyer.

If she hadn’t brought it to my attention, I’d have never fricking known about the underground business in the fricking fanfic.

Mean, mean, Colleen! Being so mean to fanfic authors!

Uh hunh.

Exit The Woman, who would at least have appeared to have had some class if she had exited a little more gracefully.

Reenter the ex-publisher.

Or, to be more precise, the ex-publisher’s ex-partner.

Recall the last part of my massive epic about my adventures with Donning. They were operating under the mistaken belief that my fellow authors and I engaged in some kind of conspiracy with Donning’s ex-partner to take all of our books to his New Age publishing company. As I said, I barely knew the ex-partner, had no idea he was starting up a new company, and couldn’t have cared less. I was self publishing A Distant Soil, at the time, and later moved to Image. I had no contact with the ex-partner in at least 15 years. We’ll call him Tom.

Tom’s New Age small press had a trade division line that looked to be set up a lot like Donning. I’d never heard of his company nor seen any of his books in stores, but I did some research when this all came up again. They had one hit book that sold very well and a lot of books that didn’t. They were adding a line of unauthorized celebrity biographies as well as insta-books about other people’s books: fan-service pop bios and info-tainment.

None of it could even be considered close to academic quality, but then, it didn’t claim to be. They were out to make a buck. Authors who didn’t even know the material were instant experts after a quick read of whatever popular novel was being made into a movie. A few weeks research on the internet, add some reprints of previously published articles, bind it, and you’ve got a quickee dollar riding the coattails of someone else’s success.

I’d done some articles and art for books like this, but usually as favors for colleagues. I think my grand total income on about 1/2 dozen books of this kind was $500 combined. Usually, I didn’t get paid at all. I took most of these sorts of gigs because I was a fan of the source material. If someone wanted to interview me about what I thought of Anne Rice, or they wanted me to write an article about Clive Barker, it was a pleasure.

Over time, these sorts of books made me uncomfortable, especially after someone wrote an unauthorized bio about me. I won’t take these kinds of assignments now.

Anyway, some years ago, I was contacted with news about Tom and his new publishing venture. I hadn’t given Tom a thought in almost two decades because I never gave Tom a thought even when I was in the same room with him. He may have been a publishing partner at my old company, but I hardly ever spoke to him and he never worked directly with me. He was gone before the lawsuit came along. I had very few memories of Tom.

Now I was being told that Tom was just the greatest guy. Some of the people at my old publisher had gone on to work for Tom, including staff and authors. My contacts were telling me Tom was not behind any of the ex-publisher’s weirdness. Tom was doing well with his new company and they were in serious need of decent artists. Wouldn’t I consider doing a new book cover for one of Tom’s celebrity bios?

Despite the glowing recommendation, I had reservations.

First, I did not believe for one second that Tom was not behind anything that had happened at the old publishing house. He was still there when I was the unpaid office drudge, and I don’t recall him stepping forward to say, “But my friends and colleagues! At the very least, she should have health insurance!” I don’t recall him stepping forward to say, “Dudes, these contracts of ours, they really suck. Can’t we give the authors a better deal?”

I do recall nice houses and cars for the publishers, and a barely mobile Toyota with no front left end for me. I recall getting a ticket for having an expired sticker on my car because I couldn’t come up with $22 to pay my taxes, and a loaf of banana bread to eat that was supposed to last a week.

That’s what I recall.

Second, I’ve pretty much had it with the small press. Few of them are small because they want to be. The pay is usually lousy. Now I was making very good money as an artist at good publishers. I had a series at Marvel going on, and GN’s at other publishers, as well as various illustration assignments. I was making the best income of my career. The A Distant Soil GN’s were even earning decent money at Image. Even though they weren’t selling nearly as well as I would like, the superior Image contract enabled me to make enough money to continue my series.

My contacts at Tom’s new publishing house assured me over and over that not only was this locale simply a jolly place to be, but they would pay me very good money to do a cover for an unauthorized book about JK Rowling.

My fangirl sense was tingling. JK Rowling! Harry Potter! Oh, boy!

OK, what to do? Take the chance? Grapple with the ex-publisher’s ex-partner? Was he a rat or not? And when would I get another chance to even get near the glory that was HARRY POTTER? I sure as heck wasn’t likely to get a shot at illustrating the real books, but this would be cool by proxy.

Against my better judgement, I agreed to the job and the price they offered (not nearly as good pay as I was told it would be) and I whipped up a color sketch.

Before I even turned in my doodle, I knew I had made a mistake.

The art director called. She did not want to work with me. This she made very clear. The publisher usually worked with in-house artists and she was not happy to work with some stranger. She was clearly not familiar with terms of art or my work. I later learned she had no art training at all. One thing was for sure, she wanted me off the assignment, and yet she couldn’t just fire me. The publisher had told her to work with me.

So, she was going to make things difficult.

The first difficult thing she was going to do was she was going to cut my pay. By a full third.

I kid you not.

I sat there with my mouth open utterly unable to believe what I was hearing. I was also utterly unable to believe that I had walked right into this with my eyes wide open.

I knew better. I really did. And there I was again, involved with yahoos, and it was my fault this time.

Fool me twice, shame on me.

But all was not lost! No sirree! They were going to give me a goodie to compensate for cutting my pay!

Can you guess?

Can you guess what the goodie was?

Oh, I bet you cannot guess!

GUESSGUESSGUESSGUESSGUESS!

OK, I will not keep you in suspense any longer.

The publisher was going to print my name in the book.

OH, gollywollackers joy! Oh, goody gumdrops! OH, thriller, chiller wonderful! My name! MY VERY OWN NAME! Printed IN A REAL BOOK!

OK, I laughed.

I hated myself for agreeing to do this stupid book cover in a fangirl whirl of enthusiasm, and I followed it up with an act of self flagellation that could only have come from my Catholic roots; I agreed to the significantly lower price.

But wait! It gets better!

If the artist would agree to one cut in pay, surely she would agree to TWO cuts in pay! So, one more cut came because they were “A small publisher and we just can’t afford your rate.” You know, the rate they agreed to and had already cut once.

I mean, for cryin’ out loud, I had already done a sketch. I was going to have to get something out of this.
 

This was the idea sketch for the portrait of JK Rowling, cobbled together from photos I altered in Photoshop.

Yeah, OK, it’s actually pretty rough, but this was a prelim idea doodle from 20 years back, so chill. Being able to do prelims in Photoshop used to be a big deal.

The art director was not pleased. “That doesn’t even look like JK Rowling,” she sneered.

No shit? Funny. It IS JK Rowling. That there, that very, very same picture IS a picture of JK Rowling. A real one. That is, in fact, JK Rowling smiling at you in that photo.

I knew I was not going to be able to please an art director whose principle complaint about a portrait of an author was that the photograph of the author did not look like the author.

But it got really, really bizarre (yeah, like it’s not bizarre already,),when she demanded to know what the owl was doing there, why is Rowling holding that wand, and why is that castle in the background?

I bet you think I am making this up.

I only stayed on the assignment this long to see what freakish thing would come out of this woman’s mouth next, but it turns out that the publisher who was about to publish the fanservice book about JK Rowling had absolutely no idea what the hell was going on in those Harry Potter novels. No one at the publisher had, in fact, read them. You’d think a New Age publishing house would be crawling with people who’d be all over Harry Potter like an invisibility cloak, but no. Not one of the people who were going to be passing themselves off as the publisher of books about this pop culture phenomenon had ever read word one of the thing. So, the art director, in all honesty, had no idea what I was putting on the cover.

Of course, she also had no idea whatsoever what the hell JK Rowling looked like, but by then I’d had enough. I quit. I didn’t even ask for a kill fee (they didn’t have a clue what kill fee meant anyway).

I considered myself 100% responsible for walking into the excrement in these ex-publisher’s arseholes, told my contacts at the company not to call again, and considered myself lucky to not be burned too badly. At the very least, I got an amusing cocktail conversation story out of it, and what the hell, if I wanna draw a Harry Potter illustration, you know, I can just sit down and do it any old time. I mean, duh.

Lookie, lookie. I just did a picture of Potter and Malfoy all by myself. I shall not only enjoy myself by drawing the Harry Potter doodle in manga style, but I will also enjoy circumventing the art director who has never read Harry Potter, and the publisher who did not get permission to make bucks doing books about Harry Potter. Aren’t I a rebel?

Well, actually that’s pretty meh, here’s another one, this is a little better, yay.

But wait. There’s more.

HOW CAN THIS BE? HOW CAN THERE POSSIBLY BE MORE AFTER THIS???

Dear God have mercy! Haven’t I suffered enough?

Even I find it hard, years later, to believe what happened. It is so freakishly loony, I am not even upset about any of it.

My contacts at Tom’s publishing house still thought Tom was a swell, and no matter how often I warned them that just because someone hasn’t screwed you yet, that doesn’t mean they won’t. No one listened of course, because it’s easy to have your head in the clouds when you’re not bent over taking it up the rear.

Time warp…it’s 2005.

Because Tom and his colleagues have the memory span of mayflies, they’d already forgotten that I had been very, very displeased that I had been ill treated by Tom and Co. at Donning, and on the cover assignment from years back, and had absolutely no interest in working with any of them.

For any reason.

At any time.

Ever.

I’m really, really not kidding.

DON’T COME BACK.

This didn’t stop them from coming back.

In a supreme act of cognitive dissonance, Tom’s minions had the sheer unadulterated gall to approach me about helping old Tom out.

Word was, Tom’s company was in trouble. Something told me Tom’s company had been in trouble for a long time, and the previous reports I heard that practically had the staff and freelancers drinking from waterfalls of milk chocolate and dancing through fields of candy were, perhaps, not accurate. I’d spoken to about 9 freelancers/staff at various times over the years and the smiles were affixed to their faces in a rictus while they admitted that there was trouble on the horizon.

Methinks they were not drinking from milk chocolate waterfalls, but from bowls of spiked Kool-Aid.

I never make the mistake of not researching a publisher these days, you know.

Money was tight. Royalties were late, or paid in monthly installments instead of twice a year lump sum payments. Despite the fact that Tom was being called a “nice guy”, he was also being called an “idiot” in the stack of mail I still have on file from his satellites.

I really didn’t care if he was an idiot or not because I had no relationship with this guy and wanted to keep it that way. Freelancers admitted that the only reason they were sticking around was because they had to help keep the company afloat. The publisher owed them so much money that if Tom went under, they all went under. Some of the authors were having difficulty getting published elsewhere.

Horror of horrors, they might have to go out and get day jobs.

Tom had a Big Plan to keep the company going, and Tom wanted me to be in on it.

Oh, what rapture.

Seems Tom had many happy, glowing memories about his days with the old publisher centered around his dreams of being a big shot in graphic novel publishing. They’d never been a big shot in graphic novel publishing, but that was irrelevant. Surely, they could be. They had published GN’s once, and now GN’s were bigger than ever. All they needed to get started was lots of money…and me.

I began getting enthusiastic calls and letters. Tom had a very important new investor who was going to save the company. This big shot was a big money man from Disney.

We’ll call him Mr. Disney.

Because why not.

Mr. Disney was being touted as some kind of business genius. His millions were going to bail out Tom’s company and they had big graphic novel publishing plans. Tom told the investor that he just knew lots and lots about GN publishing and they were all going to get rich publishing GN’s.

OK, now the obvious questions: If Mr. Disney was such a business wiz, why would he be investing in Tom’s company? And if Mr. Disney knew anything at all about GN’s, why would he be investing in Tom’s company?

Surely, he’d know Tom was no player in the field.

And if any of these people were such uber-business wizzes, and were all that and the dip about GN publishing…why come to me? I like me too, and I think I’m just dandy, but there are other people I would commend over and above myself for advice about GN publishing start-ups.

Pretty please, pretty please, pretty pretty pretty please, Colleen won’t you take a meeting?

WTF?

I don’t know how many times I said no. I can say no in several languages, but a few times in English should have been sufficient.

Further along in the not-able-to-take-no-for-an-answer department, while these fellows were still insisting on the meeting, they even had my next graphic novel project all planned out for me.

To pull a quote from the immortal film All about Eve this beat “…all awards for running, jumping, or standing gall.”

I got a stack of books from Tom’s company about telepathic bugs. Tom wanted me to do a graphic novel series about telepathic bugs.

There wasn’t just one big novel about telepathic bugs, there was a whole series of them. I had no interest in the books about telepathic bugs, would not read the books about the telepathic bugs, and sure as hell would not draw the books about the telepathic bugs taking over the planet Earth with their bugginess. I did not give a dung beetle about the telepathic bugs, Tom, Tom’s company, or anything else connected with Tom. The answer was no. I sure as hell wasn’t going to read that stack on spec, either. If they wanted me to read that mess of telepathic bug lore, they could pay me by the hour for consulting.

And to be perfectly frank, I was sick of hearing Tom’s minions whine about their money. I warned them repeatedly about what had happened at Donning. I’d been a freelancer working for free which is not supposed to be the definition of freelancer. Tom had never been mean to them before, so if others had complaints with Tom’s previous publishing adventures well, that didn’t count. Whatever happened couldn’t have been Tom’s fault, it must have been his evil partner.

Now some of them were feeling the money pinch too, and they didn’t like Tom quite so much anymore.

Well, that’s a small violin playing there, innit?

It seemed obvious to me that Tom’s business practices today were exactly the same as they were decades ago: money management problems, serious overprinting, and grandiose publishing schemes with no basis in objective reality.

Moreover, his contracts were paying 5% (as I recall). While this is common in today’s small press, it was an even lower starter royalty than in the days of his old company.

Yeah, I can’t wait to work for this guy.

They still weren’t taking no for an answer. This went on for weeks.

My curiosity was tweaked when I was told more and more about Mr. Disney. This guy was built up as the second coming, a brilliant man with loads of experience, a supernova, the Publishocalypse. I was developing a spark of interest in talking to Mr. Disney. If these yucksters were willing to pay me a consulting fee, sure, I’ll talk to Mr. Disney.

However, I adamantly refused to see, speak to, or have anything to do with Tom. I only agreed to see Mr. Disney. To meet Mr. Disney. I promised nothing more. All I could lose was an hour’s time.

And I’d get lunch.

Not only did they agree to my terms, but Mr. Disney would be flying all the way out to where I live to meet me in my little town in the middle of a remote mountain area. The only place to eat was a diner in another town. I agreed to meet Mr. Disney at the diner. I was kind of looking forward to seeing what was up with this guy. I just wasn’t buying the story that Mr. Disney, if he was so savvy, was pouring tons of cash into Tom’s company.

A week later, I showed up at the diner at the appointed hour.

I did not know what Mr. Disney looked like, but when I entered the diner, I could not find a single man sitting alone at a booth. In the corner there were two men seated with some children. Where was Mr. Disney?

One of the men in the corner had stood up and was waving frantically. “Yoohoo!” I did not recognize him.

Who the hell was that idiot?

Good lord…it’s Tom…The Idiot!

Yes, folks, I was supposed to be meeting Mr. Disney, but not only had Tom invited himself along…he had brought small children.