How to Succeed in Self Publishing Pt 1

I didn't set out to self-publish. My first ambition was simply to be a writer. I would write stories and then send them to publishers, I would be rich and famous, drink champagne at the top of Park Hyatt, then retire to a country cottage house and continue to pen bestselling works. A pursuit perhaps punctuated by many naps.  

Actually, my initial goals were much more modest: I just wanted to finish the stories I started. When I began writing and drawing my own comics--I did it so I could share them with my friends. But there's a level at which just photocopying comics and giving them away doesn't cut it. You want to know if you can make it. You want to know if you're any good. And the only way to know that is to get out there in the arena, and see if people who don't know you will be interested in what you've done.

So somewhere in-between those two ambitions, after rounds of rejection letters on stories, pitches, and novellas, came the first mini comic of Freelance Blues, co-created and written by the prodigiously enthusiastic Mike Leone. We had an idea for a series, an everyman sort of guy, who whenever he starts up at a new job discovers that his employer is bent on supernatural evil. We met an artist online, got some pages drawn, and then BLAOW. We had it. An 8 page first hit, the FLB mini. So, it was time to take it out and see if it would sell.

After a trip to Kinkos, with a hastily assembled pdf, we had a stack of folded 8 1/2 by 11s, which I took down to the Toronto Comic-com. I showed it to everyone I could. I showed it to Dave Sim, who was like, oh—uh-- that's great! But he took one, and reminded me “Hey, you have to sign it.” I showed it to Chris Butcher, who was selling books at the Beguiling table, who was like “Well the page turns don't hold together all the way, that jump doesn't make sense, but that's great man! Get out there and sell it.” So with that encouragement, I walked over to the artist alley, which luckily was sparsely populated. And very self-consciously, I sat down on the other side of the tables.

Digital painting guru Bobby Chiu, who I met while doing a profile of his Subway sketching, came over after noticing me. “Oh, you do your own comic? Here, you have to show people.” Freelance Blues #0 didn't even have a real cover image, just a very large version of the logo. Bobby cracked the book open to the centre spread, showing the art, and pulled all the books to the front of the table. “See, you got to let people see it. Don't be shy about it. Okay, good luck!” 

And that was pretty much all the initiation I got into the selling of comics. I sold them for 2 bucks an issue, and I think they cost us $1 buck to print each for 8 pages plus a stiff glossy cover sheet. But over the day I started to make my money back. I sold a few. And I thought, hey, I can do this. This was something we worked on, spent weeks writing, coming up with the concepts, finessing jokes, reviewing character designs, thumbnails, layouts, pencilled and inked pages. It was something we'd really poured our hearts into. Why wouldn't we want to get it out there to people? That's why we'd put the effort in. More than that-- we'd paid, yeah, we paid for an artist to draw our vision for this thing. Why wouldn't we want to see that money back? Aren't our ideas worth that much?

Cut to five years later. And we're still doing it. I was in Guelph, for the 2^nd day of a 3 day selling tour. Yesterday we set up at the Ad Astra science fiction convention, today was the Kazoo Zine fair, tomorrow I'd be heading down to Toronto's Wizard World. We had just printed ISSUE 5 of a 6 part Freelance Blues mini series which we had funded, self-published and marketed ourselves. We're on our way to completing the series on our own. And in Guelph, Rob Haines, one of the managers of the Dragon comic store and organizer of the zine fair asked if I could participate in a talk on self-publishing. So of course I said yes. Because after doing this for five years I think I have something to say. I've learned a few things. And it involved surprisingly less champagne than you would think.