Breaking the Fourth Wall: Episode 6

Yesterday I discussed some strategies for developing properties and pitches. Which is great, but by now you’re probably wondering if I've actually been doing any of these things or if I'm just talking out my ass. Get to the point already, Mr. Writer Guy! God.

Very well then. As I mentioned yesterday, Antarctic Press is one of those companies I have identified that accepts writing proposals; there are a few others, but many of them have guidelines that require significantly more work that a standard proposal. To start out with, then, I’m going to focus on those three companies I’ve identified whose guidelines I find the simplest and most direct: Antarctic Press, Dark Horse Comics and Insomnia Publications.

One thing that is helping me is that, prior to the beginning of my research, I brainstormed about a dozen concepts for stories which could work either as finite or ongoing series. Once I identified my target publishers, then, it became a matter of figuring out which ideas suited each publisher best based on my research and then developing an appropriate pitch targeting that company.

For Antarctic, I actually had a pitch that I had originally developed some time ago that fit them perfectly. Not only was the subject matter similar to what they usually specialize in – i.e. manga and anime influenced adventure – the series itself was structured to being with a two-issue stand alone story. This is important because as I mentioned yesterday, Antarctic prefers to publish short tryout series before considering ongoing properties. So in order to tailor this existing pitch to Antarctic, basically I just had to write it up according to their guidelines and lop off everything except that first story; instead of a pitch for a series, it became a pitch for a two issue tryout. As we follow the progress of my various submissions, we’ll call this the Manga pitch and, like the other pitches I’m about to describe, I submitted it back on August 20.

The second publisher is Insomnia Publications. This one I had a little more trouble with, partially because I wasn’t familiar with their titles prior to beginning my research but also because of their formatting. As an independent British publisher, Insomnia targets the secondary market – i.e., they don’t put out monthly issues like most U. S. companies but instead specialize in graphic novels and book-size, complete stories. The problem I faced here is that, once I took a look at their library of titles, I realized that the story that was best suited for them from a content standpoint wasn’t one I could fit into their publication format; it was a finite story, but no matter how I finessed it, it was just too long. In the end I compromised and sent them a pitch for a series of graphic novels, as I think I could squeeze the entire story start to finish into 4 or 5 trades. It’s not optimal, and I’m working on another pitch for them that better fits what they want in total, but we’ll call this pitch the Dystopian pitch. One other side note about Insomnia: they accept submissions online, via email, which doesn’t necessarily cut down on the turnaround time but makes it a lot easier from my standpoint as someone submitting. So that’s a plus.

Lastly, we have Dark Horse. Dark Horse is, of course, one of the largest and most respected comic publishers. While their sales distantly trail Marvel and DC, Dark Horse has become kind of the HBO of comics, offering high quality alternative programming in a number of genres other than straight superheroics. They also have a fairly comprehensive set of submission guidelines, which is good; the more information you have about what the publisher wants, the easier it is to craft a presentation that will appeal to them. Overall, of the companies I have researched so far, I like Dark Horse’s format the best, as it encompasses most of the major details of a pitch without being ridiculously time consuming.

In general terms, they ask that you send in a series overview along with a plot summary for the first several issues (if it is an ongoing) and an eight page script sample that covers the beginning of the first issue (again, for ongoing series; they have different guidelines for other formats). While I spoke yesterday about the importance of crafting not just your pitch but the story itself for the specific publisher you are targeting, another viable option would be to craft your pitches as though they were going to Dark Horse and then alter it to fit different publishers. The reasons for this are that a) Dark Horse publishes a wide variety of genres, so whatever the story is they would be a reasonable destination and b) their submission guidelines are broad enough that they eclipse what most other companies require, meaning you can edit down from Dark Horse to meet other guidelines rather than having to add material. This may sound like it runs counter to my statement at the beginning that other publishers ask for more work than these three, but in most of those cases it’s in one specific area (for example, one publisher asks that you script the entire story before submitting it rather than just sending the beginning as a sample; the chances of them actually reading the entire script if they don’t like the beginning is exactly zero, so I’m not sure why this is necessary).

As I tend to prefer larger scale, ongoing stories rather than either mini-series or one shot graphic novels, I have to say that the pitch I sent to Dark Horse is my favorite of the three I submitted in August. It also is right in their wheelhouse in terms of the type of non-superhero adventure books they like to publish, so we’ll just call this one the Adventure pitch. One drawback of Dark Horse’s current submission policy is that they only respond to your pitch if they are going to buy it; they don’t send out rejection letters or anything else. This makes it a bit difficult to know when they have reviewed it, which is important for the purposes of submitting it to other publishers. I personally don’t like doing simultaneous submissions and I know most companies also frown on this, so this could potentially lead to problems. That would only happen if Dark Horse and a second publisher both wanted to buy the project, though, so in those terms the problems would be only positive in nature and I guess I’ll be happy to deal with that if it happens.

To recap, then: so far I've sent out three full scale submissions, one each to Dark Horse, Antarctic and Insomnia, which we'll refer to in the future as the Adventure pitch, the Manga pitch and the Dystopian pitch. My plan going forward is to continue developing new pitches to submit to these and other publishers; and if any of these get rejected, I'll simply reformat the pitch and submit it to one of the other publishers. The idea is to get as many plates spinning as possible and as soon as I hear back on any of these, you'll be the first to know, so feel free to play along at home. After all, we're in this together.


Next time: So, we’ve sent out our submissions. Now what? Well, there are some companies that take submissions from writers only after they’ve reviewed a writing sample. Next time we’ll discuss some of these publishers and just what goes into crafting a writing sample as opposed to a full pitch.

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Breaking the Fourth Wall: Episode 5

Over the past few weeks I’ve discussed some of the background behind my current attempt to break into the comic industry as a writer. Now, however, it’s time to get into the meat of it a little bit as I discuss how you go about getting published these days and where I am in my own efforts.

As I’ve mentioned before, there aren’t a lot of comic book publishers these days who look at writing submissions. One of the driving forces behind this trend is the internet. Thanks to both online comics and the way the internet has made self-publishing viable from both cost and time perspectives, many comics book publishers feel that there is a large pool of proven talent available; instead of having people send in samples to try to prove they can do comics, the idea is that you can prove it by actually doing comics. Plus, many publishers are just that – publishers. They are looking to print and distribute finished products rather than develop talent and create properties from scratch.

In other words, most publishers are putting the onus on the writer to become their own editor and producer, and once the comics are done, then the publisher will look at it and decide it they want to hire the writer or publish the comic themselves. This is perfectly reasonable from their point of view, but for writers who just want to concentrate on their writing it can be a bit of a hurdle.

It’s certainly not insurmountable, however. For the purposes of this exercise, then, we’re going to go ahead and ignore these other self-publishing options and focus on what opportunities there are for writers in the current market. In order to give yourself the best chance to break into the business as a writer there are two main things you need to do: research publishers and tailor your submission to fit their needs. Let’s take a look at what I mean and how I used these concepts to shape the actual submissions I have sent out so far.

Research Publishers

This seems pretty obvious, but the first step is to figure out which publishers accept submissions. I’ve heard a lot of editors saying they receive mounds of unsolicited submissions, even at companies that clearly state they don’t accept them, so even though this appears to be a no-brainer it’s not. When I decided to start sending out pitches, the first thing I did – before I even began working on any of my story ideas – was to go online and start visiting websites of various publishers in order to see what kind of submission guidelines they have.

I was prepared to share all this with you, my beloved readers – the fruits of my hours of hard labor – but then I discovered that someone else has already done the dirty work and posted it online. Had I known this I could have saved myself a lot of trouble, but now I am passing those savings on to you.

Optimistically titled “The Submission Guidelines for every Comic and Manga Publisher in the Universe”, the full listing – which can be found here – does, in fact, give a great deal of detail about submission guidelines for a lot of publishers and even more helpfully provides links to their websites. This is important, because as nice as this resource is, it does have one flaw – it was posted in March. You would think that it would be up to date – and it is, relatively speaking – but even just a few months later I’ve already found a few companies that have since changed their guidelines, usually for the worse as far as writers are concerned. For example, Penny-Farthing Press, which is listed here as accepting writing submissions (and whose website also states this), doesn’t actually accept writing submissions any more.

So this guide, while handy, should really be your starting point. Check out every website yourself and if you have any doubts, email the company for clarification. Once you know which companies accept writing submissions, you can start in on the second half of the research process:

Tailoring Your Submissions

There are two parts to tailoring your submission for a specific publisher. Firstly, research their line of comics to determine what kind of stories they publish; and second, format your submission according not only to their submission guidelines but also to their publishing preferences.

Often those last two are one and the same. A good example of what I mean is Antarctic Press, one of the few publishers who still accept unsolicited writing submissions. Antarctic Press includes a lot of important details in their submission guidelines. They point out that in today’s market, many retailers are wary of ordering new ongoing titles for unproven books. Because of this, Antarctic prefers to publish one shots or mini-series rather than ongoing series. The idea is that a retailer will take a flyer on a new product if it’s just a commitment of a couple months. Then, if the series takes off, an ongoing can be done to capitalize on this success. Essentially it’s a way to limit liability for both the publisher and the retailer and this should be kept in mind when crafting a pitch for Antarctic.

This is one of the main reasons I am trying to not work on a pitch without having a specific publisher in mind for it. Let’s say you have an idea for a space opera. Not knowing just who might be in the market for it, you sit down and come up with the greatest story ever imagined, a rousing, 100 issue epic that will blow the doors off the industry. Then, with this accomplished, you check out Antarctic’s submission guidelines and discover you’re totally boned. All of this could be avoided by simply not working out the details of your idea until you know the correct format to frame it in. I’m a big believer in the idea that structure determines story, and this is especially true in the world of mainstream comics, where you have a finite number of pages every issue to relay your story in; it’s not a novel where you can ramble around at your own pace, the pace is dictated in large part by the form.

So a better way to approach your idea would be this: you look up the submission guidelines, discover they want a 1-4 issue, self-contained story to test the market and then you craft your tale around this instead of the other way around. You can save yourself a lot of work and a lot of heartache this way.

And, of course, there's the other half of the equation: don't send horror comics to a romance publisher. In our example, Antarctic Press does publish a fairly wide array of comics, but for the most part the specialize in manga-inspired science fiction. That epic space opera may have a shot, but even if you follow their guidelines to the letter, a story about Archie Andrews is probably not going to go very far. I'm not suggesting you should pander to the publisher; writing what you think people want almost always ends up with bad writing. But you should be smart about which projects you pitch to which companies.

Conclusion

The submission process can be most succinctly summed up this way: creating a story to fit a market is much easier than creating a market to fit your story. Researching your publishers will not only tell you which stories you should write, but how you should go about writing them.

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