Pageturners: Self-publishing Pt 1

I would advise a lot of caution when you’re throwing dollars at Bezos, Zuckerberg and their ilk.

Welcome to Pageturners, a book I’m writing in which I share what I’ve learnt – and am still learning – about comic writing, film writing, novel writing and how new writers can sell their stories. I’ll publish a chapter or a section per week, available for free here on Iconoblast. And I welcome your feedback or questions, so do leave a comment below!

Missed the Pageturners intro? Read it here.

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Illustration by David Broughton

Self-publishing

I’m very much in favour of self-publishing, or indie publishing as it’s also known. It means I don’t have to limit myself to what a publisher wants, which can be a problem for me if they’re establishment as most of them are today and are therefore hostile to ‘radical’ thinking which was once commonplace in comics. But this gave the illusion that text would be equally radical. Not so, sadly. Text is far behind comics and we live today in deeply conservative times. I’m not aware of any new Flashman. There’s Slow Horses, which at least has a working-class hero secret agent, but that’s the only example I can think of. Everything else I’ve read out there is solidly establishment. Often old fashioned, in my view. I can, to some extent, challenge the status quo with my books because I have built up a loyal audience. But it’s still risky. So if you’re considering self-publishing, I would recommend  writing for an established genre, especially in text, e.g murder, mystery, post-apocalypse or a specific romance sub-genre, and not stepping as far outside the tramlines as I have done. At least to start with. It means you may sell far better than me if you ‘give the public what they want.’ Or what they have been conditioned to think they want. I know other authors who have done exactly that and it works for them.

The great thing about self-publishing is I don’t have to keep swearing about dealing with so many idiots anymore. If things go wrong, I only have myself to blame. I’ve taken back my power and that’s a good feeling. I recommend it.  

It’s also worth ignoring ‘Golden Age syndrome’ if you’re planning to self-publish a comic. When I started in the industry, everyone raved about the Golden Age which is always in the past. Bellamy, Frank Hampson, Gerry Anderson, John  Burns and so forth. Fans, publishers and agents actually sneered at 2000AD. A leading agent said her top SF artist couldn’t possibly work for my bog-paper comic. Another leading agent said Carlos Ezquerra would be better off working for Battle than 2000AD. When my comic was an overnight hit, they quickly changed their tune. 

Today, early 2000AD is the new Golden Age and everyone sneers at whatever has been achieved since, and makes critical comparisons which can be really tiresome and a bit sad.

It’s that kind of negative thinking and lack of confidence  that nearly destroyed our industry when I started and may yet do so again as it looks endlessly backward rather than forward.

To me, the Golden Age always has been and always will be … now.

DIGITAL COMICS AND SELF-PROMOTION

We sell a Kindle edition of Requiem Vampire Knight and Claudia Vampire Knight.  Requiem does really well for us now, but it took at least two years to become the commercial success it is today, with the future prospect of sales going mega when the series continues in 2024. So it’s paid off. The majority of our Requiem sales are based in the USA. We do get sales in the UK, but there’s still that British longing for physical paper copies, which we can’t fulfil as Panini UK own the print rights and are unlikely to reprint until the series is complete. We can’t get past that resistance.

There’s also that resistance where some British artists are concerned who don’t want to see digital versions of their work on sale, despite showing them the healthy sales on Requiem.

It’s like the industry has a deeply conservative vision of how things should be and refuses to change or take in the commercial evidence of their own eyes. So we had to drop some projects while others prosper.

We also have to promote Requiem and we found some Amazon adverts work for us, but you need to really study the sometimes complex form if you’re going to go down that road.

We’ve produced other digital comics, too – like a digital version of Spacewarp – and that, too worked. Potentially more than Requiem, which is adult-rated. 

Gumroad is another platform we use for selling digital and physical copies of books and they take care of the paperwork well. 

We tried Facebook, Amazon and other social media paid adverts with lukewarm results. But it was important to do so in order to understand them. A necessary learning curve. There are courses and books out there which will seductively tell you how to do paid adverts and how you’ll get an amazing return on investment if you just follow their exact formula. I would advise a lot of caution when you’re throwing dollars at Bezos, Zuckerberg and their ilk. Facebook in particular will just hoover up all your cash, and ad campaigns can run away with you. We also find the seemingly ever-evolving Ads Manager a nightmare to get to grips with. In comparison, Amazon is more straightforward, and easier to control the spend. In fact, many authors complain about how hard it is to ‘scale-up’ on on ad they’ve found works for them Amazon: they get a good return on their spend, but they can’t grow it. There’s no point me trying to go into specifics here on how it all works, because they’re always tweaking it and changing the rules, or adding new features.

We’ve studied the form, just to be sure. Ads may work on narrow specific genres, but I have my doubts on using them in any kind of scalable way for comics or any title that doesn’t easily fit into a specific genre that audiences have a big appetite for.

We read a bestseller on how to reach Generation Z, which extolled the virtues of one publishing big success story. It wasn’t true. The publisher they were raving about had gone out of business!

Fans told us we should try Influencers, which we duly did for Spacewarp. Once again, we drew a blank. But we did try (paid) Goth Influencers on Instagram for Requiem Vampire Knight. That did produce a short spike in sales for a reasonable price, so we might do it again at some point. We’ve been running very low level Requiem Amazon ads to maintain a bit of visibility among comic readers, and that works for us.

Still on the subject of self-promotion, we found we could get a significant spike in sales on some of our books if we had an endorsement from a famous author.  But there’s a catch. We rarely held onto that spike: those sales were from fans of the author buying out of loyalty to him, or because they overlapped with our fanbase. So we’re inclined not to make the effort it takes again. Better to promote in other ways.

Similarly we found TV and radio appearances on a BBC book programme and Forces radio made no difference to sales. But that was still useful to know, as part of a process of elimination. The conclusion we came to was that our promotional energies were best spent on niche social media with unpaid announcements reaching comic audiences on Twitter and Facebook and on Substack.  And also reaching various comic websites. 

The market and the ground rules for promotion, paid and unpaid, are constantly changing which means you have to be careful, but it’s exciting and dynamic, so who knows what’s round the corner? 

PRINT ON DEMAND   

Print on demand books work for us: we have a range of comics and text books for sale. Even a Judge Dredd colouring book by Carlos Ezquerra. It’s been selling regularly every year for us. There’s a relatively small capital outlay, for example on commissioning a quality cover, and if you need it, formatting and proof-reading services. The reproduction quality is excellent on Amazon and the customer does’t care if it’s print on demand, so we’re enthusiasts. We don’t have to worry about piles of books we have had printed and stored in a warehouse somewhere. Yet no one else in comics has followed in our footsteps, as far as I know. I believe it’s different in the States and creators are more adventurous.

Is it because crowdfunding seems easier? Or some innate and uniquely comic resistance, reflecting the industry’s deep conservatism and love of nostalgia? Or is it the digital skills that need to be mastered? I rather suspect it’s the conservatism.  Anyway, while the rest of the publishing world successfully embraces print on demand, producing endless new authors, it’s met with baffling indifference in the world of comics. Doubtless someone will rush to defend its values, even as the industry goes on shrinking and dwelling on the past. It’s a pity, because here we have a chance of bringing about real change by unseating those publishers and agents I’ve described who have ruled the roost for far too long.

Print on demand and Kindle text novels have probably the biggest potential – especially if you’re writing for genres where there is a voracious audience. This means thrillers, romances and certain styles of post-apocalypse science fiction. Mills and Boon-style books led the way in this revolution, freed from the snobbery of British bookshops. Popular culture is not popular with many creators, who would ignore these commercial realities and prefer niche audiences. Or dream that those niche audiences will suddenly become huge audiences, which they won’t.   

If you want to know more about self-publishing, one of our gurus was successful author Mark Dawson who runs courses and is a smashing guy. Lots about him online. There’s a lot to absorb and, if it seems daunting, consider the examples of the regular publishers and agents I’ve given.  Finding genuine agents and publishers is far more daunting. Give me self publishing any day.

A self-published thriller text novel is next on my list, probably after I finish Pageturners and publish.

Next week: Self-publishing Pt 2 - Graphic Novels and tackling the newsstand