Is at PANEL AND PIXEL:
Shared Risk, Shared Responsibility and Shared Rewards. If you are entering the comic book field on the creative end, you have to realize that what you are doing is participating in the day-to-day business of roughly 3,000 other businesses — that’s how many comic book stores there are. With a handful of exceptions, these guys are all incredibly reliable: that’s why they’re still in business after four years, eight years, ten years, twenty years. A big part of any success story is just showing up for work in the morning and then giving it your level best from the moment the door opens to the moment the door closes.
Put as plainly and as simply as possible: if we had even half the work ethic on the creator side that we see on the retailer side, this business would be functioning at a much higher level of success.
When you solicit a book in PREVIEWS, you are asking 3,100 retailers to Share the Risk with you that there’s an audience out there for what you do. You’re asking them to bet $5 or $10 or $15 on what you do, usually based on a cover reproduction the size of a postage stamp and two lines of copy.
Something I can actually agree with Sim on. For once.
Hey Heidi,
Food for thought: Anybody who’s worked on the alt side of comics knows the list of comics retailers who consistently support indy published comics beyond Diamond’s list of preferred publishers — DC, Dark Horse, Image, Marvel, Wizard — is woefully small, maybe not even 20 percent.
I’ve seen enough cases that prove even when known creators do it all “right” as Sim suggests, they can still have orders under 1,000, and those come from a fraction of those 3,100 retailers.
In many cases, you’d think a retailer should be able to sell one comic about nearly anything with some effort. And 9 times out of 10 you’d be dead wrong…
I’ve seen both sides of this, and it ain’t pretty…
w