THE PROCESS! #1: I wrote a book. Oh god. What do I do now?! (Patreon)

I'm throwing this one out there a little out-of-order (because the "Oh god. I need to write a book." post is coming after this, but it's fresh in my mind, I'm bingeing some bomb-ass Tiffany Ferg self-employed content on youtube, and I'm here to share my own personal "what-I-did" after I finished my first whack at Jed the Undead, what happened next, and what I'm planning on happening next. Plus, some other options for what to do with a comic when you're done with it!

I'm starting this blog series (semi-ironically called "THE PROCESS~~") because I binged SO MUCH "process" and "professional practices" content when I was working on comics, doing my comics degree, and trying to comics Seriously (tm), that reading everyone's personal stories about how they got to a place I wanted to eventually be at, that I'm pretty sure adding my own blog to the mix can only help. Er, I'm pretty sure it'll only help. I taught a few guest lectures at the Center for Cartoon Studies about making comics into a career, so I have at least 2 and a half hours of concrete info to offer!

SO YOU FINISHED A GRAPHIC NOVEL

Hold up, did you script out the whole thing, or have thumbs for the whole thing? Or are you, like, "done" done - ready for print, colors all set, letters lettered? Funnily enough, you're in a pretty good position either way.

NON-COMICS TRADITIONAL & "BIG FIVE" PUBLISHERS

The former - having a few nicely polished sample pages, and a solid rest-of-the-book in some combo of script, thumbs, and pencils - is super appealing to traditional publishers. Most non-indie houses require a shitton of edits from your stuff, so it's actually a plus to have it be in some scaffolding stage instead of having to go back and re-ink 45 pages because the editor thinks the protag's scarf detracts from their facial expressions. The polished pages are important, though, because having a vertical slice of what you're trying to do as a sort of proof-of-concept is key when you're trying to convince people what an end product will look like.

COMICS & INDIE COMICS PUBLISHERS

The latter puts you in a good position if you're going after indie publishing, or you're really artsy and angling for that good good D&Q/Fantagraphics/Silver Sprocket cred, having a complete product is great! Tons of indie places are only looking for complete comics, that they can assess and publish with minimal publisher input w/r/t content - you're the artist, after all, so you should be putting out what you wanna put out! (For me, at least, turns out I get decision-making anxiety unless someone is telling me whether I'm doing Something Good or not, so you might wanna ask someone to edit your comic, join a workshopping group, or even hiring an editor to give your stuff a once-over before you go on submission).

SELF-PUBLISHING & KICKSTARTER

There's also the obvious suggestion of self-publishing, Kickstarting your comic, or going the webcomic route. There are a couple really solid pluses to this: 1, full creative control. If you've got an audience already, taking the publishing process into your own hands (or you and an indie house, or you and a business-savvy friend) can be super beneficial. You'll have to be doing all the fulfillment and production yourself though, but you ALSO get to do whatever you want with the book, so it's a decent trade-off. 2, The audience itself - if you don't have a built-in audience, and you don't wanna play ball with traditional publishing (which is a legit stance), you can reach WAY more people by releasing your comic online, whether through social media, or a platform like Tapas or Webtoon. Kickstarter also has a dedicated comics-promo team that's really generous to new creators, which might be a plus for a middle-size audience!

BUT WHICH PATH SHOULD I CHOOSE??

 Personally I have an audience of, like, five of my favorite people (hey y'all! Thanks for supporting me all these years!!!), and it was my dream since I was a wee little child to be traditionally published by the big 5 (while honing my comics craft to be personally fulfilling and meaningfully contribute to the language of comics, but that wasn't on my radar as a wee little child). 

I'm preeeetty sure you already know what you want, deep inside your soul (or wherever!). It's easy to fall in a kind of ever-lowering bar when you're finding a home for your comic if you hit a lot of walls - your #1 plan shouldn't be a compromise, though. If you're not into self-pubbing and have always wanted to get your stuff in a bookstore, OR if you really want to make literary art comics and build a new house out of all the Ignatz bricks you'll get while flipping off capitalism, OR if Kickstarter is the only way for you to keep tight margins and address your fans directly, aim for that! People keep saying "there's no one right way to do comics" and it's p. much true. The best you can do is plot your ideal endgame/path, see what other people have done, talk to other people who make and publish comics, and caaaaalm dooooown. You got this. You already wrote an entire book!