This article began its life as an answer to a question on Quora, where I answer a lot of random questions about things. Publishing is one of those things. The question was, “Are Small Indie Presses Taking the Place of Literary Agents?”
TL;DR Answer – Yes.
Here’s the longer answer:
While so many people write about the death of publishing, there has been a very quiet revolution going on in the publishing industry. Webcomics, Print On Demand and other creator-driven technologies are changing the face of comics publishing. While webcomics have not yet developed into a sustainable business model for comics as a whole, they have radically altered distribution, fundraising and relationship-building for many independent comic artists.
For manga artists in Japan, printing one’s own work, or developing other’s work as a small press, is a well-established subculture and farm league for mainstream comics publishing. Larger publishers comb the halls of the major Comic Market events in Japan to discover talent already nurtured and trained by these doujinshi (which my mechanical translation tool delightfully translates as “literary coterie magazine”) circles.
In the book publishing world, as large publishing companies pull their resources tighter and tighter, focusing on proven names and mass media tie-ins, small presses are stepping into the space willfully abandoned by literary agents; finding, nurturing and publishing young talent.
I can think of a dozen or more writers and artists I know that have had success dealing directly with small presses where agents wouldn’t give them the time of day. It’s almost unbelievable when you see how poorly some agents do their job.
The other side of this, of course, is that many young/new writers are woefully, horribly, inconceivably ill-prepared for approaching any agent or publisher. I do my very best to write gentle, sensitive rejection letters when I have to. This does not help. People get angry and often tank any chance of ever working with me by writing enraged, irrational, sometimes incoherent replies, explaining how much I suck for not seeing their brilliance. I’m glad to provide guidance and advice for creators, but it’s still up to a creator to get their part of the process right.
The advantage for a writer with some few publishing credits (this would be things like magazines and anthology credits, not “I have a blog” credits) under their belt is that a contract with a smaller publisher can, over time, become an entree’ to a larger audience. (Presuming one doesn’t burn bridges, which is easy in a niche field with only a few potential publishers.) The money and the promotional support is going to be minimal, so basically all a writer is getting is editorial and printing assistance – which is worth a great deal. Unfortunately most authors don’t realize that. They just see the small advance and small sales and get pissed that the company isn’t doing more. In reality, a first-time contract with a larger publisher is also unlikely to include much in the way of promotional support. The reality for first-time authors is that they are going to be almost completely responsible for their own book promotion.
Literary agents rarely have any energy or ability to take risks. Driven by market pressures, they have to produce best sellers as quickly as possible. In the meantime, indie publishers, driven primarily by passion, have interest in and ability to develop new talent. Small indie publishers have fewer resources, but can take more risks.
Small presses, like creator-driven publishing, are definitely changing the publishing landscape.
And, no matter how I look at it, I think it’s about time that was changed.
In the United States, the fanzine/small press/independent comics subculture has been a “farm team” for comics industry industry professional since the early 1960s. Literally hundreds of fans-turned-pros have followed this route over the years, and when the webcomics revolution started, I saw it as simply an electronic continuation of its print predecessors.
In the 1960s and 1970s, while there were thousands of fanzines published, it was not until high quality copiers were available to everyone in the early 1980s that small press truly became something anyone with an idea and initiative could exploit.
The widespread availability of relatively inexpensive desktop publishing software in the 1990s made quality layout widely available to many small pressers, so by the end of the decade, the only limiting factor for small presser compared to the big poublishers was distribution.
The Internet obviously has changed all of that, and now a creator has more power to develop and distribute his/her creations than ever before.
And, as you point out, that’s a good thing.
@R. Maheras – Quite right! I forget zines mostly because by the time I was really active in comics, they were sort of dying out, or morphing into magazines. Thanks for the prompt.
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for self-publishers. They are my heroes.
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R. Maheras
The Internet obviously has changed all of that, and now a creator has more power to develop and distribute his/her creations than ever before.
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Which is very nice, unless you’re expecting to make any money to speak of (minimum wage would be a huge leap forward!) from it.
@Mike Hunter – As I say, there is no sustainable business model for creative efforts right now. I’m not sure there ever was. In traditional publishing, you got a small advance and…that was pretty much it. As a first-time author, your royalties were likely to be low or non-existent and for better or worse, you probably had to write two or three more books for the same company at the same crappy rate. They didn’t provide you any promotional support until after you sold consistently on your own.
Small presses can offer even less in advances, but they often give first-time authors more flexible terms and a chance to grow their audience without pressure to sell crazy amounts.
Creator-driven publishing isn’t going to make anyone rich, but it provides them control (which is a positive and a negative) so they understand exactly what it takes to get things done.
In all cases, a breakout hit can make the author some money. But without that time and luck quotient in balance, it’s just hard work for little pay.
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Erica Friedman says:
As I say, there is no sustainable business model for creative efforts right now. I’m not sure there ever was.
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“…not sure there ever was”??!!
Don’t let history — even recent history — confuse you, then! Sheesh, things were rarely ideal for most but a very few creative folks, but countless people were able to make a decent living doing comics, writing for magazines and the pulps, rendering cartoons and illos for magazines…
…Until the Web and illegal music downloading made a generation of spoiled brats even more spoiled; taught ’em that creativity should not only be instantly available, but come free.
That aside, I’m perfectly aware how small “boutique” publishers (like Subterrarean Press*, for horror) have been a life-saver for authors who, though they have a devoted following, don’t rake in the huge sales figures now demanded by everything-must-be-a-smash-hit conglomerate-owned publishers…
* http://www.subterraneanpress.com/
Perhaps your and my idea of a decent living are different. But I don’t agree at all that many people ever made a decent living from comics.
There were folks I know who worked regularly as inkers and letterers in the 80s and 90s and as long as they lived on their own in a small apartment they could barely squeak by. But if they had a family, or wanted to be able to eat out…they got another job.
Erica — I agree. Like with the acting business, in comics there are very few haves compared the masses of have-nots.
In the arena of independent comics, unless one strikes a popular chord like Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird did with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, life will most likely be frugal with alternating periods of doing Ok and famine.
But even most pro freelancers working for the big companies may have long stretches where they can’t get work — which is why so many in the biz don’t stay in the biz their entire careers. Some of my contemporaries who broke into the business during the 1970s haven’t had regular comics work in a decade or more, and have been forced to either move on to other things or live like a pauper.
Comics, like acting, is not a career for those who like a regular paycheck, benefits and a modicum of job security.
Illustrators also take note: I’ve been getting a long of action from writers putting together packages for small-press/self-pub editions. The plus side is that some of these texts are really fun to work with, great ideas that the Big Six won’t touch with a stick. And the writers have fire in their bellies.
The down side is that some writers regard everyone involved in this process (besides themselves) as hobbyists (or chumps). Time-wasters, in popular parlance.
Of course, the real problem for illustrators is two-fold: no one uses interior art for adult books and even cover art is getting rare outside the genre niches. Curious how volume expands yet margins get tighter for anyone below the executive suite.
@ mahendra singh – This is an area where we can learn from Japanese “Light Novels.” Illustrations for these rarely forward the plot, but they make a pleasant addition in many cases. Even for titles that are meant to appeal to an older, sometimes adult market. (These illustrations can also be terrifyingly awful, too, mind you.)
I would love to see more illustrative art in YA and adult novels.
perhaps this explains the current GN commercial success?
The lack of visual art anywhere else in print media has made readers who enjoy illos gravitate to the GN niche.
Heartily second the wish for more illustrations. Mahendra, you should give us a list of books; I’d love (love love love) to support small-press illustrated books.
I’m not sure it accounts for the appeal (such as it is) of GN’s, though — the images in GN’s are generally so different in character from “illustrations.” I don’t know why — maybe it’s due to the need to pack them with semiotic meaning, or maybe it’s more that the split between “cartooning” and “illustration” affects both the sense of the market for GN’s and the image vocabulary that cartoonists generally draw on for their images. Illustration and design history are really underutilized as source material for cartoonists. Not to mention the fact that the narrative pleasures of illustrated books are really significantly different from those of GN’s. I think they’re different markets really, and that the market for illustrated books is just really underdeveloped and under-served.
They’re not completely divorced…Craig Thompson (who we’re discussing over in the other thread) seems pretty conversant with/linked to illustration.
They’re not concurrent either, though – and straight illustration work has an even lower profile than straight cartooning.
I think there’s more of an overlap in manga too, actually. Japan just has a much stronger tradition of illustration generally, though.
Yeah, but I think I’ve menteioned before — I’m not going to use manga as a substitute just because Western art can’t get its shit together. It’s just not enough for manga to get it right.
I met someone at SPX who was telling me the one time he spoke with Eddie Campbell, Eddie went on a rant about this, about not abandoning the Western tradition. If I’d known that before Matthias’ interview I’d have asked him to ask EC about it, ’cause now I’m curious!
I wasn’t really saying it should be a substitute; I just think it’s an interesting comparison.
I think a big part of it is that mainstream comics don’t owe a lot to the illustration tradition, or don’t use it very effectively (that’s not where Kirby or Ditko were coming from, really — Eisner yes, but his influence on the mainstream is pretty limited.) At the same time, the most successful lit comics look more to newspaper strips like Peanuts and Nancy, which also were more cartooning than illustration. There’s more of an illustration bent in art comics, but they’re a pretty circumscribed niche.
Yeah, for whatever reason they were historically quite separate. Does anybody know the prevailing theories about why there was so little overlap?
My guess is there are no prevailing theories.
Aren’t there theories about EVERYTHING? Damn, creativity really is in crisis. ;)
OK, here’s my hypothesis: by the 1930s, books with pictures were infantalized, with comics being for boys and illustrated books being for girls and very small children (fairy tales, fables, alphabet books, battledores, etc.).
This is supported not only by the gendering of the associated literary genres, but by the fact that so many great illustrators were women:
http://femaleillustrators.blogspot.com/
http://www.ranker.com/list/famous-female-illustrators/reference
http://www.ortakales.com/illustrators/
This gendering wasn’t true in the 19th century, when there was more illustration period and books with pictures overall were less infantalized, but it became more common as books with pictures became increasingly associated with the period of life during which gendering is taught and as comic books grew in popularity. Gendered things tend to separate, so illustration and comics grew further apart, keeping some of the residual overlap from before the infantalization and from the various vague efforts to make the forms gender-diverse (i.e., romance comics, Boy’s Life).
Now, even though comics are shedding their gender implications, they are doing so by welcoming people who are both interested in comics and who possess female bodies, rather than by incorporating illustrated books into comics’ vocabulary. This is why the art form so often still feels as gendered as it does — because gender doesn’t really have much to do with bodies.
That seems to work fairly well; what do you do with something like editorial cartoons? They are still linked more closely to illustration than many kinds of comics, I think….
Hal Foster’s work derived directly from golden-age American illustration, and he influenced an awful lot of people. I blame the perceived disconnect between illustration and comics art (if you guys are talking about the same kind of illustration I’m thinking of–the descendants of French Realism: Pyle, Wyeth, Coll, etc.) on the damage done by High Modernism to American art education, from which we have not recovered. Art schools, even the most “traditional,” don’t teach painting and drawing like they used to. They can’t; the knowledge is just gone.
I think Pyle, Wyeth, etc. probably are a different kind of illustration from what I’m thinking of. To me, that kind of illustration was pretty much a dead end — gone by (somewhat arbitrarily) 1930. I don’t dispute that High Modernism helped push it aside, but I think the widespread contempt in comics for High Modernism causes people to overlook and ignore what replaced that “golden-age” school. The niche it filled — magazine advertising and illustrated books — was indeed occupied by “design” illustrators, who were very influenced by modernism in I think a good way, but also by the great children’s book illustrators; I linked to some of them above, but artists like Tomie de Paola, Johnny Gruelle, Fritz Wegner, Michael Hague, Hilary Knight, Leo and Diane Dillon, Enrico Arno, Troy Howell, Jim Arnosky, Trina Schart Hyman, Cyndy Szekeres, …I could run upstairs and grab the Ad Annuals and add a long list of advertising illustrators to the list as well (I’m bad with names…)
There were also mid-century pulp artists like Virgil Finlay, Ed Emshwiller, Margaret Brundage, Walter Baumhofer, Hannes Bok, Edd Cartier, and Frank R. Paul, who are surely better known within comics because of the overlapping fandoms, and who have had more influence, although fantasy illustration’s influence on comics IMO is pretty much all filtered through Frazetta. We can debate their influence on the mainstream but they certainly haven’t been metabolized by contemporary art cartoonists the way the “cartooning” tradition has been.
I think the lack of influence by these artists on the best known “alt/art cartoonists” parallels a lack of interest in the kind of writing that their art accompanied, which affects the types of narratives and narrative forms that show up in art comics. Mid-20th-century illustration, and the art forms where it appeared, are just roundly marginalized.
With that clarification, I take your point, because I haven’t heard of any of those people. (Except Tomie de Paola, who had a stranglehold on my early childhood, and Michael Hague, because of his illustrations for THE HOBBIT.)
I think the pulp artists you name in your second paragraph haven’t been, as you put it, “metabolized by contemporary art cartoonists” because of alt comics’ persistent anxiety about being associated with the superhero mainstream. Googling those names, I see a continuity with Steranko’s ’60s work; they’re speaking the same language. It’s not that that particular tradition hasn’t touched American comics at all, I think, it’s that alt-comics artists have made a deliberate effort to distance themselves from it. Which is, in some ways, the right choice, and in some ways a shame.
Caro — I don’t know about your hypothesis. I seem to remember quite a bit of illustrations inside books targeting teenaged boys well past the 1930, 1940s and even through the 1960s.
For example, I’m pretty sure N.C. Wyeth was still illustrating books aimed at teenage boys well into the 1930s, such as Ivanhoe, Robin Hood, etc., and some of the earlier stuff he illustrated, such as the “My Book House” series, was in print well through the 1940s, as I recall.
And I’m also pretty sure the popular 1930s magazine “Open Road for Boys” had illustrations for some of its prose fiction/non-fiction stories. The same goes for the magazine “Boys Life,” which was using similar illustrations at least through the 1960s.
Edgar Rice Burroughs hardcovers published through at least the late 1930s had covers and interior illustration(s) by J. Allen St. John. I think some/most of the Lone Ranger books published in the 1930s and 1940s also had interior illustrations.
I’m sure there are many more examples, but those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
Just a side note: One of my favorite finds over the years was nice copies of the Random House “Step-up Books” series published in the late 1950s and early 1960s. These American history-related books for pre-teens and teens were profusely illustrated a variety of illustrators, but I keyed on the books illustrated by former EC artists such as Jack Davis, John Severin, George Evans, and Angelo Torres. I wish I knew the back-story about this series, as I find it very unusual that this many ex-EC artists would be in one “non-comics” place at one general point in time.
Right, there’s a lot of general stylistic overlap between pulp illustrations and mainstream comics — although I think there’s also a lot of distinction in the weeds, and definitely a distinction in the function of the illustrations in the two contexts.
But I also think that it is a failure of “art” in art comics that they have not processed the style and transformed it. It speaks to the limitations of visual style as a differentiator and to the flexibility of visual style in the hands of a critical intelligence; distinguishing oneself from mainstream comics by rejecting illustration misses the most important point about mainstream comics. What’s wrong with them isn’t how they look: it’s what they have (or don’t have) to say — about women, about narrative, about the world.
Russ, may be. 1930 was pretty arbitrary and probably is too early. I didn’t read a lot of books for teenaged boys when I was a kid! I think most of N.C. Wyeth’s work was in the teens and ’20s, though; I think he always thought of it as “selling out” and by the ’30s, once his work was being bought for museums, he tried not to do commercial work unless he really needed the money.
That’s a really interesting question about those Random House books…I don’t find it odd that they were doing non-comics work; that seems pretty common. Commercial illustration work was well-paying and prestigious and I think most artists sought it when they could get it. But if they migrated en masse from EC to RH, I’d be real curious to know how that came about…
“What’s wrong with them isn’t how they look: it’s what they have (or don’t have) to say — about women, about narrative, about the world.”
Nicely put. (Although sometimes it is how they look… I have no particular objection to Catwoman having sex with Batman, but I have many, many objections to the way Guillem March drew it.)
Thanks. :)
Very true, though — I was intending “how they look” to mean just the technical elements accreted into style, independent of what is represented or how. The way Catwoman is drawn is very much “saying” something…