Consider Self-Publishing

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Instructions

Consider Self-Publishing

1. If you can't secure a job at a comic book publishing house or have been turned away by several editors, consider self-publishing. Self-publishing involves many non-creative aspects of comic book production, and it also requires a decent amount of start-up capital. Opting to create your own book means shifting many of the responsibilities of production (typically associated with the business side of the industry) onto the creative team. In other words, if you're planning on self-publishing, you'll have to do a lot of legwork.
   
   Before you can even think about drawing your own book, you have to come up with a feasible concept. If you've been bouncing a cool character or story around in your head for a while, start fleshing it out. If you don't have an idea handy, think back to all those wild superhero designs and make-believe situations that you concocted as a kid. The key is finding a concept that's unique, interesting and never been done before.
   
   Consider getting help from others. As diligent and hardworking as you may be, nobody can go it completely alone in this industry. Here are possible helper roles: A writer (if you're not much of a scribe yourself), an inker (if you don't ink your own stuff), a colorist, a letterer (if your budget permits you that luxury), an accountant to handle the financial matters and a lawyer to tackle legal issues like copyrights and contracts. All of this is contingent on the size of your budget.
   
   Once your support personnel are in place, you can go about creating your book. From a purely artistic point of view, this means you'll have to translate your writer's script into 32 pages of fluid, coherent artwork. Plot out each page and work your penciling magic. Then, send them to your letterer, who will fill the captions and word balloons with dialogue. The letterer will then pass the pages on to the inker, who solidifies your pencil lines and prepares the pages for color. The colorist then applies the final treatment. Put all the completed pages together, and you've got yourself a comic book.
   
   Finding printers and distributors falls on the more technical side of things--you'll have to make many important decisions, including how big a print run you want to have (10,000 copies is a standard size for a small, black-and-white book), what kind of distribution option you want (direct market vs. newsstand distribution) and how much you're willing to pay for everything.

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Resources

• Marvel Comic Books
• How to Self-Publish Your Own Comic Book
• DC Comics

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[lcworld]

on 11/4/2009 Lancescomicworld.com is launching the first “Create a Character Contest”.

The winner will have their character featured on the main page of the site and will receive a personalized autograph from the site’s founder, Chicago Bears’s Lance Briggs. The submission date for the top five characters has been extended to December 1st. T he winner will be announced on January 1st.

Take this opportunity to showcase your talent!

[eliastowne]

on 8/10/2009 If you're on the West Coast, an option is the San Gabriel Valley Comic Book Art Academy in El Monte, California. It's run by a number of pro comic creators in the area and offers a pretty extensive education on comic book art. Check it out at http://www.comicbookartacademy.com

[seanjjordan]

on 5/15/2009 Self-publishing is a whole topic unto itself, but of the advice here, I'd be careful what you trust. Printing 10,000 copies of an indy book is likely to make you go broke, especially if you're trying to sell them on your own. Standard comic books are 24, 28 or 32 pages, but only 22 pages usually have any content. Black and white books tend to sell about half of what comparable color books sell in the direct market, which in 2009 means about 500-1000 copies, total. An indy color book that is not supported with a popular license or powerful marketing campaign will probably only sell 1000-2000 of its first issue and 500-1500 of its second (depending on sales of its first). If that sounds like a lot of sales to you, consider that the break-even-point for a book that costs $10,000 to print and produce, with a cover price of $3.99, is somewhere around 5,000 copies. In today's comic book i...