Category: Entertainment

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On Requesting Cover Blurbs

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This article was cross-posted to ChroniclerSaga.com

Probably one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve done during this whole publishing process is send out requests for cover blurbs to several writers and artists I admire. I’ve been ten-fold more anxious about these requests than I ever was about querying agents, because the result is more direct and tangible, and is tied more directly to an appraisal of the quality of my work – by people whose work inspires me.

I’ve read a lot of horror stories about self-published authors contacting others for blurbs and being complete fuck-sticks about it. Making demands rather than requests, getting pissy at rejections or lack of response, and just being general asshats about it. Amongst the many things that baffle me about how some authors choose to handle their publicity, this attitude makes absolutely no sense to me.

Having a chip on your shoulder about cover blurb requests serves no purpose. Another author is under exactly zero obligation to endorse your work. What I originally wanted to say here was “You need them more than they need you”, but that’s such a monumental understatement that it just doesn’t fly. More accurately: “You need them… and who the fuck are you again?”

As a self-published author, requesting a cover blurb is not a two-way street. Another author gains nothing by having their name appear on your book cover or sale page. A blurb is like a literary remora, swimming along on the belly of the Bestselling Author Shark, catching all the half-chewed publicity bits that fall out of that author’s popularity maw. While not entirely parasitic, it ain’t exactly symbiotic, either.

It’s hard (at least, it was for me) to find the right balance for requests; to be respectful without coming across fawning, urgent without being demanding. I’m not the type of person who can fanboy all over my favorite author’s shoes; I try to be complimentary without being slavish. It’s actually a quality that has prevented me from capitalizing on opportunities to get to know some of these people, because I wasn’t just constantly in their faces at cons or on social media. That’s just not how I’m wired.

So it’s a weird gray area one needs to tread in order to do this right. Approaching another author as though you should be the center of their world, even for a minute amount of time, is just asinine. As a fledgling author myself, I am keenly aware of the amount of work and time I have to put into my own writing and promotion, so it’s easy to assume that I can just multiply that by five for an established author.

On top of it all, it’s most important to keep your expectations in check (I, personally, have none). The requester doesn’t have any right to expectations. Remember that whole one-way-street thing? I’m sure I’d be disappointed if I never received any responses, but one must reign that reaction into only mild disappointment. Getting angry over rejections is the path to the dark side. Wallowing through a pit of disappointment and misery only to build a shell of self-aggrandizing indignation is just a horseshit way to go about anything in life, much less trying to get your favorite authors to read your work.

And so, I wait. Receiving a blurb from any of the people from whom I’ve requested would be like my birthday and Christmas all rolled into one, but not receiving one would be… well… a Tuesday. I feel like that’s the best possible outlook: don’t let the lows get too low, but let the highs launch like a sixteen-pounder on New Year’s. And, above all, don’t be a dick.

CONSTRUCT releases on September 18th on Amazon, Kobo, and Barnes & Noble.

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Formatting, and All That Jazz

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I cross-posted this article at ChroniclerSaga.com.

I am completely OCD about quality. Sometimes, that can be a bad thing. I have trouble releasing things I’m working on, especially artistic works. I’m fairly positive that this trait is what pulled me away from being an illustrator; I was never, ever satisfied with things I’d draw, and couldn’t accept the flaws in my work. When writing CONSTRUCT, this manifested itself in seven full drafts comprised of a ton of interim revisions. Had to be done.

Typos, bad formatting, terrible covers… ugh. Seeing that an author or a publisher has put absolutely minimal effort into their book’s aesthetic is off-putting, to say the least. A bit more can be forgiven in the case of self-published authors; it’s hard enough just jumping through the hoops to get the book released. But to see a minimally-formatted, slap-dash eBook from a major publisher is in-fucking-furiating.

kindle_screenshot_01The various distributors of eBooks have built systems that make it extremely easy to release your prose to the world. In developing a system centered on ease, however, they’ve sacrificed aesthetics. For the vast majority of self-published authors – and, for that matter, most big publishers translating physical copy to digital – that doesn’t matter. Ease is all that counts, and as long as the text is readable, who gives a damn how it looks?

I DO.

First and foremost, I wanted a traditional cover for my novel. The rise of Photoshopped stock images on book covers makes me die inside a little, especially for fantasy novels. I grew up on covers by Vallejo and the Hildebrandts, so I knew I’d never be satisfied with a $30 stock cover design or a Photoshop disaster. As you can see in the cover reveal I posted a couple of weeks ago, my cover artist Carmen absolutely nailed the artwork for this book, and I couldn’t be happier.

Like I said, I’m a quality nut. Once I’d made the decision to self-pub, I did a ton of research on eBook formatting, and how your formatting is affected by the various processing software provided by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and others. The almost-universal opinion of the output of these services hovers somewhere around “Meh. It works, I guess.” But even with that feedback, many self-published authors see the output of those processors and just throw up their hands, giving in to whatever minor victories they can eke out of a shitty system.

kindle_screenshot_02I didn’t want to be hamstrung by what those companies could provide, so I delved into the process of doing the formatting myself. Details, details, details. I learned how to convert a manuscript on my own, using an open source eBook management program called Calibre. Even the output from Calibre was mediocre, mostly because it requires a ton of in-depth knowledge of Calibre’s settings and features, and how they interact with the input file. I was able to get a passable result, but nothing special. I began looking for a way to do my own tweaks. I have a reasonable knowledge of HTML and CSS, and eBooks are pretty much just self-contained HTML files. I found an eBook WYSIWYG editor called Sigil, and I was off to the races.

Sigil allowed me to alter the book at the code level, and I was in heaven. I was able to futz with every single little detail, burying myself in the minutia. Everything from the placement of chapter headings to indents to line spacing to the horizontal rule at the beginning of every chapter. I refined and tinkered the living shit out of the code for this book, and I think it shows in the finished product. On top of satisfying my OCD, it was just plain fun.

How a book looks when you’re reading is important. Typos and bad formatting detract from the reading experience. Everything about a book should melt into the background except for the words on the page, and every time you run across a misspelled word or an awkward paragraph break, it pulls you out of the immersion. Even if readers don’t actively notice the work I put into the formatting, I’ll be happy if they just don’t notice the formatting at all.

If it’s invisible, I’ve done my job.

CONSTRUCT, Book I of The Chronicler Saga, releases on September 18th for Kindle, Nook, and Kobo.

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Editing Is Not Adversarial

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This article has been cross-posted to ChroniclerSaga.com.

A couple of weeks ago, the hashtag #EditorAppreciationDay started on Twitter. It primarily centered around comic book editors at first, either having been a direct response to this article on Medium.com (which was originally titled “Why Image Comics Needs To Stop Demonizing Editors Now”) or simply having fortuitous timing. From my standpoint, the article is rather absurd; a blatantly knee-jerk reaction from an editor who was obviously wound up and poised to spew that response at his earliest opportunity.

But the article – primarily in its knee-jerk nature – serves to illustrate a related, but slightly different, point: Enough arrogant, uneducated douchewaffles shit on editors that many of them have built up the same sort of auto-spew defense system which sent Mr. Kwanza on his tirade (I call it a tirade more due to the lack of inciting incident than the body of the espoused sentiment).

I encountered this issue most poignantly when I posted a comment on Chuck Wendig’s blog over at Terribleminds.com a few months ago. The discussion was about self-publishing, and the comments turned toward the subject of editing. Chuck made a comment about being able to find inexpensive editing services, or possibly finding editors who will trade their services. When I asked if he knew where I might find editors within my price range, another commenter butted in with the following:

“By editing, are we talking book doctors, or proofreaders? Frankly, if you need someone else to tell your story, you aren’t much of an author in my opinion. Nobody went back over Pcaso’s work and fixed his brush strokes. Indies may not be masters, but they should be able tomprovide abuyabke product on their own or they’re not very independant in my mind.”

[All errors in the above text are in the original post. Oh, the irony.]

Guys like this, unfortunately, are the people who put editors like Kwanza on the hyper-defensive. The arrogance of a stance like this is staggering, and is shared by far too many independent authors. The “gatekeeper” narrative has been threaded through so much of the self-publishing community that many authors have wrong-headedly learned to take the idea of editing as an affront to their creative freedom. As a lifelong artist – in some vein or another – I’m baffled by this attitude.

Any artist worth their salt will tell you everyone suffers from “art-blindness”. You work on a piece for so long – could be a sculpture or a painting or a manuscript – you become blind to many of its faults. For every one you catch, two will slip past, because you’ve been staring at the thing so damned much everything just seems normal, even if it’s not.

Before I sent my manuscript to beta readers, a friend of mine did a pretty extensive proofread, and tore it apart. When I sent the 3rd draft to beta readers, they tore it up, too; they found all kinds of issues. When I finished the post-beta-read revision – the 4th draft – I sent it off to my story editor, and she tore it up. The story edit resulted in my 5th draft, and I did a 6th draft before sending it off to the copyeditor, because I’m anal. The copyeditor tore it up.

Seven extra pairs of eyes on my manuscript, and every single one of them found faults. And not faults I would consider some sort of subversion of my creative vision (whatever the fuck that means), but faults causing me to say to myself “Holy shit, I can’t believe I missed that.” My story editor, Annetta Ribken, not only helped me unify the language in my dialogue and shave away excessive prose (I’m a wordy bitch), but she found weak spots in my plot which, had they been left in place, did a disservice to the rest of the story.

See, writing a book is hard. It requires constant, relentless critical thinking, and sometimes you’re not on your A-game. There were points in my plot even I felt were weak, but after cranking out 130,000 words and revising them three times, I looked at those passages as “good enough”. Until Annetta got ahold of it. When someone else looks at a piece of art you’ve decided is “good enough” and, in a professional capacity, tells you “It’s not good enough.”, you damned well best take note.

It’s not to say Annetta and I didn’t disagree sometimes. There were points of contention I argued for. There were changes she suggested I didn’t make. But in every single case, when she told me something needed changing, I had to argue with myself long before I started arguing with her. I had to take a critical look at every single edit and say “Is this up to my standards?” In most cases, I had to agree it was not, and had to look within myself to find a way to elevate it.

The same was true of my copyeditor, Jennifer Wingard. I learned more about the mechanics of prose from her copyediting passes than through anything else I’d done over the two years I spent writing the manuscript. I learned what my crutch words were (“that” and “was” need to be burned with fire), I learned the repetitive mistakes I make in sentence construction, and I learned no matter how many times I read over the same manuscript, I’m never going to find every extra space or misplaced quote or incorrect punctuation. I learned that “blonde” has a very specific meaning, different from “blond” (while seemingly basic, I had no idea).

And yet, through both of these collaborations, I never once felt like I wasn’t in control of my manuscript. At no point did the editing process feel as though either of my editors were trying to steer my story or fuck with my voice. You know why? Because that’s the whole point of being an editor. They’re there to make your work better – to make it more you. A good editor looks at your prose and works with you to find ways to solidify it without tinkering with what makes it yours.

And I learned so much. Probably the most amazing thing about working with these two wonderful women: I markedly improved my knowledge and execution of my craft because of these collaborations. There is no better way to become a better writer than to have a professional constructively deconstruct your prose. Which is why it’s such a damned shame there are so many authors out there with such an adversarial view of editing and, by extension, so many editors who’ve built this ablative armor against even the smallest hint of a slight against their profession.

Editing is not subversive or adversarial. If it is, you either a) found a really god-awful editor, or b) desperately need to get your ego in check. In most cases, it’s probably the latter.

If you’re in need of a substantive story edit, check out Annetta Ribken over at www.wordwebbing.com. Her edits are geared toward continuity and plot, and are well worth your time.

For a hardcore mechanical copyedit, get in touch with Jennifer Wingard at www.theindependentpen.com. You’re probably doing everything wrong, and she’ll show you how to do it right.

I highly recommend the services of both. They had a phenomenal impact on CONSTRUCT, and I couldn’t be happier with the result.

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Uggghhh… BOOK… Fgngn

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I… wow. I am… ffffff… In… jesus… I have a… UUUUUUUUUU…

That’s about how I feel right now. For the last year and a half, I’ve been single-mindedly occupied with pulling together my first novel, CONSTRUCT. I finished writing it in 2013, finished revising it later that year, and have spent the last 6 months working with two editors and a cover artist to bring the whole thing to fruition.

During that process I’ve also been building a website, setting up publishing accounts on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Smashwords, registering ISBNs, setting up a bank account, and pulling together the business side of getting it released into readers’ hands.

And it’s finally all coming together.

Tomorrow – August 12th, 2014 – I’ll be launching the website with my release date announcement and cover reveal. It’s a real thing now. It’s not just a time-sink, or a hobby, or a diversion anymore. It’s a full-fledged novel. A real, live book that people can read and review and shit all over on the internet. And I’m still having trouble believing that it’s anything other than a stupid personal project that’ll never see the light of day.

But tomorrow’s the day that I commit to making it real.

I just… I mean… fuguuugugug… It’s… hnnnnnnnh… I can’t…

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Text Is Locked on Construct

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Well, it’s finally done. Back in 2013, I wrote a post about how I finished writing a whole book. Today, after seven full drafts encompassing numerous major revisions and a pruning of over 18,000 words, the text for my debut novel CONSTRUCT is locked down. Finalized. Gone Gold. Finito. DONE.

I started writing CONSTRUCT in December of 2010, about a year after the death of my father. The death of my parents within three years of one another was a rough reminder of how quickly our time on earth can come to an end. After spending many years with the core idea of CONSTRUCT bouncing around in my brain, I decided to finally get it out of my head and down on paper. Well, into Word, anyway.

I only had about 8,000 words into it before things stalled in 2011. I was still motivated to continue, but wasn’t making the proper time to get it out the door. After seeing several people I know participating in that year’s NaNoWriMo, I decided to use their writing sprint rules to force myself into adding on to it, fleshing out my ideas.

It was a success. The goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000 word novel, front to back, entirely within the month of November. I didn’t quite follow the rules – I was adding on to a longer piece instead of creating a standalone – but the “competition” did drive me to add over 48,000 words that month, and put myself in a position where I could no longer reasonably just give up. I’d come too far.

It took me quite a while to finish the book. At about 70,000 words, I found I’d written myself into a corner, which forced a pretty major re-write. I eliminated a character, changed another, and killed an entire potential plotline. It was a rough re-write but it put me back on track, and I was moving forward again in no time.

I spent the better part of 2012 writing at a pretty languid pace, writing when inspiration came to me and when time permitted rather than forcing myself into a schedule. While it was a leisurely way to get it done, it didn’t force any discipline on me, and I let other things intrude on thought-space I should have been applying to the novel.

It was 2012, and the writing done within it, that solidified my desire to keep writing; the realization of my potential to make a real go at getting this story into the hands of readers, and extending it into the series I always knew I wanted it to be. I wanted to devote myself to it. My job very kindly obliged my desires by wearing on me, becoming more frustration than fun. So, after some long discussions with my wife and hand wringing and anxiety, I left my long-time posting at Nintendo to pursue writing full-time at the end of February, 2013.

On March 13th, I finished the first draft.

Looking back on it now, it’s pretty fucking terrible. But that’s what revisions are for. By August I had finished the 3rd draft, and after a few months in the hands of beta readers, I pumped out a 4th draft in January of this year. I shopped around for editors and, upon finding one within my price range, spent two weeks fixing up the 5th draft before sending it off. Which, I know, is kind of like cleaning up your house before the maid service shows up, but that’s just the way I roll.

The 5th draft went into the hands of Annetta Ribken, an independent developmental editor over at Wordwebbing.com. She took some hard swipes at the story I’d written, and helped hack into the bits where I’d faltered. There were so many places where I’d been vague, or just stupid, or worse: lazy. She never let me be lazy. Annetta helped me to clarify the bits that needed clarification, and forced me to re-work areas that I should never have let go. Places where I’d said “Bah, whatever. This’ll be fine.” were the exact spots she pointed out, saying “Come on. You can do better.” And, with her help, I think I really did.

After four passes with Annetta, the story locked in place, the book went to Jennifer Wingard at TheIndependentPen.com for the copyedit. I learned more about the technical bits of this craft from her editing pass than I think I did over the entire two previous years of actual writing. I finally learned how passive voice manifests itself in my writing, and I learned how that and was are crutch words for me that I need to burn with fire. More clarifying, more trimming, a few more re-writes.

These two women have had a humongous impact on my first novel. The first draft is hard for me to read now. It’s hard for me to imagine that at one point, those words came through my keyboard and I thought they were good. Annetta and Jennifer not only showed me where I was wrong in that assessment, but showed me that I’m capable of doing better, and for that I can’t thank them enough.

And now, it’s done. Almost four years and seven drafts later, my debut novel is a wrap.

Now the real work begins.

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Image Comics’ Perfect Hardcovers

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revival_cover_inlineI just received my copy of the Revival Deluxe Edition hardcover in the mail, and it has let me to this major conclusion: this is the perfect way to read comics.

Now, when I say “perfect”, of course I mean “perfect for me”. Other people have other tastes, like floppies or digital or Absolute editions. But for me, Image Comics has pretty much hit the nail on the head with their standard hardcover book design. What are the elements that make these books perfect?

Ten to twelve Issues. This is a perfect number. Most modern comic books run in 5-6 issue story arcs nowadays, especially at non-Big-2 companies like Image and Oni. A 12-issue hardcover trade usually covers two story arcs, roughly a year of the book. It’s a perfect slice for a day or two of reading, and makes it easy to have an annual release schedule for hardcovers. Image’s books bear this out with long-running series like The Walking Dead and Invincible.

No dustjackets. I’m an outspoken opponent of dustjackets on pretty much any book. Ostensibly, they’re designed to “protect” the underlying book by taking damage in lieu of the actual cover. That’s totally fine if I’m in 5th grade and my dustjackets are hand-made from a grocery bag. But from a collector’s standpoint, the dustjackets are just another component that contributes to the overall condition and can become damaged, and much more easily than the actual hardcover of a trade. On top of that, it they’re awkward and cumbersome when trying to read, so I end up just taking them off when reading anyway. If the dustjacket was supposed to protect against fingerprints, the purpose is already defeated. TL;DR version: fuck dustjackets.

Consistent spine and cover design. I cannot stress enough how important this is for OCD comic book collectors like me. When I’ve shelved a long-running series, I absolutely Can. Not. Stand. when the spine design changes. It looks so damned sloppy. Marvel and DC are terrible culprits in the inconsistent spine design arena. Image, on the other hand, has kept the cover design and spine design for long-running series identical, even if it might not be the best (as is the case with Invincible). And that’s all that matters to me. I don’t give a flying fuck if the newer covers are more appealing to focus groups or fit some change of theme – just keep them the same.

$30 to $35 cover price. What a spectacular price for what you get. The overall price of the trade ends up being cheaper than floppies, and in return you get (in my opinion) more value in a sturdy, looks-awesome-on-a-bookshelf hardcover. I don’t have to bag-and-board it, and they’re more durable than most softcover trades (I find a lot of softcovers to have less-than-stellar quality control). Most hardcovers of this size fall into this price point, with a few exceptions like the 100 Bullets Deluxe Editions, which clocked in at $50 a pop. Marvel seems to have moved toward releasing 5-6 issue hardcovers (like All-New X-Men) for $25. Half the content for 85% of the price? Yeowch. And yes, I know they’re cheaper on Amazon, but we’re discussing SRP’s here.

fear_agent_cover_inlineAll of these factors lead to my perfect reading conditions. Twelve issue hardcovers are easy to handle and read, unlike Absolute editions or Omnibi. While I absolutely LOVE the production design on books like my Fear Agent Library Editions or The Sixth Gun Gunslinger Edition, their sheer size does make them a bit hard to handle. The lack of dustjackets means I get a beautifully designed cover (the cover on this Revival book is *fantastic*) without the pain-in-the-ass of having to fumble with or outright remove an annoying wrapper. And at these prices, why would I want to pay $40 to $48 for the floppies, or even similar prices for softcovers, especially when even my comic shop gives a decent discount off of cover on trades?

Image just nails it. Other companies have followed suit in design, but not in price: IDW’s collection of The Cape looked spectacular, but was $50; the same goes for Icon’s Criminal collections. I wish that everyone would adopt the same size, style, and price as Image’s hardcover collections, because if they did, I would never read comics any other way.

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Floppies, Trade-Waiting, and Guilt

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For the last few months, I’ve been in the midst of a dilemma.

I’m a huge comic book fan. I read a ton of books – almost all of which come from Image right now. I have a list of subscriptions at my local comic shop, and about every six months or so, I’ll pick up a hardcover trade collecting the very issues I subscribe to. With the number of books I read and like, I’m usually picking up a couple of trades every month, and that’s not including back-catalog stuff that comes out in a format I like.

It’s getting expensive. Pretty much everything I read now has a $3.99 cover price. And now, with the July solicits from Marvel, a number of their books are pushing upward to a $4.99 cover price. If this price increase takes hold on a wide scale, it will officially price me out of buying single comic issues.

My dilemma, though, is trying to figure out whether that’s actually a problem or not.

Over the last several years of hosting the Trade Secrets Podcast, my on- and off-air conversations with my cohorts on the show have taught me a lot about myself as a comic consumer. One of the biggest revelations is that I don’t really enjoy consuming comics in serial form. If it were up to me, monthly comics wouldn’t exist, and everything would be a 12-issue hardcover collection.

But see, the business model of the comic book industry makes that untenable. Like ratings for a TV show, a comic book’s success or failure is solely determined by monthly sales. If a book doesn’t sell enough copies, it gets canned, which means that it’s even less likely that the hardcover trades I love so much will even get produced. And, even worse, a canceled book never gets to finish telling the story that it set out to tell.

The entire industry, from publisher to distributor to local comic shop, is based around these monthly sales. I can get a discount at my LCS as long as I maintain a certain number of monthly subscriptions, which helps me when I want to buy trades. A 20% discount on trades keeps my comic shop competitive with Amazon, on most accounts, and when all things break equal I’d rather support my shop.

The issue (ha ha) is that I don’t want to get singles anymore. My problem with floppies is three-fold: 1) they’re fucking expensive – I currently spend about $60 a month on single issues, and that total has been as high as $150+, 2) I’m effectively getting double-dipped by buying single issues and then invariably buying a hardcover collection, and 3) it’s just not the way I like to consume the stories anymore.

Why is it a problem? Because the entire industry and comic community is built around making me feel guilty for not buying individual issues. I’m inundated with tales of how my favorite book will get canceled if I don’t buy it monthly, and how my comic shop relies on those monthly sales and orders to stay afloat. I’ve seen fans and creators alike use the term “trade-waiter” as a pejorative.

Not only this, but the business model at the LCS level doesn’t support – from a financial perspective – my desire to read books in trade form. If I were to cancel my subscription box, I’d lose most (maybe all?) of my discount on other items – namely trades. I can’t set up a subscription box solely for trades (holy hell that would be fucking fantastic). So, by not subscribing to the floppies, my comic shop is basically driving me to buy my trades on Amazon or CheapGraphicNovels, where I can get a 30%-50% discount.

That’s nothing to sneeze at. The average hardcover – my preferred format – costs me between $30 and $50. Getting $8-$10 off of a $30 trade when I’m buying 2 or 3 a month rounds out to a huge cost savings for me in the long run. And, if I’m not getting double-dipped anymore by being forced to buy floppies, I end up saving myself – quite literally – over $1,000 a year.

But that’s not what the industry wants me to do, and even though comic companies make a significantly heftier margin on trades than monthlies, the majority of the community would have me believe that the industry would fall apart if everyone wanted to consume comics the way I do. Hence the guilt-trip.

On the one hand, I absolutely love my comic shop. I love buying things from them, I adore the people who work there, and I really enjoy the time I spend there. On the other hand, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to afford the associated cost of maintaining the industry status-quo. I’m broke, and single issues are just too damned expensive for me now.

And I think I’ve reached a breaking point. All the guilt is making me tired, and I’ve realized that I don’t like feeling this way. When I think about all the parts of being a comic fan – from reading and talking about comics to attending conventions to spending time at my comic shop – I’ve come to the conclusion that the only part that’s massively important to me are the stories. I want to read comics, and I want to read them my way – which, for me, means shifting to trade-only consumption.

I’m not sure when I’ll pull the trigger on changing my buying habits. I’ve been babbling about it for months, but there are still several books that I’m sort of “in the middle of” when it comes to individual issues, and I don’t want to give up on them yet. But soon, it’ll be time to give up on floppies, and leave that side of the industry to other fans.

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Comic Conventions and ECCC

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My first experience at a comic book convention was in Portland, Oregon, within a few weeks of the launch of Image Comics. The show took place in a gutted department store at one end of a mall, and five of the six Image founders were in attendance (they were sans Erik Larsen). I can trace my hardcore comic fandom directly to that show, and to my overwhelmingly positive experiences meeting Jim Lee, Todd McFarlane, and Marc Silvestri. Spawn #1 had not yet released but I was a huge fan of McFarlane’s Spider-Man, and when 13-year-old me got to tell him so, he actually pulled me behind his signing table and talked with me for 15 minutes about comics, the Blazers, and Spidey. It was a formative moment for me.

In the late-80’s and early-90’s, meeting creators from your favorite Marvel and DC books was not an easy endeavor. The guys in charge of some of the most iconic characters of all time were cloistered and egomaniacal (from a fan’s perspective), and experiences like my moment with Todd McFarlane were almost impossible to track down. Back then, when San Diego Comicon was still actually about comics, creators never really seemed to be encouraged to engage their fans on a personal level. Even this experience, I believe, was only possible because the founders of Image were already trying to change how the industry worked.

I began to understand why these experiences were unavailable during a trip to a comic book convention at Seattle Center when I was in high-school, in (I think) 1994. It was a tiny show, occupying only two rooms, with a smattering of artists and writers around the edges signing autographs. I had sketches done by Dan Norton and Joe Benitez, milled around the back issue bins, and finally – after waiting what seemed like forever – got to meet and get a signature from Walt Simonson.

As I neared the front of the line, it was obvious that several of the people in front of me were comics dealers. Every one of them had stacks upon stacks of comics for signing, including multiple copies of the same book, and manners were nonexistent. Mr. Simonson was visibly frustrated. The straw broke the camel’s back with the guy in front of me, who plopped down a stack of easily fifty-plus books, and began smarming at Mr. Simonson as though the two of them were on the golf links together.

In one of the most memorable moments of my life, Walt Simonson stared this guy down as he jabbered, stopped him from talking with a raised hand, and said “Excuse me. When did I give you leave to address me in the familiar?” He then took the top book off of this guy’s stack, signed it, replaced it, slid the entire rest of the stack to the side, and waived me up to get his signature.

This, for me, encapsulated everything that was wrong with the comics industry in the 90’s. At age 16, that moment changed how I looked at the books I bought and read. Over the next couple of months I completely changed my buying habits, shifting my entire mentality away from seeing comics as collectibles, and seeing them now as entertainment media.

At all the comic book conventions I had attended throughout the 90’s, I walked away with maybe 15 signed books. At that time, conventions that weren’t NYCC or SDCC were dealer’s shows, populated entirely by comic book shops and collectors plying their wares, with the occasional small group of creators as a draw for fans to come into a giant comic book flea market. I had very few positive experiences with creators after the one with Todd McFarlane, mostly because the creators I was meeting desperately wanted to be interacting with fans, and most of their interaction ended up being with people trying to make a quick buck.

We’re going to skip a few years, because in 1996 the vast majority of my comic book collection burned up in an apartment fire, and I bailed on comics entirely until the middle of 2002. Once I was back into comics, I found a dearth of local comic book conventions. I’d been to a few smaller ones like the Walt Simonson was at, but nothing really compared in scale to the larger ones in New York, Chicago, or San Diego. Talent didn’t really come up this way, so I pretty much gave up on the idea of getting anything signed again or interacting with my favorite creators in any meaningful way.

Until Emerald City Comicon came along.

I didn’t attend the first few years of the current incarnation of ECCC. They were held at the Qwest Field Event Center, and I didn’t really hold out much hope for them being any different than the shows at Seattle Center had been. The first time I attended was in 2008, the first year they held the show at the Washington State Convention Center, the same venue where PAX Prime is held. They occupied only two halls in the WSCC, and one of those halls was solely for the queue. In spite of the (comparatively) small size, one of the things that struck me about ECCC was the atmosphere.

Around half, if not more, of the space they occupied was dedicated to Artist’s Alley. Yes, there were exhibitors in the hall – all the local comic shops were there, a couple of video game dealers, and small booths for Dark Horse and Image – but the real focus, it seemed, was on small tables where creators could interact with fans. Due to my prior experiences, I was really wary of this setup. I expected a bunch of money-grabbing dealers surfing around tables full of grumpy creators who just wanted to go home. Nothing could’ve been further from the truth.

Fans were respectful and engaged, and because of that creators were all in fantastic moods. I met and spoke with Bill Willingham for the first time, having only just begun reading Fables. I had started collecting the Invincible hardcovers, and got to chat with both Ryan Ottley and Robert Kirkman. I was introduced to Greg Rucka’s work at that show. It was the most fantastic comic-book convention experience I’d had since I was 13 years old.

The size of the show worried me at the time. Having seen so many other shows come and go in the Pacific Northwest, I was worried that ECCC just wouldn’t last, and that it was as big as it would ever get. The shows in 2009 and 2010 were about the same size, but the attendance had doubled, and blew my expectations right out of the water. This show was here to stay.

In 2011 I’d been doing the After The Fact podcast for about two years, and decided I wanted to do a comic book podcast using the same format. I cemented the plan after recruiting Andy Podell, whom I worked with at the time, to be the co-host. Andy was already a pretty regular cast member on ATFP, so when I say “recruited” I mean that I walked up and said “Wanna do a comic book p-“ and he’d said yes before I ever finished the sentence.

We recorded Episode 0 of Trade Secrets at ECCC 2011, and the con has been an integral part of our show ever since. After that first year we decided to get a table at the show, an investment that has been paying dividends ever since. I’m not gonna lie – I’d pay for this Artist’s Alley table every single year for the sole purpose of having a designated place to sit at the convention.

Emerald City Comicon has exploded in size since I first attended in 2008. The attendance has grown from 10,000 to almost 70,000 in that time, and the physical floor space has increased from one part of one hall to the entire WCCC and a few surrounding hotels. And yet, in all that growth, the convention has still maintained that amazing atmosphere, a feeling that encourages one-on-one interaction between comic book fans and the creators of the work we love so much. Yeah, there are more exhibitors and media guests, but more than half the show floor is still occupied by simple six-food Artist’s Alley tables where some of the biggest names in the industry still sit down and sign books and take duck-face selfies with people who love their work (I’m lookin’ at you, Kelly Sue).

This convention is directly responsible for our continued devotion to Trade Secrets. We’ve developed relationships with several creators whom we’ve had on the show, mostly at ECCC. Even outside of Trade Secrets, I’ve had the chance to have some absolutely lovely conversations with some of my favorite people in the industry. And you just won’t find that kind of interaction anywhere else (especially not at SDCC).

I know, I know. Now I’m gushing. But let me be frank here for a minute:

Comic book conventions, when I was growing up, were not positive experiences (for the most part). I’ve had terrible run-ins with creators, dealers, and other fans, and some of the shows I attended were downright scummy. With the exception of that one experience with the Image creators, the majority of my con experiences were awful – and even at that show the good was balanced by a terrible run-in with Rob Leifeld that sparked enmity in me that stands to this day.

For me, Emerald City Comicon has turned that all around. In the last few years I’ve managed to get well over a hundred signatures from my favorite creators, and every single one of those came with a personal experience, if not a longer conversation, with that person. It’s one of the most fantastic shows in the industry, and one that has given me experiences I’ll never, ever forget.

Thanks, ECCC. See you next year.

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The Perfect Reading Experience

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Since the inception of ebooks, there has been an ongoing argument about the value of print in the experience of reading. I’ve had many a discussion and even written about my opinions on the matter, so I’m not going to repeat myself.

I read in bed, almost every single night. It’s not the only place I read, but it’s the most frequent. Many times my wife will want to go to sleep before me, so I’ll have to turn off all of the room lights and read in the dark, which isn’t a problem because I read on a Kindle Paperwhite. Over the last few months, I’ve finally realized that this is, without question, my perfect reading experience.

kindle_paperwhite_dark_inlineI’m a huge movie buff. I love seeing movies in theaters, and even now have a theater room in my home. Watching a movie on a huge screen in a darkened room is one of the most immersive entertainment experiences available. That rectangle of light draws you in to tell you a story, the blackness around you blotting out all other stimuli.

And that’s exactly how I feel about my Kindle. With all the lights off and that soft white glow surrounding the words on my Paperwhite’s screen, I feel more immersed in the books I read than I ever have. I don’t have to have a lamp on, or a book light throwing shadows around the whole room. I’m free to darken my surroundings and go into sensory deprivation mode, drawing all of my focus into that little rectangle of light where a story plays out before my eyes.

It’s fucking perfect.

The experience isn’t limited to the Kindle, so please don’t take this as brand-shilling – I just happen to own Amazon’s e-reader rather than a Nook or a Kobo. For any of the front-lit e-readers (or tablets, if that’s the way you go), the experience would be the same. And it’s an experience you can’t get any other way.

External lights have come close – everyone who reads a lot has spent at least one night as a kid under a blanket-tent with a flashlight or book light – but it’s still not quite the same. That complete dampening of surrounding light, and the screen carved out of the darkness in front of you is the absolute finest way to be immersed in a book, eschewing all distraction.

There is just no better way to read.

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Reader Perception And Quality Control

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I recently read a couple of posts on Chuck Wendig’s blog over at TerribleMinds regarding a self-published author’s responsibility for the quality of the work they publish. For your reading pleasure, the whole discussion started with this post on John Scalzi’s blog HERE, where he drew an analogy between the writerly life to that of a baseball player. Wendig furthered the discussion HERE and HERE.

The gist of Wendig’s point is that, while self-publishing is easy and has destroyed the barrier to entry in the publishing industry, each author who self-publishes now holds the responsibility to do right by their readers. He posits that authors should act as their own gatekeepers, and that the moment an author asks someone to pay for something they’ve written they have a responsibility to the reader – their customers – to present a professional and complete product.

I won’t further that particular discussion except to say that I couldn’t agree with him more. While I was reading through these threads another dynamic was brought into sharp focus: readers’ tendencies with regards to association of quality. Here’s what I mean:

For a moment, let’s take self-publishing out of the picture and rewind to the days where traditional publishing was just called “publishing”. If a reader suffered through a bad book – be it poorly written or unprofessionally executed – that reader associated the lack of quality with the author. Rarely (and this is demonstrated in some of the responses to Wendig’s posts, and echoed all over the internet) did a reader associate poor quality with a particular publisher or the industry as a whole. The inverse was also true: read a good book, follow the author. I can’t remember a time that I’ve ever read a fantastic novel and thought to myself “Man, that publisher really knows what they’re doing.”

Fast forward to the modern era. That dynamic I mentioned still exists with traditional publishers. While the idea of self-publishing has brought publishers in general more into the limelight, readers still don’t tend to associate good or bad quality of traditional books with the publisher or the publishing industry – the quality association still falls squarely on the author. The same cannot be said of self-published work.

When a reader buys a self-published novel and it turns out to be fantastic, that author now has a new fan. The reader associates the quality of the novel directly with the author and that association is more pertinent without a publishing house acting as middle-man. But when a reader gets ahold of a bad self-published book – again, be it poorly written, edited, and/or produced – the mentality no longer defaults to “I’m not going to buy any more of that author’s work.”, it tends to be “Fuck this self-published crap.” The onus of quality now rests on an entire segment of the industry, full of individuals who have nothing to do with one another, the best of which now get dragged down by players whose attitude is simply to dump a block of text onto Amazon without a thought to its quality.

I think that mentality originates from the idea that the traditional publishing industry, with its gatekeepers in place, has developed a reputation for at least upholding a minimum standard of quality. Readers intuitively know that – for the most part – when they pick up a book at Barnes & Noble they can expect it to have run through several editorial passes and have been proofread a few times. Please note that by “quality” I am simply referring to editorial professionalism, not the quality of the actual stories being told.

Of course, the same cannot be said of self-published work. While the barrier to entry has been razed to the ground, so has the expectation of professionalism. Without “gatekeepers” in place, no one is held to any kind of standard at all, which allows any overzealous author to take advantage of the system – of readers – to collect money for sub-par work rather than hone their craft prior to charging for it. Which is exactly Wendig’s point: Without that ingrained expectation of quality that the industry took decades to build in the minds of readers, the responsibility now rests solely on self-published authors’ shoulders to not foist snake-oil onto their customers.

I am never going to be the person to say that a writer shouldn’t be allowed to self-publish (and neither is Wendig, so please don’t assume that as my point). In fact, the ease of self-publishing is likely going to be the reason my book sees the light of day. While I don’t necessarily think that “gatekeepers” – the traditionally difficult standards of entry set by agents, acquisitions editors, and publishers – are healthy in an environment that is beginning to value creator’s rights more than it ever has, I think that publishers will morph their role into that of curators of content rather than locking all the doors and holding all the keys, and in a scenario where self-publishing digitally becomes simple and ubiquitous, it might be time for service providers and device manufacturers to take an active role in building up the quality of self-published work.

In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, the emergence of the home video game console experienced a similar issue. Atari created a console that was (comparatively) easy to program for and had almost no barriers to making games for it. Everyone from the big guys like Namco and Activision, down to programming teams of 2 guys in a basement, started making games. The result was an explosion of garbage – sometimes in the form of games that literally did not function. All of a sudden, there was a huge glut of expensive, quasi-functional trash, and no legitimate way to tell the good from the bad. Consumer confidence tanked, Atari went bankrupt, and the video game industry as a whole crashed – hard – and almost didn’t recover until a little Japanese company called Nintendo joined the fray in 1985.

Nintendo set a new standard for video game console manufacturers by providing a system that was easy to use and affordable for consumers, but simultaneously holding their publishers to a standard of quality by running every game through a battery of tests before it could be manufactured for Nintendo’s console. That system is still in place today at all the major console manufacturers, where all of them have a certification department that runs a series of tests on every single game to make sure that it adheres to a set of guidelines for usability and functionality.

These certification departments don’t judge the subjective quality of a game (if they did, we’d be blessed to never see another Petz or Babiez game again) instead simply making sure that a game functions properly, uses the correct terminology, and won’t break the console or hamper the user experience. And, in the face of a huge self-publishing boom in the video game industry, these certification departments aren’t going away – they’re adapting to the boom and working to help small video game developers publish games that never before would’ve seen the light of day.

The same model could be applied to self-published books. A company like Amazon could have a certification department full of proofreaders and copy editors whose jobs were nothing more than to comb over manuscripts and hold them to a certain level of production quality. Like the cert departments at Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, they would not comment on the quality of the stories, and they certainly wouldn’t act in a true editorial capacity (just like the cert departments don’t act as bug-testing facilities), but they would be able to identify the mechanical problems with a manuscript and have the power to reject one until it passes muster.

Granted, this would require an investment of people and funds from companies like B&N and Amazon who – at the moment – have exactly zero motivation to do so. Quality isn’t their concern, and they make their 30-70% off of every book sold whether it’s crap or not, so it behooves them to promote high quantity with a low barrier to entry.

Atari once thought the same thing.

We may never see something like that come to pass unless Amazon gets a rude awakening like Atari did, which is unlikely to happen in the modern publishing climate (at least not anytime soon). This, I think, is why publishers as curators will become the next wave of business in the publishing industry. The model that immediately jumps to mind is Image Comics.

Creator-owned comics were mostly unheard-of up until the early ‘90’s. Comic book creators, fed up with the Big 2 paying them a pittance for their work and taking their creations away from them, were looking for a new way to do business. Image Comics was formed with what was, at the time, a revolutionary idea: Let the creators keep the rights to their work. Image acts in a publishing capacity insomuch as they provide editorial support, access to printing and distribution, and a unified logo under which readers can assume a certain level of quality.

Image does, to some degree, act as gatekeepers just like Marvel and DC do, but the trade-off for creators is that they retain the rights to their creations. One of the primary drives, for authors, behind the self-publishing movement is creative control and the preservation of their rights. Image has been successful in this practice, which has been followed by other companies like Boom! Studios and MonkeyBrain, and the model seems ripe for introduction into the publishing industry.

It’s unlikely that any of the major publishers like Tor or Random Penguin would ever concede rights to new properties to their authors. The industry seems ready, however, for publishers to act less like gatekeepers and more, as I said earlier, like curators of content, sifting through the morass of self-published books to offer a middle-ground solution for authors who want to couple the benefits of unified brand clout with the flexibility of creator-ownership.

The publisher can develop a brand identity unheard of in traditional publishing, where mainstream readers can go to find works they like based not solely on the author’s brand, but also the publisher. The author retains the rights to his or her work, and can build a brand of their own with the support of a larger entity. Readers would have a way to parse creator-owned work more than just by author, finding a stable or series of stables of curated content that fits their reading tastes. It seems like a win-win-win proposal, but I’m also not a business major.

I don’t think traditional publishing is going away. Nor do I think that self-publishing is steering the industry toward some inevitable implosion. I do, however, think that new business models will emerge that incorporate the best of both worlds, and maybe with a little bit of quality control on the service-providers’ ends, we could see a more balanced renaissance in the publishing industry that serves the business, the creators, and the consumers alike.

For now, though, all a fledgling author like me can do is ride out the storm, and try desperately not to suck.