vs. Stumptown 2008
264 CGs sold. Zombies was most popular, with 77. Office, surprisingly, was the runner-up with 61, beating out Pirates at 59. My unscientific observation is that people responded more to the office bit in the pitch than the zombie or pirate bit -- people might (finally) be tiring of pirates and zombies. I got the sense that some folks tuned me
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Y'know those lottery ads that have the "buying lottery tickets is not a sound investment strategy" small print? I think that "writing novels on spec is not a sound career strategy" maps tightly onto that, metaphorically. I'm done with writing work on spec. From here on out, if I write some fiction, it will be for my own pure amusement, or for advance payment.
At the risk of sounding like an Internet dork, the Flying Spaghetti Monster gave me a genuine epiphany. The FSM dude first became a web celebrity in the dark days of early 2005, and he sells out in a mere eight months, for a tidy $80K book deal. And I'm like, "what am I wasting my time for, toiling in some crappy, lonely minor league when the FSM has shown a better way?"
So, in a moment of maximum hubris, I decided that I would zen my way into novel-writing. I would go do something else, get famous there, and I'll migrate back to fiction when somebody asks me nicely to return. (and if nobody asks nicely, then just merely being famous will be a nice consolation prize.)
Thus, comics. I chose comics for these reasons:
a) I have an enormous advantage over other comics creators. I can afford to be a publisher. I am well capitalized. I can pay for good artists, good printing, nice paper, and then produce something that looks professional enough so that when I tack a profitable markup on it, I don't look like I'm ripping my readers off. I can really differentiate myself from much of my competition. This is harder to do in fiction.
b) self-publishing in comics is regarded as noble and honorable. There is no giant carcass of an industry blocking the way between me and readers. The dreadful stunted phase of comics, where Marvel and DC owned the whole works and didn't want to do anything that wasn't in spandex -- this is something that helps me hugely, today. It unleashed this thriving indie scene that has never been -- what's the opposite of unleashed? Leashed doesn't seem right. Anyway, I am totally exploiting the revolt against the past wretchedness of that industry.
c) comics are much more Internet-friendly than prose is.
d) comics are much more accessible than prose. I had a stack of CGs on my desk today, free for my colleagues. They went fast. In the past, I've photocopied some of my published short stories and handed them out to co-workers after they'd expressed polite interest in them. Not a single echo.
I made a plan to do a minicomic a month in 2006. The restroom Comfort Guide was the January one. In fact, its first public exposure was at your goodbye party at that Greek place in West Seattle. I took it to Stumptown later that year. People laughed at it and gave me money. Then I lucked into meeting Kat and started doing Greeter. People enjoyed that, sent me nice mail, and gave me money. I did some more of both and things have continued to go well. Both lines are profitable, and I'm sure I can ride them both quite a ways further, and after that, who knows? Kat and I are already talking about post-Greeter stuff, and I've still got all those minicomics scripts from 2006 that need doing....
Anyway, so that's the back door thing. You can see how when the editors from $big_publishing_house washed up at my table like a corked bottle full of $100 bills, I was like, hey, validation!
I hope I don't come across as too much of a showboating asshole about this stuff. It's just nice when things go kinda like how you planned them. I'm sure Zeus is chambering a thunderbolt for me.
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(Folks like Scalzi I have to put in a separate category. I mean, I could maybe do what he does, too, if I'd spent the last twenty years honing my skills and my habits and my work ethic as a journalist and freelancer, but oops.)
"Career strategy" is a slippery thing. I try not to think about it too much, except of course in the seasonal affective depths of November and December when I start telling myself prose is dead and SF is an Aral Sea fishing village and I should go to art school. I figured out some time ago that almost anything anybody might pay me to do will pay better than writing SF, and since then I suppose "my own pure amusement" has covered most of it. (The money, I mean, you have to laugh or cry, so I suppose that's sort of an amusement.)
(Well, the amusement, and that writing science fiction is such a great way to meet girls.)
I can see that putting in that couple of years and sending your beautiful offspring out into the world and hearing nothing but crickets might be less amusing. Right this minute I'm smugly congratulating myself on choosing a subgenre of dependable commercial potential for the novel I'm smugly confident of finishing this summer even though that'll be a year past the deadline I smugly set for myself a year and a half ago. But who knows, this time next year I may be talking about art school again.
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