I really, really should have blogged about this before now, but the New York Center for Independent Publishing is presenting SPLAT: A Graphic Novel Symposium tomorrow. Yours truly was on the planning committee, and the group managed to pull together a truly impressive list of panelists. I would have been one of them, but a personal commitment came up and I had to bail, much to my sadness. I hope everyone has a great time.

Brian Wood was interviewed by the New York Post today in conjunction with an article about SPLAT, and he had some excellent guidelines for aspiring creators who might be looking for publishers for their work. I want to reprint those here along with my own thoughts and comments….

* Publish something, anything: “Just get something into print. Then you’re proven. The next editor you approach sees that someone has already banked on you,” Wood says. If no one will hire you, print up your own copies of a book to give away as samples. “Not only does your work look the best in a printed form, it shows you can follow through on a project.”

So true! There are so many people out there who want to just submit a story idea and see if we’ll take it. It’s like fishing by throwing worms in the water; you have to have a decent fishing pole to get any kind of response back.

* Have patience: “I went to conventions and gave away these self-published books to anyone I could find. It took three years until anyone called me back. You can’t get discouraged,” Wood says.

Here’s the secret about the current market for comics: If you’re good enough, you will get published. It’s not like novels, where an editor may need to read 50 pages to determine if the work is any good. If you’re doing good comics, you’ll hook the editor immediately (if I can continue my fishing metaphor) and you can reel them in quickly. At least that’s true for artists; if you’re a writer, it’s going to be tougher, no question. But this is a good time to be a creative person in this biz.

* Sell it before you draw it: “If you’re just trying to get an editor interested in you, you don’t have to fully execute your 100-page graphic novel. You can just do the first chapter.”

And further, a good editor will want to have the opportunity to work with you and to help you shape the work, and when the book is already done, they know they won’t get to do that.

* Find the right editor: Look at the mastheads of books that you like reading and send your work to whomever edits those. Then mail a hard copy of your work. “Don’t e-mail. An editor can just hit delete on an e-mail.”

“Don’t email.” I can’t agree with that one strongly enough. If you’re at all like me, your inbox is constantly full, and here at Random House we have a limit on the size of the inbox. So when you send me a 10 meg art file, I can’t receive any other email, and the easiest way to clear that up is to hit the delete button. ALWAYS send a hard copy of your work.

* Take to the Web: “That’s what everyone says is the next big business model,” Wood says. Many aspiring artists have been offered work by putting samples of their stuff up online.

The cliche “if you build it, they will come” has never been more true than it is now for web comics. Megatokyo, Penny Arcade, PvP, Perry Bible Fellowship… and the list goes on. If you’ve built up an audience online, then we already know there’s a demand for your work. I acquired Nina Matsumoto’s Yokaiden on the strength of her work on her web comic, Saturnalia.

To Wood’s advice, I can only add one other piece of my own - be persistent, but not too persistent. Make contact, and then follow up - and then wait a while before you follow up again. If you don’t follow up, you may not get noticed, and if you follow up too much, you’ll get noticed in the way you don’t want to be noticed. Follow up once a month for three months, and then make a judgment call. If you’ve got a nibble of interest, maybe follow up again in two months. Or if you’ve got nothing, wait 3-6 months before contacting the editor again.

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