Scott King

Bill: Ok we are going to get started. This is the first panel of the professional programming here at SPX and we are going to talk about the ups and downs of working with mainstream publishers. Dennis has been a publisher for years and an underground cartoonist as well as an agent. Scott is the man behind “Under Standing Comics,” which if I understand right, had three publishers? 

Scott: Tundra for a blink of an eye, Kitchen Sink, DC, and now Harper Collins.

Bill: So that’s four then?

Scott: Yes.

Bill: I’m curious Dennis, it seems a lot of places are trying to work with cartoonist and get into graphic novels. I’m curious as to what your impression is with these publishers’ new openness.

Dennis: A few years ago they would have been tossed out the door. Now every house is eager to get a foot in that door and the reason for that is that there have been a few comics that have become best sellers and then there will always be those that bomb. But the market as a whole is being seen as growing and profitable and as long as it stays that way the publishers will want a piece of the pie. The downside is that most of these houses don’t’ have an expert in the genre or they will have a complete amateur and no one knows what they are doing or how to handle a graphic novel. You also loose that personal touch that you would get working with the small press.

Bill: Scott, as we mentioned, you’ve been on all sides of this now. What is your perspective with the tradeoffs and advantages of a large or small press publisher?

Dennis: Careful Scott.[audience laughs]

Scott:  I’ve established a precedent of a certain degree of control. I have certain contract benefits that I had with small publishers and as I moved up the food chain I was able to keep them. So I negotiated better rates off the cover and things like that. What Dennis said too is right. They have people inside the organization that don’t know what they are doing and a lot of them have to be educated on comics and graphic novels.

Bill: Right, I think you benefited from building a track record cause you had incubated your work with the small press and then packaged it up for the large publishers. Now Dennis, I know you work with the Eisner Estate and you’ve announced that you will also be representing up and coming cartoonist.

Dennis: Yes, there are several I’m working with, some were here at SPX. What you are doing as an agent is looking for young talent that is ready to make the jump to the big publishers, which is completely different from working with something like the Eisner Estate. With them it’s a different beast and it’s my job to stand in the author’s place to fight for their rights since they are no longer here to do it for themselves.

Bill: Certainly, it seems, the main roll of the agent is to handle the business and to shop the book around.

Dennis: The agents now in effect are pre-screeners for the major publishers and an agent is only as good as the work they represent. If I represent Joe-Blow and take him to a publisher, but his working really isn’t that great and he wasn’t that great, they may not return my phone calls for the next person I’m representing. My credibility as an agent is only as good as my talent. Then the only way to get a manuscript to the publishers is to have an agent. I think in 34 years there was only one book published as an unsolicited manuscript called “Confederacy of Dunces.” But the reality is that editors and publishing houses won’t look at manuscripts sent in by the layman. They don’t have time to do look at them. If you want to publish big then you need to not worry about impressing a house because its more realistic to impress an agent and if you are really lucky they will decided to take it to an editor.

Bill: Well I wanted to ask you about control. When a young cartoonists takes a project to the big publishers to they also give up control? I know people who enjoy picking out the format size, color, paper weight, and all those anal things that control freaks love. When you take a book to a big house do you lose the right to make those decagons?

Dennis: It’s a reality check and it gets back to the publishers are her making an investment. If you say you want control of your cover they will say “our art director is a sweet person and will take your suggestions into account.” When in actuality the art director has the final say or in most cases the marketing people. At the same time these companies aren’t stupid. They know you have a unique vsion or style and they would be foolish to tamper with it too much because then they could ruin what makes you interesting to readers. Then, the more your stuff sells the more likely you will win any arguments.

Bill: Now Scott, I’ve noticed that your cover for “Understanding Comics” done by Harper Collins is different from the black cover that I prefer. Can you talk about that?

Scott: Oh sure, yeah. Well it was a pretty relaxed process. I figured if I went to Harper Collins then they would have more control. The real difference is that for the black grid cover, is that I designed that for comic book shops. At the time everything back in then was big splashy with lots of colors. So I thought my cover design would stand out and would contrast and pop with everything else on the shelves. Now Harper Collins was selling it next to novels. So they wanted to make it more splashy and colorful. To me that made sense because it was the same strategy I used. Either way you can still see my book from across the room so I was fine with that. I would much rather they approached it from the book market from scratch trying to meet the needs of that market.

Bill: You had “Understanding Comics” out from Kitchen Sink and Harper Collins?

Scott: Yes for most of its run. Kitchen Sink handled the no return market and Harper Collins the book stores.

Bill: Then it moved to DC?

Scott: Yes. When the barbarian hordes invaded North Hampton Dennis very nicely conspired with Judy Hanson---

Bill: Did DC become the book deal as well?

Dennis: Yes.

Scott: DC took over the comic market while Harper Collins still did the book market. They came and got me right before everything went to hell for other people. Lucky for me, Dennis looked at it on a human level and thought, “Here is a person who is about to get run over by a train and I can humanly get him off the tracks.”

Dennis: Technically, Harper Collins had a sub license, which is if I were to give Scott the right to print X image to someone and then he gives that to someone else. I still get my money, but I get it indirectly. It’s a very typical thing and used all the time with international rights. You usually do it when someone can handle a market better than you can.

Bill: I’m glad you explained what a sub liences is, not because everyone should know it, but because they should know how confusing all of this is and so they can see that there are all these possibilities.

Scott: For a long time I had an allergy to the whole concept of agents. If I hadn’t I would own a house today. When it came time to sell the new book, “Making Comics” DC had the right to first look. They made an offer for it and the right to re-publish the other two books and I thought it as ok. But my agent turned around and took it to Harper Collins and they offered me seven times more.

Bill: Now “Making Comics” is the first time you’ve been published by a house and have done a major book launch?

Scott: Well I’ve always been with Harper Collins in the book stores, but they always say my books as ones they were reprinting. Thi is the first time they are looking at one of my books as their books.

Bill: It seems you are taking a pro-active roll in the publicity of this new book. Obviously there is something coming from the publisher, but there is a lot from you as well, right?

Scott: The tour is very much our tour. We are handling all the logistics of it and paying expenses. But they are also lining things up in book stores or side trips that they are footing the bill. They recently mailed 14,000 schools along our route telling them about the tour and really the success of “making comics” will fall on two things. The first is the content of the book and second is whether Ivy and I can generate enough excitement through the tour.

Bill: I remember yesterday you were talking about scheduling with Politics & Prose.

Scott: Politics & Prose is a great store and I’ve always been told that if you go to D.C. that’s where you have to go. So Harper Collins planned a book signing on Saturday night of SPX thinking “oh great its only 10 minutes away and all your SPX fans can come.” When actually SPX people stay close to home because they’ve waited all year to see their friends and Saturday night is the night where they go to dinner or off to the bar. Why would they spend 10 minutes in a cab to see me, specially when they’ve been bumping elbows and seeing me all day here. Another thing they did is that for Sand Diego they made ashcans of the new book and they wanted me to give them out to people for quotes. They said that I should do some random samplings and just hand them out. I was like, “Don’t we have a limited number of these?” and they said they were just going to seed the market with them. But here’s the thing. The people that come to my panels are already my fans. They don’t need convening to buy the book. Finally my agent Judy said to me “They don’t understand conventions. They are used to trade shows where you hand out copies to major book store buys or independent stores. Those people can turn around and buy 600 copies. They don’t understand that at conventions its just any shlub who feels like walking in.”

Bill: Thanks Scott, I’ll read it by the light of my light saber.

Scott: Yes exactly.

Bill: Dennis, how long were you publisher of Kitchen Sink?

Dennis: 30 Years.

Bill: From your perspective, having gone from small book publishing to big publishers, is the market more favorable now to the smaller publisher trying to get into book stores?

Dennis – Two sides to that coin. Some companies like Fantagraphics are making it into the book stores because they are piggy backing other publishers. Fantagraphics has a deal with Norton, but at the same time they are still competing with Norton. The other side of it too is that small publishers can’t compete with the large advances or pay that the big publishers can offer creators. I think it was Top Shelf that just lost Craig Thompson’s “Goodbye Chunky, Goodbye Rice.” I’m sure it was a very hard and difficult decision for Craig, but the publishers will be able to write a larger check for reprints than Top Shelf ever could.

Bill: Any last word from you Scott?

Scott: Its really when you look at the books that have cut a white path like “Blankets” or “Maus.” AT the end of the week its still the content that makes them best sellers. I mean hope any of you out there have the problem of figuring out which large publisher is for you. I hope you have to try and decide which of the places vying for you is the one you should go with.  But mostly I hope you spend 98 percent of your time producing kick ass work. My suggestion is to stick with that day job and keep working on your masterpiece on the weekends or in the free time. Keep going until it’s produced. Then when it’s done take it around and say “Here is my thing. It’s a good piece of work. Publish me.” It really helps to have a book finished and no that you are going to publish it no matter what even if you have to do it yourself. People see your passion for the work and you’ll start to build steam and if your lucky an agent will come and you’ll be able to take it to a publisher.

Bill: The interesting thing about Art Spiegelman is that when he was making “Maus” he assumed no publisher would want it. He just went on making it for himself because he felt it was too raw for a publisher. He submitted it to 15 places and was rejected from each. Finally, Pantheon picked it up. They gave Art a pat on the back and said “It’s like a poetry book. It’s a good book. It’s ok if we don’t sell more than 3,000 copies because at least we know it’s a good book.” And then it went sell a lot more than that.

Scott: The important thing was that it was a good book.

Dennis: And one of those 15 publishers that rejected it was Pantheon.