I Recommend You Learn to Cook

Carla Speed McNeil on self-publishing:

I moved my game to Dark Horse because I am one.

I’ve been a self-publisher for a long time. I highly recommend it. Think of it (as you learn to live on beans and ramen) as an apprenticeship in our business. When you self-publish, you learn to create your own work method. You have to learn what gets you out of bed and away from the game console, the whole season of Stargate from Netflix, the big pile of comics you haven’t read yet, the day job, the significant other, the messy mind that talks you out of working like an anorexic’s mind talks her out of eating. You go through a process that teaches you what can and should be put aside for later or brutally pruned off your life so that you can get your work done consistently. That is the absolute baseline. And you have to do it, because there are gonna be things that cannot be put aside. A family is basically another day job, one you can’t quit once you start. You may find yourself caring for sick parents, a sick spouse, or even sick you; learning how to get the work done in spite of the things you simply must take care of is where you start. I recommend you learn to cook. Beans get to look mighty ugly after a while. I learned to make port-wine reductions living in an efficiency apartment with no kitchen—just an electric skillet and a hot plate.
It’s not such a crazy idea, doing an apprenticeship. Lots of professions still have this structure. Think of young doctors doing their residencies. They don’t sleep. They work all the time. They have to stick the details of their lives through the chinks of their careers. They eat, sleep, and breathe doctorin’ for years. A self-publisher has to do that too, because nobody else is going to do it for them. You get to know how printers work. You learn quite a bit of math to determine how much money you need to set aside for taxes, how much of your rent you can declare as a business expense if you work at home, whether a price quote for a printed book is too high for the cover price you want to charge. You get to know how to archive and organize your work.
You have to get creative about getting your work out there, and getting the money to start coming in. You have to keep your eyes open and the hamster on the thinky wheel. You have to try new tactics. And the best part of it is, if your book doesn’t take off, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Really. That’s the best part.
If your book fails, it may be because you need to learn more about story structure. Or lettering. Or character design. Or pacing. Or viral marketing. Or money management. Or personal priorities. But if you’ve been learning all those things, you’ll have an idea which one, or ones, you need to work on. And you’ll have a way to go. You won’t be reduced to saying, “I’m better than Celebrity Such-and-Such. If that fly-by-night publisher or evil distributor or soulless corporation had just done right by me, I’d be rich and famous.
Unless that’s what you’re into.
Even if you don’t get rich and famous doing your own book, you’ll get opportunities. If you’ve taught yourself how to work, you’ll be able to take advantage of them. You’ll have to learn what to cross out on a contract before you sign it and send it in, but that’s good too. You’ll make money. You’ll have a career.
And perhaps you’ll find yourself where I am now. I self-published for years. I’ll still self-pub things from time to time. Nothing on God’s green earth would make me give up minicomics. Self-publishing is a perfectly valid business model. My book Finder trundled along all those years. People read it; people liked it. Some people loved it. I made some money. I got some jobs. I got some awards. Finder never broke out, not like Bone or Strangers in Paradise. Never took off like a rocket. I admit that in spite of my best efforts I will never be a genius at marketing, and I am still inclined to hit computers with leg bones when they beep at me. And I admit I knew jack-all about writing when I sat down to draw Finder #1. Hell, look at the panel borders: I literally could not draw a straight line. Did not know how to lay down a ruler and run a pen down the side of it. Walt Kelly I ain’t; he freehanded all his panel borders.
But I have been learning. I have taken a number of leaps in my writing in the last few years. Getting away from doing my own work instead of clinging to Finder has been remarkably good training. Stepping away from my treasured core world of Finder has been an eye opener as well. The books I am doing now and will do in the future are better. I have so much more to offer people who will be checking me out now for the first time.
The last thing self-publishing will teach you is this: who will make a good partner. Most of us, when we decide we want to do comics, have so much to learn that we’re like kittens in a box, trying to be cute and funny, hoping somebody will come along and take care of us. Somebody else to do all the rest of the work while we draw. You will encounter plenty of hopeful publishers who want the kitten but who are, at best, clumsy kids who will turn the kitten into a surly, scratchy creature who sprays the couch. If you do the work, you’ll learn about publishers—what they do and how well they do it. Your book may still fail; do a new one. By then, it won’t seem so hard.
A dark horse is one that wins unexpectedly. For ten years I wasn’t looking for a publisher. The minute I was, the last one I expected took the lead.