B&N Week 115: Editorial Flow
We have another brilliant Tuesday upon us! I’m in the mood to listen to The Ruler’s Back, by Slick Rick. (The Great Adventures of Slick Rick was a great album. Yes, I’m a child of the 80s.) A day such as this, we need trumpets to blow, just to herald it.
Anyway, let’s get into some Bolts & Nuts, shall we? This week, I wanted to talk about your editorial flow. Many of you are going out, doing your thing, and you don’t have an editor onboard. While I don’t agree with it, I certainly understand the position. Not everyone can afford an editor, and most of you believe you don’t need one. [If you’re a writer, all you have to do is take a look at any entry in The Proving Grounds to see how fallacious that idea is.]
However, I understand the predicament. What I’m going to attempt to do here is to give you some keys and procedures to follow to make the journey as smooth as possible.
Please understand me: this is not meant to be a replacement for a competent editor, nor is it meant to be followed step by step. Adapt this as necessary to your situation.
Preliminaries:
Save your money. Study your craft. This bears repeating, so I will: save your money, and study your craft. There is no excuse for what happens if you fail to do either of these.
Create a budget. Your budget is going to be for the following: pencils, inks, colors, letters, logo, cover, printing, advertising. These are the basics. If your artist does their own pencils and inks, you may be able to save a little money there, but don’t count on it. Decide now if you want the book to be in color or b/w. Assuming color is always a good thing. You can always go to b/w later. This is going to affect your creation cost and your print cost.
If you publish on the web, then replace printing with domain registration and hosting costs. Advertising might be another cost that gets lowered, if you publish on the web.
Save your money and study your craft. This is important.
First Steps
Build your story. This means studying it, taking it apart to see how it works, putting it back together to make sure everything still fits. Move things around. Think about it differently. Populate it. Come up with your themes, your storylines, and think about how you want the reader to be affected.
Plot the story out. Check your pacing. Make sure you have enough story for your page count.
Write the script. Leave it alone for about a week if not two. Come back to it and try to edit it. Make sure the panel descriptions are static images, try to ensure that the panels can be drawn. Go over the dialogue. Give it a good once-over. Make sure it does what you want it to do.
[This is the point where you want to hire an editor.]
Second Steps
Make a production schedule. Know when you want to have a certain amount of the work done, and build in a buffer for those times when Life creeps up on us. Trust me when I tell you that there will be times when life has to be taken care of before comics. There are times when it’s just unavoidable. We’ll all have it at least once in our careers.
When you make your production schedule, make sure that you build in a buffer that allows for life events. It is very easy to get behind, and very difficult to catch back up or even get ahead. Not without sacrifices on someone else’s part, if not the entire team’s.
The buffer should be making it easy for everyone to do their jobs within a reasonable timeframe, with more time to spare.
Here’s the trick, though: you’re going to be the only person who knows what the true schedule is. Give your team a timeframe, deadlines to hit, but don’t tell them the buffer that was built in. If you really want to be safe, build in two buffers.
This will become more important if you are able to get distribution through Diamond. Diamond is going to need a date for you to submit your next issue to them for solicitation. That date will be your guide. Start building from there, once you get there. But for now, start thinking about when you want to have your issues done.
Third Steps
Now, you can start to look for a creative team. This is where your budget starts to play a role.
You can go about this in a couple of different ways. You can either put up an ad at multiple locations, telling what it is you’re looking for and whether or not it’s a paying job; you can approach an artist that strikes your fancy and see if they’re available; you can do a combination of these. However, before putting up the ad, make sure you stick to your guns.
You want to think about what it is that you want when you write your ad. Do you want links, or do you want attachments, or do you care? Don’t forget to put your name, what you’re looking for, how to contact you, and your preferred method of seeing the work.
Now, you’re going to get a LOT of submissions. As soon as you offer money, you’re going to get submissions from people hoping to get some of it. Here’s a great way to start culling: ask for one thing in specific, either links or attachments, but not both. (But ) I know. Ask for either/or, but not both.
The reason is because people don’t read. They’ll look to get the address, and then send over something you didn’t ask for. If you said links only, you’ll get attachments. If you said attachments only, you’ll get links. If they don’t bother to read, they don’t get the job. Pure and simple. [And this is what I meant about sticking to your guns.]
Before you put up the ad, you’re going to write three different response emails. The first is a thanks but no thanks. You’re not even going to keep these on file. The next one is the hard decision but the position is filled email. Personalize this one. Keep these creators on file. This is going to be the third set of emails you send out. We’ll get to why soon. The last email you want to write is the I like your work, let’s talk about hiring you one.
Okay, let’s take out the trash first. There are going to be creators who just don’t deserve to be paid for their services as yet. Their work isn’t yet appropriate for paying work. They still need a lot more practice under their belt before they can get a paying gig. You can send the thank you but no emails whenever you wish. But you also have to stick to your guns with this email, too, and here’s why.
You’re going to get some good artists here, but they can’t follow directions. You said links, and they sent attachments. You like what you see, but there’s the fact that they didn’t do the required reading. Send the email. Save yourself the headache. It’s going to be tough. Send the email. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.
Now you want to rank the creators who fit the criteria. You’re looking for a top five. When you get these in order, you contact the one that best fits the project and offer them the job. If they accept, send out the hard decision email to the others. Be honest and actually keep these people on file. If the first artist has to bail for whatever reason, you can then contact the next one on the list to see if they’re still interested. The hard decision email prevents hard feelings. This is why you send it last.
Step Four
Character designs and thumbnails. You’re going to want to make a separate document to give to the artist so they can do their work on the characters. Get the designs nailed down for all the main and supporting characters. Once that’s done, they can then start thumbnailing the script.
This is important, because it gives a visual representation of what you’re going to be seeing. It lets you know that the artist is following the script, and allows for changes to be made for pacing purposes if necessary. It lets you know if the storytelling makes sense. It also lets the artist know whether or not what you wrote can actually be drawn. This is not always the case.
If this step isn’t done and the artist just starts to draw, mistakes can crop up that will be a challenge to fix. This is a very quick, simple, preventive measure that can be taken.
Step Five
Scanning. The higher the dots per inch (dpi), the better the art is going to turn out. However, a high dpi also means a larger file size. The minimum size should be 300dpi, and a max of 600dpi. The files are still somewhat manageable at 600dpi, but if you want a nice mix, I’d go about 400dpi.
Step Six
Now we’re into the nitty gritty! We’re drawing! What do you want to look for here? That the script is followed, that the thumbnails are followed, that things are in proportion, that the storytelling makes sense, if there is enough space for the dialogue, camera angles are consistent, and more. I’m talking planes, vanishing points, foreshortening, light sources, and more that the artist can try to confuse the eye with.
Inking. Line weights, cross hatching, light sources, fore-, mid-, and backgrounding of characters and objects are all important here. Generally, whenever you look at a comic, you’re looking at the inker’s work, not the pencilers. Inking is a subtle mix of style, tracing, and correcting. There are technical aspects, yes, but it comes down to these three things.
Step Seven
After inking comes colors and lettering. The files can go to both the colorist and letterer at the same time. For colors, you’re looking for continuity of colors from panel to panel and page to page. This can vary, depending on the skill of the colorist. Things to watch out for: overuse of lens flare, correct time of day, consistent light sources and lighting,
Lettering is a bit easier, while also being a bit more of a struggle. Some things to look out for: get rid of all crossbar I’s, except for the personal pronoun. If you want to avoid confusion, that’s the only place you’ll use it. [Some letterers will also use it at the start of a sentence. This isn’t incorrect, it’s easier to get rid of them all except for the personal pronoun.] Make sure that all the balloon tails are pointing toward a mouth. Don’t break borders unless necessary; anchor the word balloons to panel borders instead. Watch the width of the balloon tails—make sure the last 1/3rd comes down to a point.
Step Eight
Create a cover, logo, and figure out what to do with the interior cover pages, as well as the rear cover.
Step Nine
Go over every step obsessively, looking for mistakes to be corrected. Do all of this before you find a printer. The more problems you find before printing, the fewer things you’ll have to correct once you get the samples back.
Step Ten
Pricing and printing. The price you sell your comic at will largely depend on multiple factors: the cost of the creative team, the cost of printing on a per unit basis, whether or not that printing is in black and white or color, number of pages, and paper stock used. Using print-on-demand services is good only up to a few hundred copies, because it is then cost-effective. Just know that once you get out of the realm of a few hundred copies, it becomes more cost effective to use an off-set printer. Using an off-set printer lowers the cost-per-unit—but the catch is that you have to buy a higher amount of units.
Pricing is a growing concern. It’s a matter of cost versus amount a customer is willing to pay for a product. Most of that price is going to be set by what other companies are selling their wares at. If Marvel/DC sell their wares at $4, you are going to be hard-pressed to sell a similar product at a substantially higher price. Using either method, you’ll be challenged to break even, let alone make a profit.
When you get the printing samples in, you’re looking for mistakes, as well as aesthetics. Are the pages in the right order? Any pages crooked? Are the colors the way you want them? Are the graytones doing their job? Are there any pages that are cut off incorrectly? How does the sample itself look? Are there any chips, folds, tears, or other damages that can be seen? Fix any mistakes in the files you see, relay any damages to the printer, and then print. No, more than likely you aren’t going to get another sample. It isn’t in your contract.
All of that is your editorial flow. All of that is going to be your responsibility. Daunting? It can be. If you hire an editor, large chunks of this can be offloaded to them, depending upon how much power you want to give up. No relinquishing of power means that all of the responsibility is now yours.
Don’t forget: all of this work is for a single issue. You’ll have to do this over and over again, some of it over every issue you produce, all of it over every project you produce. Find a flow that works for both you and your project.
And that’s all I have for this week. Your homework: save your money, take your time, and plan out your steps for production. If you take your time, you should have a better product on your hands.
That’s it. See you in seven.
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Category: Bolts & Nuts, Columns
