I meet another writer online whose first book is about to be published by a small house. We have an immediate rapport, and I tell her my tale of woe about my publishing disaster. She offers to tell her publisher about me. Who knows what might happen?

Here's what happened: I am about to make an even more colossal, much more costly mistake than I made by entering into a "Hey, kids! Let's make a Broadway show!" agreement with my graphic designer friend. Good thing I went to college and grad school to make me so smart.

My new writer friend connects me with her publisher, whom I will call "Bellatrix Lestrange."  Lestrange is young (too young, I wonder?), enthusiastic, has nearly a dozen titles in circulation, talks a good game, is impressed with what I achieved in PR and sales on my own. She sees I'm a hard worker, and sends a contract with a lot of bad clauses in it. I hire an agent to look at it for me, and while I get some of the bad clauses excised, I lose the most important battles.

Eager to get Carpool back in circulation, I sign the contract, give her the book for no advance whatsoever and agree to write a second book for her, also with no advance. Well, after all, publishing advances are getting smaller and smaller. If my books do well, I'll make it up on the other side, right?

In the meanwhile, my friend's book is published, riddled with errors. I worry, as Lestrange now controls the future of Carpool and my next book also. In fact, it takes me four attempts to get them to fix the typos and other mistakes that I had found in the page proofs of my second book, Till We Eat Again: Confessions of a Diet Dropout, including mistakes that were added by Lestrange's mother, who with zero qualifications whatsoever "edits" my book.

When I open the first box of Till We Eat Again, a book I loved working on and was excited beyond belief to finally see, I feel physically ill: it looks like it was produced on a 1985 dot matrix printer. I have visions of my book launch party and already feel embarrassed at taking people's money for this shabbily printed book. I hide my dismay as best I can.

The "royalty" statements are also suspiciously complicated, with columns and columns of confusing numbers. It seemed designed to obfuscate, and after hours of pouring over them, I discover dubious accounting practices, such as double-billing me for returns and weird overhead charges. I ask for clarification on the statements, but wouldn't you know it? The "accountant" is always out of town!  

Things go from bad to worse. I compare notes with other authors similarly shackled to the same publisher, and we all come to the inescapable conclusion that Lestrange has taken us all for a ride. Several of us even fly halfway across the country to appear at a legal proceeding against her brought by one of the authors. Many thousands of dollars later, I ransom my books via an intellectual property attorney, the same books that I had given away for free. It's hard to admit all my dumb mistakes publicly, but if it helps someone else be more careful, to do more homework, I'll be glad.

This was a painful way to learn that it was not enough to have met an author thrilled with her publisher when the author-publisher relationship was so new. I have since cautioned every would-be author who asks me for advice to get several references from authors who have at least a year-long relationship with a publisher before signing a contract. There is too much on the line, too much a publisher needs to show they can deliver professionally over a sustained period, before you can safely assume you're dealing with a pro.  

Now I had two books OOP, but both books had won awards for humor, I began to be invited to speak at conferences, and my fan base was growing. Like an addict, I couldn't stop myself from thinking about a third book. Good thing I have a sense of humor.
    

Posted by: Judy Gruen

Seven years ago, in a moment that was either inspired or crazy (or both) I decided to write a humor book called Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy. I had already worked as a writer and editor for several years, had a graduate degree in journalism, and had many author friends, so this idea wasn't quite as ludicrous as it might have been if I were, say, an actuary for an insurance company. Since I knew something about book publishing already, it made my idea merely meshugena.

Still, as an unknown writer, I knew my chances of landing an agent and contract with a reputable publishing house were slim. So, trying to save time and aggravation (that was the idea, anyway) I decided to self-publish. Knowing I lacked the skills to handle all the functions of a publisher, I researched publishers that offered self-publishing services. One man at the publishing house I almost (and should have) signed with was saint-like in his patience for my endless questions during numerous phone calls.

This brings me to my favorite line from the movie "Terms of Endearment," when Jack Nicholson, who plays a retired astronaut romantically involved with Shirley MacLaine, keeps trying to make a break from MacLaine, who is clinging to him needfully. Just when he thinks he can bolt, MacLaine latches on again. Nicholson, in classic tone, says, "Just seconds from a clean getaway."

And so there I was, ready to write the publisher a big check and get my book project moving,  when a friend about to self-publish her husband's book invited me to publish my book under her new imprint. She had read John Kremer, she had bought a block of ISBNs, she was applying to B&T and Ingrahm for distro agreements, and she was an outstanding graphic designer who I knew could ably handle the book design.

"Why not?" she said. "I know you could save a lot of money if we do it together."

And so, like Nicholson, just seconds from a clean getaway, I signed an agreement with my friend that we cobbled together as best we could. This was a big mistake. I ignored my misgivings, such as that my friend had a controlling personality that I knew could make her difficult to work with, and that despite my research, which included calling publishing attorneys, no one had ever heard of this kind of publishing partnership and could offer no advice about how to structure the contract. Our agreement spelled out our respective responsibilities as we could foresee them. But of course, certain things were not foreseeable, such as my friend's marriage dissolving, her life becoming so tumultuous that she could no longer keep up her end of the bargain, and the worst: her deciding to yank her (ex)husband's book from circulation, ending her imprint, and therefore forcing me to declare my own, precious first book OOP when it was barely getting its sea legs.

This was devastating. I had devoted more than six months to just marketing the book, networking with every Mom-related web site in the universe, sending out review copies, contacting magazines, a maniacal one-woman marketing machine. And she was the one who convinced me to publish with her! 

Despite this, we had three successes: Radio shrink Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who had more than 20 million listeners back then, plugged the book on her show and offered it as a giveaway to "the first five callers" who called our toll-free number. (No one on her staff told us that our phone would start ringing at 6 a.m. and go through the night, by "first callers" who listened to the show in every time zone imaginable.) I also sold an excerpt to Woman's Day (circulation 6.2 million at that time), and they also put in our toll-free number to order.

Dr. Laura's plug pushed the book sky-high on Amazon . . . for about two days, after which it settled back down to humble territory. I was bewildered that the Woman's Day excerpt did almost nothing for sales that we could see, until I realized that a magazine whose every issue hawks "20 ways to save money" (my excerpt was about saving money, too) was a magazine whose readers waited for their books at the library. 

The third, and most substantial success, was my selling 2,500 copies of Carpool to Scholastic Book Fairs. This was a huge achievement, though a logistical pain (25 copies to this location; 87 to this location, etc), but at least I made a little money.

When I was forced to declare Carpool OOP, we hired a legal mediator to untangle our partnership, simple as it was. While my partner's troubles were far worse, I still felt I had gotten a raw deal. Thinking about what might have been with the other publisher was useless, but I wasn't ready to remainder my book to a small sad blip in publishing history. Tune in next week to find out what happened next!

(By the way, if you'd like to order a copy of Carpool Tunnel Syndrome, please order it from my web site, www.judygruen.com. Remember, it's OOP!)

Posted by: Judy Gruen

It is hard to talk about publishing without, well, talking about authors. After all, without them... Seriously, while I wouldn't say that today's authors have it rougher than their predecessors (indoor plumbing! soft, comfy pajamas! TiVo!), when your entire industry undergoes a sea change, you can't help but be affected. To my mind, the biggest challenge facing today's author is rising above the noise.

Think about how many books are published each year—300,000 and counting, if I recall correctly. Add in the books published last year. And the year before. And so on. Plus the classics and perennials, and you being to wonder how anyone ever catches the attention of a reader.

According to Publishers Weekly, they reviewed about 6,000 of those releases last year. That's a whole lot of reviewing, but it's not near enough to get the word out. And, as we know, newspaper review space is rapidly dwindling. This puts additional burden on authors to get the word out while remaining true to the work.

It's hard.

Today's readers expect more from authors...as do today's publishers. Let's focus on the former first. As the demand for "authenticity" increases, so does the desire to erase the boundaries between author and person. Once, authors were people of mystery, we didn't really know who they were, just that they created. Now, it seems to be a rule of celebrity (and as authors do publicity, they become celebrities of sorts) that it all hangs out. This is uncomfortable on a lot of levels.

Here is the funny thing: I don't want to know about the personal lives of authors. Generally, my relationship with them comes through their fiction. Real lives are so often, well, meh. I mean, it sort of taints the reading experience to know that the author is dull and tedious in real life.

Or petulant. Or paranoid. Or insecure. Or any of the traits that makes us human.

This is the fine line that authors must walk: maintaining enough mystery to keep their readers from confusing fact with fiction while using social networking tools to maintain open lines of communication and build audiences. My feeling is that most of us are pretty boring, and describing our daily activities doesn't help generate interest. Very few people have the talent—and the lives—to write personal blogs that sustain reader interest.

But you have to keep your name out there, make sure they remember you between books, sustain interest while enticing new readers.
 
Oh, and just to make it that much tougher, this must be done in conjunction with building a broad, effective social network. Depending on who you are and what you write, this network ranges from a basic email list to a personalized social system with features that rival the best of Facebook. It means that the modern author must—and I do mean must, not might or should—spend precious time maintaining the author brand.

The burden of doing this and more rests firmly on the shoulders of the individual author. Your publisher simply doesn't have the resources to lavish dollars and staff on maintaining the author publicity machine. Very few authors get the red carpet marketing treatment. And while publishers are offering increased online opportunities, the publishers also own the readers reached via their efforts (hint: if you have a good agent and your publisher is collecting names and email addresses, make 'em share). Just as you won't want to cede control of your list to Facebook, MySpace, or any other social network, you don't want to cede control of your information to your publisher.

Let me say that again because I actually heard an industry expert suggest, with a straight face, that authors shouldn't worry about such archaic notions as websites. "Just keep it all on Facebook," he said.

No. A million times no. Do. Not. Keep. It. All. On. Facebook.

Not if you cherish your author brand. If you're cool with carefully building a network only to have it dismantled when the service disappears or glitches—and I can guarantee that a system will glitch at that moment when you need it the most because that's how Murphy's Law works—and if you're cool with rebuilding your network from scratch, then sure, let someone else own your data. I mean, it's just your career. Why not trust it to a system created by a couple of near-college graduates who had a cool idea and lousy security (no real services insulted here)?

Sorry, I digressed. Back on topic. Just had to get that out. Today's authors are competing on a level their foreauthors could not have envisioned. Competition for time and energy is fierce, both from other forms of entertainment and from within your own industry. Conventional wisdom suggests that the window for capturing reader interest is very short—a week or two after a book's release, maybe additional time if you go through multiple formats—in order to meet sales expectations.

The care and feeding of a career starts long before that book hits the shelf and continues long after that book is past the window allowed by said conventional wisdom. This branding effort (and, yes, you are a brand and you want your brand to succeed more than anyone else on the planet) takes time, energy, and strategy. You aren't just publicizing a book...you're building a social network that extends beyond traditional shelf life.

It's sometimes too easy to spill your guts and overshare when it comes to building a relationship with your fans, your readers. It's a tough line that authors walk as they hone the tools needed to maintain these reader ties while remaining true to the work. I can't tell you how to find the necessary balance to do it all and to do it well. That you'll need to figure out for yourself.

But I can tell you that the socially networked author you need to become will be easier to face if that author isn't the person you see when you brush your teeth every morning. I see the former as a character in your repertoire, someone you put on when working the marketing side of your brain.

I see the latter as someone your public doesn't need to meet, doesn't need to know.

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

Last week, my final thoughts were about community. If you'd asked me a year ago, I would have said, "Absolutely, reading is a solitary activity. Just me and my book. And maybe a glass of wine." Today, as I'm thinking about reading, I'm realizing that it's not the "me" activity one would imagine.

When I was in the third grade, my teacher would read us a chapter from a book every day. My favorite was Island of the Blue Dolphins. The entire story played out miles from my home—I could see the island from the highway. My mom, the librarian, read to the family during dinner. My favorites from her were the King Arthur stories. Man, I have a weak spot for knights in shining armor.

For a few years, my husband and I had this thing where we'd play the audio version of Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash while on road trips (we don't take many and it's a long book). We'd both read this one separately, of course—how can you be an early Internet geek without a little Stephenson on your reading resume?—but it was just as much fun to hear it together. We'd listen, we'd pause, we'd discuss, we'd remember.

Back when it was first released, we were also playing online with friends in San Francisco. Nobody did anything but play in those days. This was when a graphic, web-browsery thing called NetCruiser was all the rage. Back when it was the height of cool to play chess via email. Back when you could see what was new on the Internet—the entire Internet—and still have time to experiment with the early version of chat.

And we talked about books with those friends. Talked about Snow Crash. Wow, we thought, imagine a virtual world. If you've been to Second Life, you're thinking, "Maybe next virtual world." But no matter, it's a book that came to life. Imagine that...someone imagined a reality, and then someone made that imagination real.

Fast forward to 2008. I've been a member of my book club for about ten years. I'm one of the newer members, though not the newest. I joined after they'd done the Jane Austens and some Russians (saving, however, The Brothers Karamazov for me). That was when we had the "old" list. We've integrated a new list because there were titles on the old list that nobody wanted to read, though a few die-hards insist we have to give it a shot. So once a month, we get together to talk about one book, though we talk about a lot more (there's a reason it's also known as "wine club").

Think about it. You read, however you read. I know people who, for various reasons, are audiobook-only readers. I know people who are blind readers. I know people who read slowly, excrutiatingly slow for someone like me. I know people who rival me in speed (I can't help it, even when I want to linger...). The one thing we all have in common is that reading is just part of the experience.

The best often comes when we talk about the story, the words, the vision, the ideas. Every person comes away from the book with something different. No two people have the same experience when they read a book. It's all about putting impressions together. Books, and I'm talking fiction in particular, are about community. We read, but that's only a piece of the experience. Our relationship with a book doesn't end when we read the final sentence. For some of us, our relationship with certain books never ends at all. And we want to share our thoughts about that book with everyone we meet.

A lot of people worry about the future of the novel. I don't. I do worry about the business of publishing because the industry depends on ad hoc groups to build community and sustain community and maintain the passion necessary to keep the world excited about book—and I'm going to tell you, the kind of community that this industry needs requires more resources (yeah, that's code for money) than the current business model permits.

We live in this crazy new world that throws old rules over for new rules without a passing thought. Old rules in the book biz were top down, you told me what I wanted to read. Now I'm telling you what I want to read—I want dialogue with authors, booksellers (really, I wish  more booksellers were working together to, I don't know, create consortiums of passion for books), publishers, everybody.

Community only works if everyone contributes. For this first decade and a half of what is our online revolution, readers, especially, have brought the passion and the innovation while the publishers have remained on the sidelines. But if I'm building my half of the bridge and you're waiting for marketing to devise a project plan, then I have other worlds to explore. If we don't want to talk about the publishing industry in the past tense, then the publishing industry needs to change how it relates to books and readers.

I am not 100% sure of how one goes about building a perfect reading community online (and offline, because it ain't about one medium), but I do know that leaving it up to the readers and authors isn't enough. We need serious industry investment into building serious community. Serious communities require sustained involvement, or if not sustained, then a loom big enough to handle the warps and wefts of individual involvement.

There are communities out there—Shelfari, LibraryThing, Goodreads, among others—and it's a joy to see how these groups are growing and changing. How word spreads from one reader to the next about tools and resources and fun. Like so much of what is happening online when it comes to books, these communities thrive despite the publishing industry. Imagine the possibilities if the industry side of the business threw as much passion into these communities as readers do.

When it comes to building a community of book people, so much of the burden is placed on those who read books (also known as consumers). Maybe once the professionals were able to remain up on the hill, above the community, living off the labor of those on the street. If that time ever existed, it's over now. If the publishing industry doesn't invest in the reading community in a serious, meaningful, sincere manner now, then maybe, like newspapers, the publishing industry as we know it will cease to exist.

Like I said, I'm not worried about the future of the novel. Story will survive. It will thrive. But the industry, the thing we know as publishing? It has to join the community or be cast off into the wilderness.

Or maybe I should just say this: I like to talk about books. Don't you, too?

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

While I am a proud elitist, I am not a literary snob. As I said last time, it's story that moves me, and if I let myself be limited by books I "should" read or authors who pass some sort of weird smell test, then I'm missing out on parts of the entire reading experience. I don't want to do that, and it perplexes me when other people do.

Don't they know that it's a great big world out there? There is no right way to read. It's so important to remember that.

For years now, I've hated on the Los Angeles Times Book Review (and to a certain degree the New York Times) because I see that my hometown paper simply refuses to acknowledge the diversity that is Los Angeles. The LATBR, largely a reflection of the editor, became a pastiche of California history, Hollywood history, obscure biography, and a smattering of mostly literary fiction.

You could argue that these topics are all worthy of reading and reviewing, but I would argue that these topics lead to the state of the LATBR today: it simply isn't valued by a large enough segment of Los Angeles's reading population. Even before it became the flipside half of the opinion section—making it that much harder to find in morass of ads and special inserts—the LATBR was locals only, in the worst possible sense of the term.

While good writers graced the pages, the overall tone was, shall we say?, stultifying. Maybe it was the subject matter, maybe it was the editorial tone, but there wasn't a sense that reading is fun, books are fun, and we shouldn't have to waste our lives slogging through words that simply don't move us emotionally. Most egregiously, the LATBR failed to understand that readers cross the literary plains with ease—there was no reaching across reading cultures, no real attempt to bring the science fiction reader into a different, but equally speculative type of fiction. No "hey, if you like this, you might like this, too."

Newspapers have absolutely no obligation to cover books, especially when books don't pay the bills. Of course, bills are paid in different ways, and if the book review were valuable to the people of Los Angeles, it would be much harder for the powers-that-be (powers that, I am convinced, have no business running a newspaper) to cut and trim and destroy the LATBR. I don't think it's too harsh to suggest that the editorial staff of the LATBR has a whole lot of culpability when it comes to the state of the book review.

My guess is they don't see it that way. During the past year or so, as more book review sections were cut and eliminated, I noted a lot of hand-wringing, but not a lot of proactive action. "We must save the book review!" they cried, but nobody offered solid, practical plans, a smart course of action. There was a sense of entitlement in some of the discussion, a sense that book reviews are "good for us" and must therefore exist in the print edition of a newspaper.

Like millions of people—more than a few of whom are American—I regularly read the book coverage at the Guardian while no longer bothering the sift through the wasted paper to find the LATBR (and, honestly, sometimes I'd just forget that it was upside-down and backwards from the opinion section). I get what I want from our friends across the pond: lively book coverage, diverse opinion, and passion for reading, writing, and publishing.

Book reviews are somewhat tricky, you see. Some people don't want to possess too much information, so they only read for general gist. Others prefer to read the review after they've read the book because that's where the review is most helpful: comparing and contrasting views and thoughts. And there are those who equate "review" with "analysis", looking for more than a review when they encounter discussion about a particular book.

I think the newspaper book review section killed itself, but maybe that's a good thing. Maybe the model was tired and at the end of its natural life, especially in this age of community and cross-border interaction. Maybe the book review section had to die to give rise to something bigger, better, and, yes, more inclusive: a true literary community. A community that crosses boundaries and lines and social strata. A community that doesn't exist on a publishing timetable. A community that facilitates face-to-face community as much as it does online debate.

A community that loves books—from the moment fingers hit the keyboard (or ink hits the paper) to the moment the reader closes the last page (or turns off the Kindle).

Posted by: Kassia Krozser

For a few years now, I have bemoaned the dearth of publishing industry professionals at the annual South by Southwest interactive conference. It's not geared specifically toward publishers; though, in many ways, it's telling that online media, the motion picture business, gaming, and the music industry have come to dominate the festival. Why is publishing left off the roster?

Publishing people should attend the interactive festival for a few reasons. The first, of course, is that it's still cutting edge (though, as the size of the crowd increases, that's waning)-- what's being talked about in panels and at parties is what you're going to be chasing after in a year or two. The second that one this is made clear by SXSW: storytelling rules.

Gamers, particularly, get this. They understand that it's not enough to have guns and dragons and scantily clad women. The underpinning of great games is story. What gamers really get is that games are defined in many ways. Sometimes games are played individually, sometimes they're played by groups of people in the same building, sometimes they're played by groups of people within the same region, and sometimes they're played by groups of people separated by geography.

Games, like reading, make people happy*. Games, like reading, invite people to share in a common world with common rules. Games, like reading, offer an alternative to the humdrumness of day-to-day life. Games are fun. Reading is fun. It's no wonder that gamers focus on the importance of storytelling.

But today's games get that participants don't exist in one space at one time. There are options for everyone, be it the solitary soul or the gregarious joiner. Books are like that too -- reading, the act of processing text on the page into brain waves, is something we do alone; but we love to share the story, the experience, the words, the nuance.

To me, the future of publishing is tied to the future of storytelling. The future of storytelling requires the realization that we started out by campfires listening to tales and we have been telling stories in all shapes and forms ever since. Books, as we like to imagine them, are relatively new in our human history. Books, if I may commit heresy, are a means to an end: one way to tell a story.

I am not much of a gamer, just ask my mother. She and my sister play Scrabble like it's a blood sport; I play for the sheer joy of the game. They hate me. I am madly in love with story. When I look back at what has engaged me through the (many) decades, story, mostly in text format, is front and center. I am happy to meander through convoluted plotlines, as long as I can trust that it's all going to come together in the end...even if I disagree with how it happens.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about this over the past year, and it still feels weird to write it loud: publishing can learn a lot from the gaming industry. Hmm, maybe not learn a lot, but remember a lot. Remember that it's the story, stupid. Remember that it's the reader who matter. Remember that we're not picking up books to make ourselves miserable.

Most of all, remember that reading is supposed to be fun.


Posted by: Kassia Krozser

I’m about to suggest something that could make my life a lot harder. It just as easily could make my entire profession a lot stronger.

It seems like everyone wants to create comics and graphic novels. Stephen King has presented the latest stories in his Dark Tower series as comics. Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Chabon has his own super-hero, The Escapist. Best-selling author Jodi Picoult has written DC Comics’ Wonder Woman, Jonathan Lethem has Marvel’s Omega the Unknown, science-fiction star Orson Scott Card has written Iron Man, and so on.

It’s not just novelists. Screenwriter-director Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, has written comics based on his own creations as well as long-established Marvel super-heroes. So has Clerks writer-director-actor Kevin Smith. Musicians are involved, too, from KISS’ Gene Simmons to cutie-punker Avril Lavigne to burnout rocker Courtney Love. Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage created the comics series Voodoo Child with his son Weston. The book’s publisher is Virgin Comics, which has also produced comics from author Deepak Chopra, porn star Jenna Jameson, and filmmakers John Woo and Guy Ritchie.

Gol-durn Johnny-come-latelies, I’ve occasionally grumbled. For decades, comics bumped along, often without making much money and almost always without attracting much prestige. Now that graphic novels have started getting some respect, amateurs from other fields want in. Where were they when the business needed them? (I may start manufacturing T-shirts bearing the line “I was comics when comics weren’t cool.”) Like TV stars who get a contract to write picture books or movie actors who get music-company record deals, celebrities are crowding into the graphic-novel world. And I suspect that they might crowd out lesser-known talents like, well, me.

Nevertheless, I want more celebrities to join them.

As a reader, I want to see great graphic novels, which means reaching out to any people who have the talent to make them—even famous people. And as a guy who works in comics, I’m all for anything or anyone that’ll bring the business more attention and higher sales.

But a lot of people who could make great graphic novels haven’t yet grabbed the opportunity, and I want them to. Here are some people who deserve a chance much more than a porno actress or a movie star’s son.

• Comic strip cartoonists. This category would seem to be a natural, but few strip cartoonists do much work in graphic novels. Crafting a three-panel gag requires different skills from sustaining a 200-page narrative.

But some strip artists could do it brilliantly. In Doonesbury, Garry Trudeau weaves stories that run for weeks at a crack, and his characters develop depth and maturity. Calvin and Hobbes’ Bill Watterson has a superb visual talent (look at his Sunday strips) and great skill at making vivid characters. For Better or For Worse’s Lynn Johnston and Funky Winkerbean’s Tom Batiuk have produced long storylines of considerable emotional punch as well as humor.

• Comedians who tell stories. Like comic-strip artists, some comedians are simply great gag writers. But others go further. Bill Cosby tells tales -- from memories of his family to the adventures of Fat Albert and Old Weird Harold to the episodes of The Cosby Show’s Huxtable clan—that indicate a genius for character and story structure. Ellen DeGeneres’ discursive anecdotes seem to run off in a dozen directions, but she always pulls them together into something hilarious. These storytellers could create great graphic novels, and they wouldn’t even have to draw. The field has a long tradition of fumetti, also known as photo-comics. Besides, a lot of artists would love to work with Cosby or DeGeneres.

• Artists who went astray. A lot of creative people studied art but became rich and famous elsewhere. Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood went to Ealing Art College and has kept up his skills. I’d love to see him do a comics memoir of his days in the Stones. Filmmaker David Lynch, famous for movies like Blue Velvet and the TV series Twin Peaks, trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and has created both animated and print cartoons. Horror novelist Clive Barker is a skilled painter of visions every bit as weird as the ones in prose volumes like his Books of Blood. Tim Burton, who started as an animator before going on to direct Batman, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and other movies, has written and drawn books such as The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories.

There are so many more. Suspense novelist Walter Mosley knows comics well; he’s even published a lavish, panel-by-panel tribute to the first issue of Fantastic Four. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, could produce terrific graphic novels. Editorial cartoonists like Pulitzer Prize winners Don Wright and Dick Locher could deploy their remarkable skill at staging scenes, capturing characters, and making points into superb narratives.

As long as I’m dreaming, I’d like each celebrity guest to do all the work of making comics. No ghostwriters, as-told-tos, or other crutches that let a celebrity come up with a few ideas and turn the bulk of the work over to professional writers. In my ideal world, celebrity creators of graphic novels would have to do what the rest of us do: face the blank sheet of paper and muck through every detail of structuring a plot, building a world, and devising each characters’ words, actions, and emotions.

I can’t forget the way screenwriter Sam Hamm reacted after he first tried writing comics. “Comic books are damned hard to [create],” he admitted in the introduction to his graphic novel Blind Justice. “I did my harrowing stint and came away with enhanced admiration for the talented guys who turn this stuff out on a regular basis.” Still, he added, “It’s an experience I wouldn’t have traded.”
 
I don’t know about you, but I hope that Bill Cosby or Ron Wood would feel the same way.

Posted by: David Seidman

You know that graphic novels are getting more popular all the time. You’ve read GNs, but to do your job right you need to know more about them. Where to turn?

Let me take you by the hand. It’ll be easy.

Publishers Weekly issues a free e-mail newsletter called PW Comics Week, full of news, previews of upcoming graphic novels, links to reviews, and other useful stuff. You can sign up for it here.

The Comic Book Industry Alliance (CBIA) is a group of more than 500 comics creators, retailers, and other experts. If you’ve got questions about graphic novels, if you’re looking for a comics creator to do a presentation, or if you need anything else related to comics, the people on the CBIA’s very active message board can help.

The CBIA’s reach is worldwide. For information specific to your own area, your local comics retailers can be immensely useful. To find a retailer near you, call the Comic Shop Locator Service (CSLS) at 888-COMIC BOOK (888-266-4226) or visit the CSLS web page. You can also check out the master list of comic book stores.

Comic-Con International: San Diego, held at the end of July, is a must for anyone passionate about comics and graphic novels – or anyone who just likes spectacle. The four-day monster, the biggest comics convention in North America, gathers the entire comics community: more than 100,000 writers, artists, publishers, retailers, fans, and more. The show even has special programming for librarians. The 2007 con, for instance, included panel discussions such as “Graphic Novels in Libraries” and “The Secret Origin of Good Readers” (hint: the origin has something to do with comics) alongside “DC Comics’ Big Guns” and “Pro/Fan Trivia Match.” If you can’t make it to San Diego and you want to find a convention in your community, you’ll find links at Comic Book Conventions, Comicon.com, and Hoboes’ Comic Book Conventions.

You probably know that the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) is a great source of guidance regarding graphic novels. The organization issues an annual list of Great Graphic Novels and sponsors “Get Graphic @ Your Library” workshops to help librarians work with GNs.

Once you get deeper into the world of comics and graphic novels, I think you’ll like it. We GN folk are a fun and friendly bunch, if a little on the geeky side.

See you soon, I hope.

Posted by: David Seidman