Reality kick

Every so often these days, somebody suggests using Kickstarter to fund one of my comics or gamebooks. I expect it was similar in the 1930s – “You just need to put it on the wireless.” Did Caxton tell Malory that the printing press would make him rich?

I’m no expert on crowdfunding. In fact, so much not an expert that I’m not even sure about the “crowd” part. Most projects seem to get off the ground because less than a thousand people stump up an average fifty dollars apiece. Those T-shirts had better be stunning.

But let’s say you put your comic or gamebook on Kickstarter and you raise $100,000. Whoop! Quit your day job, right? Well, no… Because you now have to print, parcel and post about six thousand copies of the book. Plus some T-shirts and a free lunch for the rich kids. A conventionally-published book doesn’t get onto the bestseller lists by selling six thousand copies.

Admittedly, by using Kickstarter as a publishing platform you cut out the bookseller. So that’s 50% of the cover price that you don’t have to give away. But you do have all the manufacture and fulfilment issues to take care of.

What’s the profit margin on a Kickstarter campaign? I haven’t looked (see Not An Expert disclaimer above) but I’d expect them to vary wildly. By profit, I mean the money you’re left with when the last cheque clears and the last book goes sliding down the chute at the post office. With that you have to cover all your fixed costs – writing, art, typesetting, leaving aside the risk of running the Kickstarter in the first place.

This is why I’m sceptical when somebody tells me how easy it would be to fund an entire book through crowdfunding. I can do all the writing for nothing (I didn’t pay myself a penny for all the work I did on Mirabilis books 1, 2 and 3, including layouts and lettering) but there’s still artwork costs. Editing, if you care about quality. Lettering. Typesetting. Printer set-up.

I’m pretty versatile. I can do about three-quarters of that stuff myself. But I still have to pay artists and colorists. And at the end of the rainbow I’m even hoping there might be a few coins left to pay for the thousands of man-hours I put in along the way.

Kickstarter is a way of raising a subscription to print books. It also serves as a great way to enthuse a core of fans who will hopefully spread the word about your project. But it is not a viable way to raise development funds – unless you are super-famous to begin with, in which case you probably don’t need the development funds that badly anyway.

But Kickstarter as a publishing platform? That’s something else. Now you have to make enough on sales to cover costs from scratch. I’m often asked about gamebooks because I wrote a lot of them in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A gamebook takes about four man-months to write. (My interactive adaptation of Frankenstein took nearly eight months, but that was much bigger than a regular gamebook.) Interior art, call that a man-month. Cover, editing, typesetting, another man-month. So a minimum of six man-months for just a black-and-white gamebook. For a full color graphic novel like Mirabilis it’s getting on for twice that.

Writers and artists do need to eat. (Nobody in the movie or publishing industries believes this.) No executive wants to pay them as much as you’d get for flicking paperclips around an office and setting up PowerPoint presentations, but even so that Kickstarter-based publisher will need to find some $23,000 to fund the gamebook, $46,000 for a graphic novel. If you build in a 20% profit on sales, that means the campaign will need to hit a quarter million to get the OGN paid for.

That’s not how it works, of course. I didn’t go out and get investors to do Mirabilis. We had some money in the early days from David Fickling and Random House, but when The DFC (blessed be its memory) had to fold, we didn’t shut up shop. I continued writing for nothing. I went out and found supporting jobs that would pay for Leo and Nikos. This is how most creators have to work. Kickstarter may be a shiny new thing, but it’s not going to change that.

Cowabunga!

I was sitting on the stairs nursing a Coke and a hangover when the bell went and several hundred kids poured out of assembly like Genghis’s horde. The hangover was Leo’s sister Lucy’s fault. The kids went around me in two waves. I noticed the furtive sidelong looks, full of crafty young speculation. They looked like bundles of twigs in short pants.

One of them stopped in front of me. Genghis himself, all forty-two inches of him. The horde went into slo-mo. “Are you him?”

“I am he,” I said. It was a school, after all.

He nodded, satisfied. The horde drained away. They had established what they needed to know. Sometime that morning, between reading and sums, they would get to hear about something they actually cared about. Because the Turtle guy was here.

They were called the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in Britain. Ninja were banned because some government busybody had decided the very word might incite kids to tiptoe around in black balaclavas and slit each other’s throats. We also weren’t allowed to show Michelangelo’s nunchaku. Back in the ‘70s, a kid in the UK hit another kid with two sticks tied together with rope. Consequently nunchucks were considered a deadly weapon. Unlike the katana, sai or bo, obviously.

How it started: the editor at Random House Children’s Books phoned me up. “Dave, we want to do a series of books for 8-10 year olds. Have you heard of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?”

“Yes, it’s an indy comic book. Pretty violent. It’s not for 8-10 year olds.”

What did I know? Eastman and Laird had taken the $10 million check. Whatever the TMNTs used to be, they were now the next must-have action figures. And lunchbox. And bedspread.

Whoever made the movie hadn’t been told. That was a dark, bloody affair of revenge in which Raphael got beaten to a jelly. It was a story taken straight from the comics but it wasn’t going to play well on a Saturday morning alongside Scooby Doo. So I rolled off four kid-friendly plotlines and wrote them in a week each. Nice work if you can get it – especially when Random House in the States paid me for the stories all over again. That was gratifying, but not half as gratifying as seeing ninja back in the title.

The editors told me I was the only writer outside the US authorized to come up with completely new TMNT storylines. I doubt if that was true, but I appreciated the flattery. The penny dropped when they came calling for an adult novelization of the movie. “Can you send over a video?” Uh-uh, all they had was the script, which came on a bike that same morning. I read it over lunch and called them back.

“There’s not a lot of story here for a 60,000 word novel…”

“Will you do it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Great. You’ve got three weeks.” Click.

When I finally got to see the movie, there was a whole flashback sequence concerning Splinter’s origin that had never made it off the page. Rightly so, as it would have bogged the movie down, but if you track down a copy of the novelization you can read all that stuff. Stretching a screenplay to novel length is never easy, and I was glad of all the padding. I also tuned up the cricketing jokes. The scriptwriter had put, “You have to eat scones if you like cricket.” Oh, come on, cricket is a gift to a gag writer. Silly mid-off. Googlies. Howzat! And all he could think of were scones?

Back to school. The teachers brought them in class by class. Each time I’d show a video of the TMNT song by Partners in Kryme. The teachers winced through that with teeth gritted in a big smile. And gradually my hangover lifted as I chatted with the kids. What the teachers didn’t get was that this wasn’t just about a movie or a TV show or the toys the kids wanted for Christmas. The Turtles were one of those concepts that sets a spark inside kids’ minds and fires their imagination. About everything. They barraged me with questions: What were the costumes made of? How did the actors do martial arts inside them? What was green screen? How were cartoons made? What was a katana? Did turtles really live in sewers? How do you know if you’re a mutant?

By the time Lucy came to fetch me for lunch, I remembered why I did this. Because the stories you tell kids aren’t just a way for them to while away a couple of hours. Those stories are the beacons that draw them into the wider world, thirsting for knowledge, excitement and understanding. Even stories about green teen crimefighters? Especially those.

Brought to book

Much to our surprise, the Gazetteer has been moving up into pole position this weekend after more than a year of trailing the pack. The idea of doing a Dinotopia or Spiderwick's Field Guide type of book was how we originally conceived Mirabilis more than 12 years ago now, and was the form in which we first pitched it in 2004 to David Fickling, who several years later invited us to turn it into a comic strip for the dummy issue that he was putting together to help sell the idea to Random House of publishing a weekly comic.

The Gazetteer was to be a complete story of the Year of Wonders told through the eyes of many characters whose lives would intertwine throughout. When we got going on the comic, the Gazetteer took a back seat - but it was part of our contract from the outset, and the intention was to release it once the graphic novels started coming out. Not only did Martin do a great bunch of paintings and illustrations for it, we also had the half-dozen standalone comic stories that David Fickling had asked us to prepare for The Guardian, a UK newspaper, but which were never used. The Gazetteer would be the ideal place for those.

The real value of the Gazetteer, I think, will be as an easy-in to British readers who look askance at graphic novels. Indeed, we at Team Mirabilis often speculate that the Gazetteer might be the real money-earner and the 800-page graphic epic might just turn out to be our labor of love. Still, it has languished for about a year now on the back burner, but just recently we started to think that maybe it is the right place to start after all. Or, at any rate, it's worth getting out there so that readers have a choice of starting points.

Our new plan is to get the Gazetteer all ready in time to go to the Bologna Book Fair next March. So it might actually be out early in 2012. Only two and a bit years after the original publication date, but in the mazy world of book publishing that's all too frequent a tale.

While there's music and moonlight

Not wanting to jinx it, but things are looking distinctly brighter for Mirabilis this weekend than they turned out to be for the Weinsteins and Miramax (see last post).

We have spent the last three months negotiating a release from the old DFC contract that will free up the Mirabilis rights. And at last that is looking like it’s about to happen, thanks to the heroic efforts of our agent Stephanie Thwaites and the personal intervention of Random House Children’s CEO Philippa Dickinson.

Getting back our rights will allow me, Leo, Nikos and Martin to complete the Winter book and get on with the rest of the series. We’ll also be able to go looking for publishers in various territories who really love Mirabilis and will want to get behind it. The size of the publisher isn’t all that important – it’s their passion and commitment we’ll be looking for. For example, look at comments by Tim Jones here and Alistair Spalding here that show their enthusiasm for Garen Ewing’s brilliant Rainbow Orchid series (next book out July 5th). Leo and I fantasize about finding Mirabilis a home like that.

You diehards won’t have to wait, though. We’ve got 200 pages almost complete and we plan to release those in a limited collector’s edition right away. We’re also iPad junkies, and you can expect to see a version in the App Store alongside Leo’s charming Sweet Pea series. (My wife thinks Sweet Pea looks like an infant Estelle. Close, except Estelle at five years old would probably be building a formicarium in her wardrobe instead of deciding what to wear!)

On top of that, what I’d really like is to get Mirabilis out in comic book form. Book One neatly slices into eight 25-page instalments. I’m not sure yet how Mirabilis: The Comic #1-#8 would dovetail with an iPad or print collector’s edition, much less what the eventual publisher would think about it. But a tiny part of the story was originally serialized in Random House’s weekly DFC comic two years ago, and that didn’t hurt – in fact, netted us several thousand blog hits.

And you know I mocked up those “Mirus Comics” covers a while back? Those might soon be a reality. My ten-year-old self is going to be ecstatic.

Getting this show on the road

We promised to reveal news of the graphic novel publishing schedule this month. The exact dates have yet to be firmed up, but the UK edition of the Winter book will be released either June or Sep/Oct next year.

That's a bit of a wait but it's par for the course in publishing, where books are not infrequently printed up in the Far East and the binding is done on board the ship bringing them back to Europe. As consolation, if we can arrange to get on with Spring reasonably promptly, you could be holding that just a few months after the first book.

In the meantime, we're going to see about bringing you a few more episodes on the main Mirabilis site.

Mirabilis graphic novel

New news – and something we’ve been eagerly waiting for. Our publisher (David Fickling) tells us that he will be able to give us a firm release date for the first Mirabilis graphic novel “very soon” now, ie within a month.

The Winter book is about 190 pages long, so possibly Random House will want to release that in two volumes. Knowing how distribution can end up uneven across the country, I’d prefer it to be just one book. But as it’s full colour throughout and should be on fine quality paper, we’ve got to be aware of pricing. Better two volumes for £11.99 (guessing, there) than one great whopping thing with a price tag of £25 to frighten off all but the wealthy few.

The story is broken down into chapters, each 20-25 pages long like a regular comic book. In fact, I can tell you now what they are:

#1: “The World Turned Upside Down”
 #2: “The Wrong Side of Bedlam”
#3: “Standing On The Shoulders of Giants”
 #4: “Fire and Sleet and Candlelight”
#5: “The Darkest Hour”
#6 “Saints and Sinners”
#7: “A Ribbon Across the Sky”
 #8: “Saltwater and Ashes”
#9: “Everything Changes”

The way publishing works, even though the Winter book is almost complete right now, we’re still looking at next summer at the earliest before it’s on the shelves. So, if it’s up to me, we’ll release those chapters as monthly 25-page comic books in the run-up to the trade paperback edition. Not the internet sales model that the DFC tried, though; instead it would be published under licence to an existing comic book publisher.

Okay, given the niche distribution that “pamphlet comics” get these days, a release in that form is not going to make millions. But it would help build a good head of steam for the tp release - and, as a bonus, the revenue just from the monthly comic sales would probably more than cover production costs. Everybody wins.