Red Wombat Studio

November 2009

Well, shit.

Robert Holdstock, author of books like The Hollowing and Mythago Wood died this morning.

His books were mythic and tricky and difficult to read–he wasn’t a comfortable author–and they left me with a nervous queasy unsettlement and fragments of spectacular imagery. The Hollowing was a powerful influence on what eventually became Gearworld. (I bought it probably fifteen years ago because of the John Jude Palencar cover…) If you imagine one of Lovecraft’s is-this-really-happening narrators dealing with mythic archetypes instead of Old Ones, that’s about as close as I can describe. (I suggest reading one before you go out and buy all of them–if you like it, you’ll love it, but it’s definitely not for everybody.)

My sympathy for his family, and also for all the fans out there who can no longer hope for a return to Mythago Wood.

I am all fat on turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes and homemade mac and cheese. And pie. And wine.

It was a good Thanksgiving. Well, the beagle tried to climb on everybody and generally proved that we are the owners of a horribly untrained dog, which fills me with abiding shame, but I drowned it in pie.*

Now I kinda wanna go play old video games and roll around on the bed being fat and lazy.

Meanwhile, since you’re likely also well-fed and feeling just slightly queasy from eating too much, it’s the optimal time to inflict Mildly Horrible Sketches on you! Horrible Horrible Things

Blargh. Took a nap, had one of those weird complicated dreams that meander around and around, and at one point I was attempting to explain my feelings about the book Nation to my former stepfather and then driving around looking for parking and a minute later I found myself as a young boy playing a grand piano in the middle of a jungle, while a giant boar slept on the ground barely a foot away, and if I stopped playing, the boar was going to wake up and go rampaging. Which was an interesting visual, anyway, and one of those weird dichotomies where you’re watching the scene from outside, and at the same time, you’re staring down at your hands on the keyboard playing the Dies Irae and feeling a strange bleakness because you know you can’t keep playing the piano forever and sooner or later the giant pig is going to wake up and devour you, which is of course one of those universal fears Freud was always on about.*

Now my mouth feels fuzzy.

*Possibly he might have couched it in different terms.

Great Googly Moogly

Okay, I’m reading about the dust-up about Harlequin (the romance writers, y’know) starting their own vanity publishing arm*, and as I go through the comments, every now and then one jumps out at me and breaks my heart into tiny little pieces.

These comments say things like "I know you have to pay to get published…" or "Up until I read this thread, I didn’t realize you didn’t pay to get published."

Oh sweet god.

You are all very smart people of impeccable taste–or at least, you’re reading the blog, so I like to pretend–but just on the slim chance that any of you are not quite as informed on this topic as you could be–NO NO NO NO NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO.

The publisher pays you. ALWAYS. You do not pay the publisher. EVER. It does not cost the author to publish the book. The publisher does all that. They take the book and give you money. The only place you sign the check, to paraphrase, is on the back, is over the little line that says "Endorse here."

You don’t pay to get published. The publisher pays you for the privilege of taking your book. You invest time and energy and printer cartridges. The publisher always pays you.

(This is also why you don’t hire an illustrator–because the publisher hires them. And pays them. That is how it works.)

It’s okay if you don’t know this stuff. Don’t feel dumb. Publishing is weird and arcane and I still take royalty statements to my buddy Deb and go "What does this mean?" and I still don’t understand half of it. You’re not dumb. Much of this isn’t intuitive. You don’t have to take my word for it–find the author resource online of your choice. and ask questions. There is no need to be embarassed.

I have produced…uh…if we count Digger volumes…nine books through four publishers. One of the publishers is a very respectable small press, one is a starting-out-but-getting-there small press, and two are big giant scary publishers with New York offices and budgets bigger than a third world country.

All four of them pay me money. Sometimes they pay me lots of money (at least by my standards, which are quite modest) and sometimes they pay me a couple hundred bucks. The big houses can afford to pay me mondo advances, the small presses can afford to take me to dinner.** This is fine.

The point is, they all pay me. I don’t pay them. Ever.

The sum total I have spent on any book I have ever written was about two bucks worth of postage to send out the initial draft of Black Dogs, over a decade ago, and I did buy a decent pen in order to sign copies of Dragonbreath. (And by "decent" I mean like 2.99 for a pair. I am not a pen snob.) Then I lost the pen.

The only times money goes the other way is if I’m buying a couple of copies of Digger–I get free copies of each, of course, but sometimes I want to sell them at cons where Sofawolf’s not attending–and in this case, they just slap the wholesale price against my royalties. This is pretty normal, and the only example I can come up with off the top of my head. (Okay, no, wait, I sent a print to my editor once because she wanted a signed art print of the Nurk cover for her office. Technically I paid for that, but I didn’t stuff twenties in there or anything.)

I do not pay for those big publishing runs. Authors don’t. There’s a little under thirty thousand copies of Dragonbreath floating around out there. Total cost to me = $0.

If somebody is telling you that the authors do pay for these, they are either misinformed or…well…you’re smart wombats, you can figure out yourself why somebody might have a vested interest in believing that you give people money for this sort of thing and who might not have your best interests at heart.

Now. Self-publishing. This is something else. If you are self-publishing, then you know it up front. (If you have to ask if you’re self-publishing, there are problems already.) We can talk about this later and in lots of detail if anybody wants. Self-publishing is great for what it does well. I am a big fan of self-publishing. ( I myself have work in a self-published little anthology that our local comics group puts out every year, as a print-on-demand thing. You can buy it on Lulu, it’s got some nice stuff in it, a couple of the members sell the occasional copy at conventions. I didn’t buy any of the wholesale copies because I don’t have table space in my usual con kit. Cost to me = $0. Profit if I HAD sold them at the table = maybe a buck or two. It’s a neat little thing to have, but none of us are making money on it, and it’s not a publishing credit I’d take seriously. I could talk about this longer, but we’re already running long.) Self-publishing is kinda like merchandising. I would self-publish a webcomic the same way that I would get a run of T-shirts printed, I’d sell them at cons or over the internet, like T-shirts, and I would expect to make approximately the same amount of money.

So. To recap. They pay us. That’s how it works. If you are paying them, then something is very very wrong.

If you’re self-publishing, things are a little more complicated, but you should really only be self-publishing for stuff that self-publishing is good at. If you want to be a bestselling fiction author, that’s not something self-publishing is particularly good at. If somebody tells you that self-publishing is good for that and you can make zillions if you give them your manuscript and a lot of money, they are predators and need to be ridden out of town on a rail.

Vanity publishing, which is what Harlequin Horizons is offering, is a scam. They take your money by the fistful and dangle this promise that if you pay enough, you can be a Real Writer. Well, Real Writers get paid, they don’t pay. Nobody is so bad a writer that they deserve to lose money for it. If you just want readers, put it on the internet, if you just want a physical copy, go to Lulu, but please, PLEASE don’t believe that writers have to pay to be successful. Please.

*There are lots of posts and comment wars. The fast and amusing one is here. The gist is that they’re implying heavily to the marks that this is a Real Book with Harlequin and then turning around and telling their real authors, who are Not Amused, that no, no, it’s not, nobody should think that, and the books won’t actually be on shelves or anything, we just kinda found a way to make money off the slush pile. It is very sad and makes me very angry.

**And in no way shape or form should you think I’m raggin’ on the small presses–I am deleriously glad they exist because a big New York house wouldn’t ever publish Digger, there’s just not the demand. Small presses aren’t small because they can’t be big, it’s because they publish things where demand is small, but often very passionate. I do not know how many copies of Digger have sold, but I’m sure all for volumes are less than the initial, not-very-large-by-industry-standards print-run of Nurk. That doesn’t mean Digger’s bad, it’s just specialized.

Back from MFF!

Whew!

Con was exhausting, as they always are, but pretty good. Sales weren’t fantastic–art show was down for everybody, I’m told, and I have nothing to judge table sales/commissions against other than Anthrocon, which is my biggest con of the year, so by those standards, it wasn’t all that hot–alas, without being a GoH and having them actually pay for my hotel room, I still can’t quite afford to do it as a yearly con. I wouldn’t lose money, but I’d be working like a dog for the weekend and the two-week run-up to turn a couple hundred bucks worth of profit, and my time is growing increasingly, terrifyingly precious, so it’s not quite feasible yet.

I hold out hope for the future, though–they’re growing like gangbusters, and I’ll definitely try it again in a few years!

Practicalities aside, it was a VERY fun convention. Hung out with the artist cadre, got drunk with had sushi with and spent Sunday evening with

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dark_natasha

who decided, with the extreme punchiness that one gets at the end of a con, that I needed to learn to draw vore.* I retaliated by deciding that she needed to draw phalloi, which she took to like a duck to water. We only had a couple of sketchbooks lying around though, so Kevin, who had never had a sketchbook before at a con and didn’t really know what to do with it, is now the very proud owner of one that has things. Terrible, terrible things.** The con staff started coming up to the guest suite to see this sketchbook. (Personally, I think Natasha’s phalloi nursing a litter of little…phallets?…was genius…) He is very happy. (A number of other artists who wandered in also contributed, but in the interests of preserving their reputations, I shall not name names.)

And we came home. Apparently the birds came out in force while we were gone–at this moment, I can see three kinds of woodpecker, including the big pileated, and so far this morning there’s been a flycatcher and a kinglet and some random sparrows and a flock of juncoes and the usual more common garden birds.

Now, to get ready for Thanksgiving…and FC in two months…

*A type of porn where people get off on things being eaten by other things. And being happy about it. You see it in some furry art and a lot of R. Crumb drawings and hentai and barbecue signs and don’t ask why people find this hot because I haven’t a CLUE. Mind you, I don’t get the inflation stuff or the macro stuff either, but hey, different strokes, haggis shortages, etc.

**Once you’ve drawn it, you can’t undraw it!

Ladies and gentlemen, squids and wombats, it’s That Time Of Year Again.

Christmas shopping time. Yup.

Prints are great! Prints are inexpensive, they’re signed, and if you pop ’em in a nice mat, they look like you spent quite a lot of time and/or money and they’re totally personal in that "I knew you were the kind of person who would appreciate penguin barbarians!" sorta way.

If you want to order prints–and I hope you do!–I beg you to get your orders in now. Today would be great! Tomorrow is also awesome! At any rate, before December is best! Head to www.redwombatstudio.com and order! If you have a print you want that’s not there, drop me a line–I’ll get it uploaded, or I’ll get you a quote and we’ll do it the old fashioned way by e-mail. Regardless…the sooner the better. Mail gets awfully backlogged out here come December, and it’s much easier to guarantee arrival on time if you order before December.

I can take orders through the first week of December on print orders in the US–I really can’t stress enough that for international orders, if you want ’em on time, order very soon! I beg of you! I’ll do my best, but stuff gets SLOW at the border!

Thank you very much.

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  • I write & illustrate books, garden, take photos, and blather about myriad things. I have very strong feelings about potatoes.

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