ESSAY // 2.20.03

BRINGING ANARCHY TO THE MASSES
by Patrick Neighly

Editor's Note:

This essay is the first in a series of self-publishing guidelines by Patrick Neighly, co-author of Anarchy for the Masses. This series is presented as a companion piece to Harris O'Malley's regular "Doing the Work" column. While Harris' column tends to focus on the creator's perspective, Patrick will be guiding the reader through the business side of self-publishing. So as you can see, this isn't stepping on anyone's toes, and there's really no need for Harris to hunt me down and kill me.

Do you hear that Harris? There's no reason.

DC

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ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES is to blame, really.

About four years ago, I made an off-handed comment to a friend that what THE INVISIBLES really needed was some sort of companion piece, a guide to the labyrinthine references writer Grant Morrison was tossing into each new issue at alarming speed. Someone should write one, I said.

A year later, THE INVISIBLES was hurtling through its final volume, and I found myself discussing the same matter with the same friend. And again, the comment was made. There was a pause on the other end of the phone as both of us had the same thought simultaneously. If nobody else will do it, why don't we? So we contacted Grant Morrison, who agreed that the idea had merit and invited us to interview him in Glasgow. We spent the next few months tracking down phone numbers and email addresses for the series' artists and editors, buying books for research and whittling down the concept of the book to a core series guide. Everything was falling together…until we tried to shop it to a publisher. Every approach to DC was met by a blanket of silence. A few smaller publishers at least responded to our pitches, turning the book down with veiled hints that it wouldn't sell.

What the hell, we thought. We might as well just put it out ourselves.

In May 2002, ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES was finally released. And then something curious happened. This book, which we had only really written because we wanted to read it, sold out almost instantly. After the expense of publishing the book, we had no marketing budget. There were no ads, no buzz, and no effort to alert retailers of the book. And it sold out. And then we got the email from Disinformation.

Disinformation is a sort of the AOL Time Warner of the counterculture, with a popular Web portal, television series, publishing business and, it turned out, the rights to make an INVISIBLES movie. Would we, they wanted to know, be interested in licensing ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES to them?

This brings us to comic books. Specifically, to my forthcoming first comic book, GREAT APE. As I approach the publication of this comic, I realize that my experience with ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES taught me two things:

1) If you want to read a book, write it.

2) The publishers don't know the market any better than you do.

Both of which mean that if you've got a story to tell that doesn't involve corporate-owned properties, there's nothing stopping you from telling it on your own. This isn't a slam on the larger small press guys out there (and anyone outside of the big five is a small press, if we're speaking in real world terms). It's just that you can do the job yourself and, with a little bit of passion and a lot of hard work, you can probably serve yourself better than somebody else could.

So when the characters and story for GREAT APE popped into my head, it didn't even occur to me to shop it around. I found an artist and got to work. The resulting 32-page comic made its debut this month at the Alternative Press Expo released through my Mad Yak Press imprint.

There are probably dozens of resources on self-publishing comics scattered around the Web. Some of these, like Larry Young's early SAVANT column True Facts, are even available in print at your local comic shop. But I'm going to be a bit controversial and admit that these resources didn't really give me the information I needed for ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES or GREAT APE. Although the writers generously shared their experiences, in my opinion most of them kept their cards too close to their chest, simultaneously helpful and defensive. Where were the hard numbers? It seemed to me that these writers were willing to offer generalities, but shied from specifics lest they embarrass themselves or create viable competitors.

So, in keeping with "If you want to read something, write it," I've decided to tell you the story of GREAT APE, warts and all. When that Diamond order comes in and says QTY 17 in the little box, you're going to know about it. I'll tell you my costs and margins and, if they materialize, profits. GREAT APE will become that book, the one every aspiring self-publisher can point to and say, "That's the case study."

At the end of these essays, you'll know as much about GREAT APE as I do.

The new edition of ANARCHY FOR THE MASSES: THE DISINFORMATION GUIDE TO THE INVISIBLES is being released in February in the UK and March in the US, featuring additional interviews, corrected text, previously unpublished INVISIBLES artwork and a new cover by Frank Quitely.