There’s this thing called Spot UV, or Spot Gloss, or sometimes Spot Varnish. This is the technical term for making part of a matte book cover shiny. Sometimes what people choose to make shiny is the title! Or maybe there’s a central character. Or something! Using Spot UV is a technique that designers apply to Read the Rest…
I recently got an autobio comic from one of our authors which indicated that perhaps we weren’t making the distinction between sales and marketing clear enough. Sometimes these things are a bit difficult to parse — and it doesn’t get easier to understand when you realize that every publisher tends to handle the marketing/sales distinction Read the Rest…
(ganked from The Smithsonian Institution. You will probably be as old as this man is now by the time your book gets published. Or at least feel like it.) It takes a long time to publish books. Probably this is because we publishers are cruel, unreasonable people whose goal in life is to thwart authors Read the Rest…
(image ganked from The New York Public Library) Occasionally, authors ask: should they hire freelance publicists? If you are an author and having similar thoughts, the first thing to do is call or e-mail your publisher. Ask them if they can explain to you what they’re already planning to do to publicize your book. You Read the Rest…
(the latest in our series of First Second-skewedly-explains-the-book-industry-to-comics posts) You may remember the Scholastic Book Fairs from your childhood — I do. Once in the spring and once in the fall, our elementary school gym would take out the sports (yay!) and fill up with tables covered in books (double yay!). My parents would give Read the Rest…
(photo ganked from the Smithsonian Institution; Annie Jump Cannon doesn’t actually work here — we wish! But it would probably be a waste of her astronomy-related skills) Hey guys! In the past few months, since we’ve been talking more about our submissions process on our blog and on twitter, we’ve noticed that we’ve been getting Read the Rest…
(photo ganked from the DC Public Library; Roosevelt’s Secretary of War in no way works for First Second, even in his current zombie form) Here at the First Second home offices, we get a number of e-mails and letters from people who would like to get a job at First Second. Here is the short Read the Rest…
Taking on a different part of the internet’s Kickstarter kerfuffle, we’ll start with this. The end result of Kickstarter is that cool cartoonists whose work we personally admire (and possibly some other people too) are getting money to do projects that they really want to do. How neat is that? We approve of people getting Read the Rest…
(ganked from The New York Public Library) Dear [Major Media Outlet], Frustrated by several years of calling, e-mailing, mailing and carrier-pidgeon-ing copies of our current and upcoming books (accompanied by witty and insightful press releases) to you and never receiving coverage in your publication, much less a syllable of response from you, I am quitting Read the Rest…
From the desk of Zack Giallongo, the author of Broxo Last week, I presented my thoughts on how I draw Broxo, the wiry boy barbarian. This week is the yin to his yang, Zora. From the start, I didn’t want Zora to be a shy princess or a weak damsel in distress. Zora is tough Read the Rest…
