This book had a long, winding road to travel, but it’s finally here! A “typical” (ha! as though there is such a thing as typical in this business) graphic novel starts life as a script, then it gets arted, then sent to the printer, and then, pretty soon, it’s a book.

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong had a slightly longer, odder path. It started life as a prose novel by Prudence! And then Faith made it a script! And then Faith made it full of art! And then Faith and Prudence made it a web-comic, and NOW, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

It’s a book.

And it’s pretty freaking great. You’re looking at yer run of the mill screwball teen comedy by way of political farce, odd-couple friendship, robot-death-match, dysfunctional family drama, cheerleader death-squad adventures. Basically: the best thing ever.

Spoiler alert: everything that can go wrong, does.

Spoiler alert: that’s a good thing.

New book!

Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel Boxers & Saints is a diptych — a story told in two books.  And we have just gotten it into the office!

Here’s the cover of the box set.  All the type is on the spine!

And a side view of the spine.

Here’s a full-on view of the box set spine.  It is extremely attractive!

The top!  This is where we put information about what the book is about.

Here’s the back of the boxed set.

And a side view — you can see the spines of the two books in the box.

Here’s the full-on view of the book’s spines.  You will notice that they match!  Even the ampersand.

And the bottom!  This is where we put the logo.  And, you know, information like price and ISBN and stuff.

The boxed set emerges from the wrapping, like Venus from the foam of the sea. . . .

(This was a very dramatic moment for us, guys.)

And here’s the box with the two books peeking out the side!  Double-frown from our Saints protagonist!

And the reverse image — the backs of the books peeking out from the boxed set.  They’ve got some great quotes on them which you will be seeing pictorally soon!

And here’s the box without the books in it.  You can see that the cover image wraps around — and that the box is made of cardboard!

Here’s the cover image for the actual book of Boxers.  It’s like the box, but with more text!

And the back cover, with promised excellent quotes.

And the front flap, which has gods on it!

Here’s an early interior page from the book.

Here’s the cover of Saints — it’s like the box, but with more helpful text!

And the back cover.

Here’s the front flap from Saints.

Here’s an interior page from Saints.

Most of Saints is told in black and white, but it has some color highlights, indicating that the main character is having a religious vision.  Here’s one of those.

Boxers & Saints comes out in September.  It’s going to be really amazing, guys.

(This photo is from the Smithsonian Institute and was taken in 1918; as it is from the past, these were probably not blogger review copies.  Sorry, bloggers!  You only exist in the near-present past.)

‘This review copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for a fair and honest review.’

This is a statement that I’ve been seeing pop up on the bottom of a number of review sites recently.  Presumably it’s there to get the legal rigamarole out of the way and not cause embittered influenced book-buyers to rise up and sue a site because they didn’t realize that publishers sometimes give reviewers books for free.  And I’m totally fine with the not-getting-sued disclaimer.  Please, book websites — try not to get sued as much as is legally necessary to protect yourselves!  If you did get sued, we would be sad for you.

However!  I do want to be clear about my review-copies-sending-out policy, because it doesn’t exactly fall into line with this statement.

I send out lots of review copies.  Some of them are to people who request books; some of them are to people I think would like the books.  To none of them do I send anything resembling the directive, ‘by receiving this book in the mail, you have agreed to write a review.’

Reviewers to whom I send books are not obligated to write reviews!  In fact, if they get books from me in the mail and they hate them, I would probably prefer that they didn’t write any review at all.  Even if a reviewer gets a book and feels bland and vaguely indifferent towards it, I’ll probably be like, ‘how about you review a nice book from me that you thought was awesome instead of forcing yourself to write something vague and indifferent about this book — I’ll find someone else who loves it to cover it.’

To be clear, I’m not stopping anyone from writing a review — if reviewers hate a book and want to write about it, that’s totally fine.  If reviewers feel bland and indifferent about a book and want to write about it, that’s fine too.  But if a reviewer gets a book from me and doesn’t want to write a review because they didn’t like it, because they feel that it doesn’t suit their audience, because they don’t have time for it, because they can’t fit it in with the rest of their content thematically that week, you know what?

Those are all perfectly reasonable reasons not to review a book, and I’m fine with that.

On to the second part of the legal disclaimer — ‘a fair and honest review.’

We all appreciate fairness and honesty.  Mostly it’d be nice if people were fair all the time, and moderately honest, too (but still tell us that our cooking tastes delicious and that we always wear hats well — it’s true, right?).

However.  We are not the fairness and honesty police.  If a reviewer starts a review with, ‘this is the best book ever!’ for the second time that month, we’re not going to come after them.  It’s hyperbole, okay?  And there are a number of other literary tactics that are perfectly reasonable things to be using in reviewing — purposefully provocative statements, feigning one viewpoint and reversing in another paragraph, writing a purposefully incendiary review from the perspective of a literary character (Miss Manners does not like 20th century morality!), etc.

You know what?  Those are all fine with us.  We care more about reviews being thoughtful and interesting than whether they are perfectly fair and honest.  (And what does ‘fair and honest’ even mean?  To be truly fair about a book do you have to read it comparatively to the rest of the YA light fiction coming out this year?  To be truly honest, do you have to point out the single typo?)

In conclusion: an accurate footnoting legal statement for any books provided for review by First Second would not mention fairness or honestly or other saintly characteristics — or any reviewing obligations.

Instead it would say, ‘A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher.’

(This photo was taken from the George Eastman House.  Surprisingly, the person in the photo is actually a publisher — Robert Collier!  Probably, however, you would not like to have him as your publisher as he is — sadly — now deceased.  Zombie!Publisher?)

There is a terrible publishing moebius loop that new authors frequently find themselves caught in.

Many publishers don’t take unsolicited submissions.  That means that to get published by them, you have to have an agent.

Many agents don’t take on authors as clients without the author having at least one book published, or at least a deal for a book.  That means to get an agent, you already have to be published.

(It’s like the getting-your-first-job dilemma!  You have to have past experience to get a job . . . but you have to get a job first to have past experience.  Augh!)

So what do you do if you’re an author and you want to get published?

First, let’s have some perspective.

I don’t know a lot of editors who personally edit more than twenty books a year.  If an editor has been in the business for over ten years, they probably have that twenty books/year mostly filled by authors that they’ve been working with for the past decade, with only one or two slots per year open for new authors.  To get in one of those slots, having a lot of visibility is required — either having an agent, having a book deal already, or winning an art/writing competition, being virally popular online, etc.  (We recommend you read this useful post by Maggie Stiefvater about this aspect of publishing.)

If you’re not that award-winning, agent-having person, here are four things you can do to increase your chances of getting a publishing deal.

The first thing to realize here is that getting a book deal takes some effort, just like getting a job does.  Would you expect a job in marine biology just because you got a degree in it?  Maybe first you’d have to get an internship, do some volunteer work, do some temp work, etc. — you’d have to learn about the field and gain some experience and connections.  The same thing is true in publishing — you don’t just get a book deal because your work is wonderful; you get a book deal because your work is wonderful and you know how to promote yourself and who to talk to about your work.

Meet people who work in publishing.

Meeting people who work in publishing sometimes takes some doing, but it’s typically possible.

If you live in the New York area, you’re set!  It is full of people who work in publishing; just show up at some book events and talk to the authors and publishers you meet about what their jobs are like and what your hopes are.

If you’re not in New York City, you’re by no means out of luck.  Though you may not be in the position of meeting someone who works in publishing every time you walk down the street, your area probably has some libraries, some bookstores, and some local authors.  Reach out to those people and befriend them.  Become a regular patron of the local library and shop at your local bookstore.  When you become friendly with these librarians and booksellers, talk about your career hopes and ask if they have advice.  Speaking as a publishing person, we do get submissions sent to us by librarians and booksellers we know who have had good work come their way.  We think it’s super when that happens!

Write to or e-mail your local authors and ask them if they have time for an informational interview about how how their career happened.  Most authors we know are very nice and they want to encourage aspiring authors.  That’s you!

You should also be aware of any larger publishing-related events that are happening in your area.  The Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators exists just about everywhere, and they’re basically a ‘how-to-get-published’ for kids books authors; they have regular meetings and conferences.  There are also a number of other writer’s conferences around the United States; you can reach out to them as well.  Check in with the Creative Writing/MFA program at your local university — maybe the professors there have classes that’d be helpful to you (and connections that would be helpful to you).  There’s probably some kind of book festival in your state — you should check that out and see what kind of authors and publishers you can meet at that.  And there are mystery and science fiction and comics conferences all over the place all the time.  Even if some of these events, stores, or libraries aren’t in your backyard, it’s worth driving a few hours to make these connections — this is your career you’re talking about, after all!  Putting in some effort is probably necessary to make it work out the way you’d like.

Also, there’s the internet!  It’s full of publishing people.  You can interact with it.

Basically, this comes out to: do as much as possible to integrate yourself into the literary landscape of the area you live in.

Do research about publishing.

Everyone hates form letters.  I myself hate form letters.

So how do you think an editor — or an agent — feels if they, the person who you are expecting to commit to dedicating the next quarter-century of their career to working with, gets a letter from you headed, ‘Dear Sir or Madam,’ indicating that you don’t know the first thing about them, what kind of books they edit, or even what their name is?

There are a lot of easy resources about the publishing industry that any aspiring author should spend time reading — Publisher’s Weekly, Shelf Awareness, Media Bistro, and Publisher’s Lunch all provide information about editors, authors, and publishing deals.  If you’re interested in becoming a published author, you should take a look at those websites and subscribe to those e-newsletters, because the best thing you can possibly do for yourself is get daily e-newsletters about the publishing industry and read them all until you have a clear familiarity with who all the publishers are and who the editors who work for them are.

Finding the right agent and editor for your book is a difficult process.  You have to find someone with the same areas of interest and the same style, likes and dislikes as you — it’s like finding the perfect book, the one you always want to re-read.   Those books only come around once in a while — and it’s the same thing with agents and editors.  You should set high standards for the agents and editors you work with and research them before you get in touch — do you like the books they’ve agented and edited?  Have you talked to other authors of theirs and have they had good things to say about their working experience?  Do you personally like them and want to trust them with the next decade of your career?

That isn’t an exaggeration — that is literally what you’re putting in the hands of your agent and editor when you sign up with them.  (This is also what your agent and editor are taking on, so think about that when you’re composing your introductory letter to them, too — you have to convince them that you’re a person they want to start a long-term professional relationship with.)  Doing your research first means that you’ll be e-mailing the agent or publisher whose background you’ve researched, who you’re following on twitter and whose blog you’ve been reading, to say: you are the one.

Accept that it might take some time.

Is being an author your dream job?  That’s wonderful!

Sometimes it takes time for dream jobs to become a reality, even if you’re the perfect person for them.  Publishing is not one of those industries that can afford to give money to every person who comes by with a proposal that has potential — we, for example, have rejected perfectly good books because ‘we have two other books dealing with this subject that we’re already publishing this year.’

Waiting is almost everyone’s least favorite thing (it’s certainly mine, aside from sharks), but doing freelance work, building a portfolio, constructing a presence on the literary scene, making connections with authors and teachers and librarians — those are all invaluable things for any author-to-be, and they all take some time to do.  In many cases, it might be years before you find the perfect idea and the perfect editor to match it with.

In the meantime, publish online, self-publish, publish with small presses, print your work as zines or mini-comics, and practice not becoming a cauldron of resentment because no one has recognized your genius.  This is one of those careers that takes time to build; it’s important to keep a positive attitude towards publishers and the publishing industry even if they’re not publishing you.  In two years when a publisher offers you a book deal, probably you don’t want your first response to be, ‘Why didn’t you offer me this deal two years earlier?  I hate you and everything you stand for!’

We recommend here the positive-attitude-inducing strategy of frequently reading excellent books (also an excellent way to keep up with the industry).

Write the best book you can, then write the best pitch you can.  Send it to the people in publishing who you think would be the best people to agent or publish it.

First Second doesn’t take unsolicited submissions.

What does that mean?

It means that we don’t guarantee that we’ll read every submission that comes in, or get back to the authors who send them to us.  It doesn’t mean that we toss every unsolicited submission we get into the garbage — it means that you may send something to us and then never hear from us again because we looked at it and it didn’t fit in with our list and then we didn’t have time to get back to you.

There are a lot of other publishers who have similar systems.

But if someone sends us a submission and they’re recommended by their local bookstore, who we know — if they follow us on twitter and comment on our facebook page frequently enough so that we recognize their name — if they’re recommended by their local librarian, who we know — if they’re recommended by an author we know who taught them creative writing or just is a fan of them and their work — if they’ve had short fiction or mini-comics or anthology work published that we’ve heard about or seen — if we met them at a conference we went to — we are just about 100% likely to open that submission and read it and get back to that author (even if it’s to say, ‘this book isn’t for us’).

If a publisher gets an amazing submission in and the project doesn’t have an agent, it may take some time to uncover it, read it, and get back, but no one is going to say, ‘this project doesn’t have an agent, but it’s amazing — we can’t possibly publish it.’  At many publishers, those amazing unsolicited submissions get buried in the pile of stuff that comes in (I think I got four submissions today, and that’s just stuff that came directly to me — and I’m not even an editor).  That’s where those industry connections you’ve been making come in — getting your submission a place at the top of that pile.

If your submission is really good, there will be a publisher who wants to publish it, and an agent who wants to represent you and your work.

So in conclusion — we recognize that this publishing moebius-loop of almost-unending misery is both confusing and frustrating.  We’re sorry about that.  But for first-time authors, unfortunately, there’s often not much you can do but ride it out — and start trying to crack the mysteries of the industry in the meantime.

(thanks to Joey Phelps for the post subject suggestion.)

(from the Nationaal Archief.  Yes, our early schedule drafts may indeed be just as incomprehensible as this one is.  What, you’re surprised?)

We finalize our publishing schedules over a year out.

What does that mean?

That means today, as I’m sitting at my desk, we’re assigning final publication dates in our schedule for our spring 2014 season — May, June, July, and August 2014.  (And actually, I’m writing this post on April 17th, so ‘today’ is actually ‘a week ago.’  We’re planning even further out than you thought!  It’s like a mind-vortex.)  And when I say ‘assigning final publication dates,’ I don’t mean seasons or months — I mean actual week-by-week dates on the calendar for every single book in that spring 2014 season.  We’ve been working on this version of the schedule for two or three weeks now; the dates will be final tomorrow morning.

So at this point, we have to be sure that these books are all definitely making these lists — that most if not all of the final art is finished if not turned in, the books have gone through our editorial process, we’re working on starting the conversation about cover design and figuring out the actual book design; I think at least one of these titles has already been completely laid out.

So we’re not sitting here, over a year out from the publication date, and saying, ‘well, we can publish BOOK X on June 17th, 2014, if the art is in by May 1st, 2014.  And we definitely-probably know that’s going to happen.’  We’ve got a final list of the books we’re publishing for spring 2014 with most of our materials in and we’re in the process of designing books out of them right now.

Rather than making our month-by-month or week-by-week scheduling decisions on the materials due-dates, we make them based on opportunities.  What does that mean?  Well –

Is a certain book a strong candidate for an extensive author school visit schedule?  We’ll want to publish it in the winter or in early fall so that the author can go talk to students in the classroom. If we’re publishing it in spring, it should go in the first possible release date.

Does a book’s author have a strong relationship with a convention?  We’ll plan to publish the book in time for it to debut at the show.

Are we publishing a book for the same age/audience/media outlets on that same day?  Maybe we should move this book to another month so we don’t have to make booksellers or media or consumers chose between two great books of ours to feature.

Are we publishing five other books on the same day?  Maybe we shouldn’t do that, so we’re able to give each book its time in the spotlight.

Does the book have a seasonal hook?  Is it about love (Valentine’s Day) or summer (summer books come out in early spring) or school (September)?  We should put it in a month where stores and media will be able to best feature it.

Once we’ve performed this tightrope balancing act with our whole season of books, it’s pretty difficult for us to change our publication dates.  Our schedules are like those mobiles that are all hanging interdependent pieces — if you move BOOK R out of May to July at the last minute, what can we switch to fill its place so that we’re not accidentally publishing four books in July and only one in May?  And will BOOK J that we’re moving up now miss out on the opportunities that we were planning on for its July publication?

Why do we work this far in advance?  Well, one of the reasons is that we like being prepared.  (No, really).

We also work with a number of distributors and stores and schools and libraries who we want to be able to give accurate early information to when they need it so they can best sell and promote our books and nominate them for awards — in some cases, this can be as far as eight to twelve months before a book’s publication date.  We also print our color books in China, and we’ve got an extensive proofing process for all of our books (at least three rounds of proofs and one set of blues) after we send them to the printer, so the shipping and the proofing both take up a great deal of time.

In short: we want the books to be the best possible books, and we want to create a publishing schedule for them so they hit the time of the best opportunity for them to make a splash in the marketplace.

So we take a long view of things.

It’s convention season!

When you work at a graphic novel publisher, you attend a lot of conventions and a lot of small-press shows. And you start to notice patterns – you get a sense of what works and what doesn’t work for the folks who have tables at a show like MoCCA or TCAF or Stumptown or what have you. So with that in mind, a few friendly tips for folks who might be new to the scene.

1) Be at your table! Or if you leave for lunch or a meeting or a walk, don’t just abandon it. Have a friend or neighbor attend your table for you, or failing that, leave a note saying when you’ll be back. Your biggest fan might come by the moment you step away. Don’t leave her hanging!

2) Have your name visible somewhere at your table. Why else are you at a show if not to promote and sell your work? You’re shooting yourself in the foot if you make it harder for someone to make note of you… and to make note of your name. Related: put your name on your mini comics… preferably on the cover or inside front cover but for the love of Pete, put your name on it SOMEWHERE.

3) Do your homework! Are you planning to step away from your table (leave a note!) to pitch your work to some publishers at the show? Find out ahead of time who’s going to be there. Visit their websites. Talk to anyone you know who knows anything about them. Read up on them. Check out their catalogs and backlists. Does your work seem like it matches their sensibility? Do they accept submissions or portfolio reviews at shows? Try to find out as much as you can ahead of time – it will distinguish you from your peers.

4) Everyone loves mini comics! Well, not everyone. But lots of people do. If you have a stack of minis that you can afford to give away, consider handing a few copies out to artists, writers, publishers, and other people you admire. Very few people will turn down a free story, and you never know when getting your work into the right hands will pay off. Just remember to put your name on it.

(This page of text — which I have not closely examined for copy-edits — comes from The Smithsonian.)

I like things to be spelled correctly.   I like it when there’s subject-verb agreement.  I like not having to strain through punctuation errors when I read a book.

But do you know what?

If I get an e-mail from an author that says:

“Gina, was that interveiw at 9am EST?  It’s 9:15 and I still haven’t heard from them!”

Or an e-mail from a reviewer that says:

“I loved Astronaut Acadamy: Re-Entry — thanks for sending me a copy!  Can I do an interview with Dave?”

Or a manuscript submission where I read through the first two chapters of the book and find that one time, the author spelled ‘and’ as ‘nda.’

I don’t get upset.

Mostly, I don’t even notice.

Working in publishing, we at First Second spend all day staring at text.  Some days, I write multiple pages of copy, compose several letters, and send out hundreds of e-mails.  I hope I spell the book titles correctly 100% of the time.  Otherwise?  My subject/verb agreement starts getting a little shaky after e-mail 60 of the day.

You’ve probably seen something from me with a typo in it (like this blog, which I’m sure is riddled with typos).

Here at First Second, we do our very best to make sure that the books we publish have no typos in them.  We do this by reading and re-reading the designed manuscript, employing a copy-editor to read it, making the author reads it, and re-reading and re-reading after each new design pass with corrections.

That’s pretty important to us.

But we don’t put every e-mail or note we write through that same rigorous copy-editing process — what’s important there is the communication, not the spelling (though obviously we try to do our best on both fronts).

This is to say: if you sent us an e-mail and realize after you hit the ‘SEND’ button that there was a typo — don’t worry.  We’ll understand.  We do that sometimes, too.

(And while you’re at it, try to refrain from sending an e-mail saying, ‘OMG, most horrible typo ever, I am the WORST!’ unless the typo actually impedes us from correctly understanding your e-mail.)

An Earth Day post courtesy of Zack Giallongo, the author of Broxo.

Zack is our resident barbarian excerpt, because he wrote an absolutely barbarians-vs-zombies teen graphic novel for us last year.  So when he wrote to tell us that barbarians were the the greenest consumers around, we had no choice but to listen!

You may ask, how can you be as green as the barbarians were?

Zack will tell you. . . .

Maybe some day we can all be as green as the barbarians were!

(photo from the New York Public Library.  I’m not sure what branch of the library this is, but can everywhere have book balconies?  Clearly they are the best kind of balcony.)

A lot of people we talk to about books or jobs or just knowing more about the publishing industry (as it is a vast and also confusing industry) are in a state of ‘what is this industry, I don’t know it yet!’ which is a state we have some difficulty comprehending, because we tend to spend hours every day contemplating the publishing industry (possibly whilst simultaneously doing work, of course).

Why is it important for aspiring authors and publishing employees to know more about the publishing industry?  Won’t you learn about it as you go?

Well, yes — but before you get that first book deal, or that first job, wouldn’t it be nice to know what you’re getting into?  Wouldn’t you like to know if your boss-to-be is the protagonist of The Devil Wears Prada or if they’ve won the Eric Carle Museum’s award for a lifetime of great mentorship?  If you’re really into ‘New Adult,’ wouldn’t it be great to know if the publisher you’re pitching your book to has publicly derided the category?  If this paragraph has organizations or terms in it that you’ve never heard before, don’t you want to have an understanding of what they are — before you start interviewing for jobs or pitching books?

So!  If you are one of those people who wants to know more about the publishing industry (possibly with an eye to being part of it someday), here’s a quick informational list for you.

Publishers’ Weekly is a publishing industry publication.  They just write about publishing.  All the time.  If you get their daily newsletter, PW Daily, every day, and read it faithfully for a quarter-year, we guarantee you will gain a very reasonable understanding of the publishing industry.

PW also has some specialty e-newsletters just about things like comics, cooking, children’s books, religion, etc.  You should consider checking those out, too.

Shelf Awareness is another publishing industry publication, aimed specifically at booksellers.  They’re a great resource for you to learn about books that are currently coming out, awards and media that are occurring, and industry news.  Their daily newsletter is super, and it’s a good representation of what the outward-facing issues are in the industry right now.

For more-frequent-than-daily updates on the publishing industry, you can check out Media Bistro‘s blog.  They’ve got all sorts of information about the inside of the industry — and the outside too; their coverage includes book deals, but also book events, current media, and more.

Are you interested in learning about what books are selling to who?  Publisher’s Marketplace is your go-to source for information about book deals — including who’s buying what from which authors and how much they’re paying.  This is an especially valuable resource because as an author, you can know that you like a specific publishing house’s output — say, you really like Roaring Brook’s picture books.  But there are five editors at Roaring Brook who all acquire picture books — which one is doing the books that are most up your alley?

If you’re interested in comics specifically, The Beat, The Comics Journal, and The Comics Reporter are all blogs that update multiple times a day.  Between the three of them, you’ll get a moderately well-rounded sense of the comics industry.

Happy exploring!

I first came across Aaron Renier’s work in Spiral Bound, and with it developed an instant affection for his storytelling. I loved the readability and distinctness of his characters, the rambunctious, breathless pacing of the adventure, and the unique mix of influences that lends Renier’s work an instantly familiar mood.

When he joined First Second with The Unsinkable Walker Bean, Aaron brought all that and more to the Long John Silver genre—reinventing it in the process and producing a work that belongs in every collection of the very best perennial comics for young readers.

There are many qualities I delight in when I read Aaron’s pages. One of them is his generosity. As a writer and as an artist, he spills over with extra—extra story, extra details, extra discovery… And not just in his now famous “Waldo” spread… Click to enlarge and get lost inside this one:

Aaron Renier’s Walker Bean gives and gives and gives some more… Though he plays with all the tropes of the pirate yarn, he illuminates it with so many magic little flourishes that it becomes something uniquely his.

Renier’s panels yield their treasures over many readings, and with revisiting I especially feel the author’s exuberant, childlike pleasure at drawing, at inking, at telling his story…

Aaron Renier packs in an astonishing amount of invention into his books, and Walker Bean’s world is replete with animated objects, ancient creatures, and more devices and contraptions than you’d find in Diagon Alley… His sketchbooks alone are bewildering that way.

I’m so proud we publish Walker Bean and the next one is appearing a page at a time, and I can promise you, it’s every bit as magnificent.

Mr. Renier isn’t done giving.