A Failure to Submit pt1

Around November I finished the first issue of Bait. After numerous edits, which I realized would never end as I grew more critical with every glance, I decided I needed to just finish this book. In my mind "finish" meant, send it to publishers because once it was in their hands, it was too late to make any changes. So I went online in search of every publisher I could find, in hopes of emailing them my book. In hindsight, I guess I was thinking I would just find a list of 100 publishers and mass email them my book only to be bombarded by a series of responses begging to print my book. It did not work like this, not at all. What I found out was that most publishers won't even accept submissions albeit emails. I checked most of the top independent comic book publisher and most won't even look at unsolicited submissions. So pretty much they want established creators only. Which I kind of understand, they don't want to be hammered with countless zombie books (cough, my book will probably have a zombie in it.) but in doing so also turn away many legit creators just trying to get a start in a very difficult profession. One bright spot was that I did find out that powerhouse Image Comics did accept online submissions. I kind of thought Image was a little to prestigious for an untested creator like myself but fuck it, i'll give it a try.

They wanted to be sent a "pitch". This is something that took me a week to write up, as it ended up being way more difficult than I ever thought it could be. The process of doing a comic book pitch seems to be a somewhat mysterious process, one I'll talk about some other day. The pitch took me forever to do. Imagine taking a book which you've spent months creating a world full of interweaving stories and themes and having to compress that into a few paragraphs, it's tough. Though it is necessary, you can't expect a publisher with stacks of books to blindly read an essay about a story that only has a small percentage of a chance to even interest him or her, it's your job to quickly grab their attention with just a few sentences. It was a struggle to pick apart my story and try to take something that I pride on it's complexity and make it so.. simple. I spent so much time on this, though later on I found out this didn't even matter. end part 1

this helped me locate a lot publishers and what they wanted.  Submission Guidelines