Canister X – A.P. Fuchs: Zombie, Paranormal Romance and Superhero Novelist, Blogger, Artist, Publisher

In reply to the wonderful essay on Brian Keene’s website by Weston Ochse entitled, “The Great and Improbable Secret to a Great and Improbable Writing Career,” I said:

Are you true to your craft? Are you doing things to better yourself and understand the craft of writing?

Yes. Absolutely. Won’t claim perfection—who can?—but I write following the writing rules I know, staying true to the ones in stone, bending those that can be bent, and just being myself. I read everything from novels to non-fiction books, to comics and graphic novels, to poetry and news articles, magazines and more. I pay attention to their construction and try and apply those lessons to my own work and that of others when I edit them.

Do you seek out as many edits as possible? Note that an editor has to have some sort of training. Merely calling oneself an editor isn’t good enough.

Yes and no. I do believe in over-editing, that is, where you revise and revise until the whole thing starts coming apart like repeatedly cleaning a garment. The fabric can only take so much picking. But I do have an editing system: first three drafts are by me, fourth is by an editor, fifth is me going over his edits (of which I accept around 95% of them), sixth is another draft by me, then seventh is my wife as first reader who just reads to enjoy but marks down anything that jumps out. At that point, my books are pretty clean, and my editor is notoriously picky and hard to please.

If you’ve self-published, did you do it because it was on your own terms, or was it because you were too impatient for the impossibly slow and laborious publication process?

As a long time advocate of self-publishing—since 2004—I originally did it because I was duped into subsidy publishing via a vanity press in 2003. Was a nightmare start to finish, but ironically I fell in love with the book-making process and since my original goal was to be a self-published comic book creator—think Image Comics style—I simply applied my entrepreneurial spirit to writing and publishing books. It’s worked out well for me and it’s how I make my living, and this was before the Kindle hype and all that nonsense, you know, when the midlist dried up and midlisters self-pubbed out of desperation. Some found success, others didn’t. Now it’s a bandwagon, etc., and, it seems, new writers are self-publishing first before going traditional. Doing it all wrong, mind you, but doing it nonetheless. Some are lucking out and finding success, but most aren’t. I have a book on it coming out in June called, Getting Down and Digital: How to Self-publish Your Book, plug, plug.

My company has dealt with Simon and Schuster and the like. It’s fine, but for my own work, unless a really sweet deal came up, I’m better off going it alone. I also write niche-specific superhero stuff and some monster stuff so I’m not exactly doing mass market material. I was actually a guest at a writer’s conference a few weeks back and got some behind-the-scenes details about certain NY houses and what their writers go through. If anything, for me, it reaffirmed my decision to go it alone. I really don’t want to be a cog in someone else’s machine and pretend as if I’m really a writer staying true to his/her vision as a result. Money’s not my motivator. Whether I made six figures a year or just enough to live on, I don’t care. My goal has always been to support myself with my art, but dollars and cents don’t drive me—as in give me more, give me more—and I’m content with whatever comes my way. Money’s overrated anyway.

Are you true to yourself? Are you writing what you want?

See above. Absolutely. I tried to write to market as an experiment—did a trilogy of paranormal romances—to see if genre would affect sales. It didn’t. The joy of self-publishing is I can fool around like that. Got more stuff on the horizon. Are they popular ideas or sure fire ways to reach the masses and make money? Time will tell. Is reaching the masses and making boatloads of cash why I do this? No. If it happens, it’s a side benefit. If it doesn’t, hey, most artists—and I include writers in that label—have to duke out a living anyway. Publishing is a crapshoot. There is no secret formula. If there was, it would’ve gotten out by now and we’d all be doing it.

Good essay, Weston. Didn’t realize you were all the way up to book thirteen. Congratulations.

Recently I sent a letter to Dave Sim and one of the things within was my outline for how, at the time, I approached publishing my Axiom-man comic book series. The other day I got an email from the A Moment of Cerebus website along with a letter from Dave suggesting that Tim, the owner of the site, run my 8-step model. So I said yes and the 8-step model ran on the site today. I’ve copy/pasted the 8 steps here for archive reasons, but please visit A Moment of Cerebus for the article, Dave’s comment, and also for the other cool Cerebus-related stuff on that site.

Since my company is web-based, with 95% of books ordered being online (whether for print or eBooks), the remaining 5% sold at conventions and booksignings, and since I’ve been able to sustain a living for close to three years based on that, and given the state of tech these days, I think I’m onto something.

Though I’ve slipped recently due to a major burn-out but am now getting back on track, I agree that, as you’ve stated – can’t remember where – that when folks ask you for the secret to Cerebus’ success, you said keeping the book on time is the reason. I believe you. On-time books keep readers interested, give them their fix at regular intervals, and, assuming the sales are there, enables the creator to maintain a steady level of interest as he can sink all his time into his book instead of dividing the comic against a day job.

Here is my current model for Axiom-man. I’m open to any feedback and/or suggestions and/or “what you’re doing is crazy” comments:

1) Release the book on time in print, electronic download, and twice a week post a page from the comic on Mondays and Thursdays. The reason for the webcomic is to raise awareness of the character to help feed print sales and downloads, likewise, if folks like what they read, they will be apt to pick up one or more of my novels.

2) Forego Diamond for the print periodicals. Due to finances, discounts and such, I’m opting out of Diamond Distribution for the monthly book, instead releasing the copies of the comic for direct sale, short-running each issue at 300 copies. This cost enables me to keep the price low on the book and still make close to a buck an issue. Direct sales include direct ordering, conventions, booksignings, and trunk-of-the-car sales.

3) Release each print issue through Ka-Blam (which is like ComiXpress), and utilize their print and digital storefront at Indy Planet and Indy Planet Digital respectively.

4) Release each issue in digital format through as many channels as possible (Kindle, Nook, iPad et al.), treating each download as if they are the print counterpart. A sale’s a sale, after all.

5) Once a particular story arc is complete, collected into a graphic novel. Also, ala Mike Mignola, include a bonus story to set the graphic novel apart from the periodical book.

6) Use Diamond for graphic novel distribution.

7) Use my printer’s amazing distribution system to make the graphic novel available to all the online hotspots like Amazon.com and its sister sites, Barnes and Noble.com, and others. Also offer for direct sale, whether by order, conventions, booksignings, trunk-of-the-car sales, etc.

8) Offer the graphic novel at a fair price for digital download via all the same channels the periodical was. Perhaps offer the same direct as long as I can ensure proper shopping cart procedure and security through services out there that specialize in online digital product ordering.

Part of being a one-man-band, as you know, is time management as it would be all too easy to turn the running of the company into the fulltime job and not the creating of comics. All of what I mentioned above–aside from direct sales–is based on the do-the-work-once-than-don’t-worry-about-it model I’ve been using for eight years. This then frees up time for creating, marketing, and personal time with family. Might even be time for sleep, if you’re into that sort of thing. Har har.

Added for the sake of the article:

The idea(l), I think, is to cast as wide a net as possible distribution-wise without unintentionally getting yourself into a sea of paperwork and a big mess of places to keep track of, in turn losing yourself in the chaos and losing money and time as a result. Streamlining is so critical when it comes to being a one-man operation. I’ll keep an updated list of distribution channels on my blog How To Self-Publish Books & Comics The Right Way.

Here’s a complete run-down of what I’m working on personal project-wise.

Axiom-man: City of Ruin – Done and published. Came out beginning of November.

Redemption of the Dead, Undead World Trilogy Book Three: Technically done and published, released the same time as City of Ruin. Is not yet available via online outlets as it involves slightly different formatting for my usual printer than the one I used for the comic con crunch. Will be out sometime this month, though.

Axiom-man No. 3: Complete. Almost done airing on the webcomic site. Will be put into print via the new format early in the New Year.

Axiom-man No. 4: Written. Yet to be drawn.

Canister X Comix No. 4: Written. Yet to be drawn.

Collected Letters (not official title): in progress

Self-publishing How-to Book (not official title): in progress but partially published at How to Self-publish Books and Comics the Right Way

Movie Review Book (not official title): in progress

Zomtropolis: Hoping to make it my January book to finish and serialize here before publishing it in paperback and eBook.

As promised, I’m advising you a new article is up at How to Self-publish Books and Comics the Right Way.

This one shows some sales and dollar numbers.

Visit the link above to check it out. Thanks.

Spent the past while transferring over all the self-publishing, publishing and writing-related info from this site over to a new one to keep it all together/niche market it. It’s called How to Self-publish Books and Comics the Right Way: The Rantings and Ravings of a Veteran Self-publisher.

The site, a work-in-progress by it’s very nature, was set up because having been a do-it-yourselfer for so, so long, it bothers me that there’s a ton of misinformation about self-publishing floating around and writers are finding themselves trapped, confused, scared . . . well, you get the idea.

It’s time to set the record straight and so a new website is born.

I’ll post a link on this site when a new article goes up over there to keep you updated.

If you know of anyone who would benefit from How to Self-publish Books and Comics the Right Way, please send them over there and have them bookmark it. It is, and is going to be, a valuable resource, especially in this day and age when the information about publishing your own work can be so confusing.

Thanks. God bless.

Regular visitors of this site know that since about mid March I’ve been running the new Axiom-man comic book as a webcomic over at www.axiom-man.com

The idea of offering the comic free is to help increase public awareness of the character, and also tell a serious superhero story via the Web as I’ve read elsewhere that a serious superhero webcomic is hard to find.

At the same the webcomic runs–twice a week: Monday and Thursday–the book is also released more or less monthly as both a print comic and a downloadable digital one.

The hard reality of the current print comic climate is that, unlike the glory days of the late ’80s and ’90s, and even up until a few years back, the comic book shop market for indie comics has shrunk so considerably that they are extremely hard to find. Even some stores, as per the comment section of Terry Moore’s blog a while back, don’t even carry his stuff, and he’s right up there in terms of indie comic successes. Making things worse, Diamond Distributors, the only game in town to get your stuff into comic shops–again, unlike the glory days of the ’80s and ’90s–has raised the bar in terms of how much money your book has to bring in as a gross each month. Currently it’s at about $2500 and as per this report, which makes it about 1,667 orders needed to hit that number. Sure, if you’re a big name already, you’ll probably pull this off. If not and are unknown to the comic field like myself, then, well, have fun. Likewise, you have to keep that sales level at least at that amount to keep being listed month-to-month. Since–not always, though–a monthly series’ readership falls each month, again you have a major issue.

Yet there are so many creators out there who want to make comics for a living and not just as a hobby. My current challenge to myself is: can it be possible to carve out a sustainable comic book career, one that provides for oneself and family in today’s market?

Is it really Diamond or bust?

I love a challenge. In fact, my entire literary career is built on that. I’ve fought tooth and nail to make a career out of writing and publishing books. Even been homeless once. I’ve also lived in major poverty where my wife and I had no food in the house aside from a can of soup and no money for groceries. My folks would drop off a loaf of bread and other small items to see us through until the next maternity leave check came in. Hard times, but during those hard times, I was paving a road and laying the foundation for what would later be a career in publishing and being able to support my family with it. The price was a ton of sacrifice, hard work, no sleep, ridicule, condecension, financial uncertainty, and a whole other mess of stuff that could be an entire blog entry on its own.

So . . . that said, let’s get back to making a living doing comics. Is it possible nowadays? Especially if you’re a nobody in the field and have zero “name weight” to throw around?

I think there is. I also have zero data to back up this theory/ideal, but if I have learned one thing duking it out to have a creative career, is that, as Marty McFly said, “If you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.” This includes comics.

Quick side note: I refuse to take all the credit for my current career. I thank Jesus Christ first and foremost for being blessed enough to have such a career. I also thank the support of my wife and others.

If you talked to a marketing guru and asked how to be successful–in any field where something is manufactured–they’d tell you to “find out what people want, make it, then sell it to them.”

Makes sense.

But if you’re an artist–and without sounding pretentious as all get out–sure, you can make what people want, but the final product wouldn’t be as good as making what you want. So then the question becomes personal and you have to decide whether you’re going to go short or long term for other folks’ desires, or for your own.

After having done both, I’m sticking with the latter. If my heart and soul is going to go into a project, I better be passionate about it. I remember something Kevin Smith said a long time ago, something along the lines of, “If I like what I write, then odds are there is someone else out there like me who’ll like it, too.” Good advice. Of course, how many people are “like you” varies. (Actually, who else out there is like Kevin Smith?)

My new comic series, Axiom-man, is part of my life’s work, that is, when I leave this planet, I want a giant saga about a superhero to be left behind, one encompassing books, comics, audio books, etc., all done by a single creator. I also want this work to be true to the vision I have for it, which is not quite your usual superhero fanfare. The Axiom-man Saga, though chock full of superhero action, is also a life-and-times piece and chronicles the life of a superhero starting from when he first donned the tights at age 24. There’s drama, some of the daily mundane, introspection, romance, superpowers, and a pile of other stuff (including what it’s like to fly all the way down from Canada to Florida when you’re top flight speed is about 60km an hour).

The books are like that and I want the comics to be like that, too. I’m also taking a huge risk in the comic’s presentation since I’m heavily inspired by indie comics, namely independent, black-and-white books. The Axiom-man series is in black-and-white with a hand-colored cover. No digital. The inside has a touch of digital here and there, but nothing super fancy as I personally find today’s digitally-colored comics distracting and the overuse of gradients and effects dragging down the original artwork.

A black-and-white superhero book? Are you crazy? Well, maybe a little, depending who you talk to. So far as I know, Axiom-man is the first single-creator, long-term comics narrative done in black-and-white, and also the only one done by one creator. Not only is this cost-effective, but it’s also a smart choice in making the book stand apart. Of course, for some superhero readers, it might take some getting used to.

Anyway…

Below are some numbers and figures regarding the first issue. Though a monthly book, the figures below cover the first issue since its first page aired on the Web to its last page, cover-to-cover.

Webstats: 1,100 (equaling an average of 11.34 hits per day. Since my counter doesn’t tell me which are unique hits, let’s just assume that each repeat visit was by the same person.)

Money out: $416.59 (print costs, taxes paid not included in this total)

Money in: $33.30 (sales income, taxes collected not included in this total)

Profit: – $383.29

It’s a decent chunk of change to be in the hole, but the good news is a) the comic is still for sale and will move copies (I’m fairly well-known at C4 Comic Con), and it’s also available in digital via Kindle and that will be one sale perpetually b) I’m used to thinking longterm for this business. I’m also encouraged by what Dave Sim said when he talked about the early days of Cerebus. He said for the first couple years on the book, he would have made more money babysitting.

Comics is a marathon, especially when you’re an unknown comics creator jumping into the water.

Take the above as you will, but I thought it’d be fun to share this journey with you.

If you would like to help turn that negative number into a positive, Axiom-man No. 1 is available in both print and eComic through multiple venues. Please see the comic book store here for details and issue summary. Info on the second issue is also there. Thanks in advance for your support.

Feel free to sound off in the comments below. Perhaps we can all learn something from each other.

Just finished crunching my numbers for my personal book sales in 2011. I set out at the beginning of last year with a 5000-book goal. The Lord’s blessed me with more than that. Last year, I sold over 5850 Fuchs books and comics!

Amazing, especially since in 2010 I sold 1889 books and comics, so that’s, what, a roughly 300% increase? Truly blessed and thankful.

In this day and age when reading is on the decline and most folks would rather watch TV or play video games, to sell nearly 6000 books in a year for a single author/artist is very special. You readers are great, Jesus is great, and fandom is great.

In last year’s post, I mentioned 2011′s 5000-book goal, so to do the same this year, let’s see if we can hit 8000 books for 2012. Anything you can do to help me reach that goal would be sincerely appreciated. Nearly all my books are less than $5 on Kindle, and paperbacks range from $7-15. Comics are at $2.50-$3.00. Nothing to break the bank.

But I also want to repay you readers on a regular basis and offer stuff for free, so right now the first book in my paranormal romance vampire series, Blood of my World–Discovery of Death–is free on Kindle, Nook and Smashwords. Also, here on this blog I have a serial post-apocalyptic zombie love story called Zomtropolis, which I recommend for those looking for a different take on the undead than what’s usually offerered on bookstore shelves.

So once again, thank you for such a great year in books and comics.

Blessings,

A.P. Fuchs

From today, each tweet separated by ***:

Was I ahead of my time? Every argument I made for indie publishing years ago are now the anthems of many writers now, even midlisters.
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But at the same time, I think it’s gone too far. It’s becoming an “us and them” thing again, only the players are switching sides. Dangerous
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No one path is better than the other; it’s a case of one path being better for YOU personally. That’s the secret to #publishing success.
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Dear Reader: Are u aware of how your favorite writers act outside of the book of theirs you’re reading? Sometimes, I get woefully embarassed
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and sometimes I get really proud. Ahhh, the Internet, where anything goes and everyone’s an expert.
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‘Tis a dangerous beast we created, and by we, I mean people with math a technical skills far more advanced than my own. I have no idea how..
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…to make bits of metal and plastic talk to each other; how to send invisible info through the air; how to make that which is not alive…
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…think and process for me. Am I the only one scared by this? As cool as all this tech is, I can’t help but wonder if somewhere someone…
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…or something actually holds the tech cards to the world. The more ground we give to machines, the more of ourselves we lose. It’s true.
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Balance is everything in this day and age. So I employ you, put books on the scales. Read. Most people don’t. Reading will put you ahead of
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everyone else. Don’t believe me? Read random bits of writing and see how folks can’t spell stuff on grocery lists, to-do lists, notes for…
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loved ones, etc. We’ve given up our intellect to a world of entertainment, the kind that numbs our brains (i.e. TV, video games, and more).
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Not that those things are bad in and of themselves, but I fear for our younger generation. Big time. If you’re a parent, uncle, aunt, etc.
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teach the little ones to read, to do math without a calculator. You’ll raise leaders that way because they’ll have to take charge when…
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the others can’t because they weren’t trained to use their God-given brain. Have a kid that doesn’t like reading? Start them on #comics.
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It’s a beautiful and underrated medium. Then feed them more comics and prose works. They’re life will be all the richer for it.
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Feel free to comment. I gotta go bag me some zombies.

On Monday I launched the first three books of my Blood of my World series.

If you want to give it a technical genre label, it’s a paranormal romance. Personally, for me, it’s a vampire love story, and there is a difference between the two because, like I’ve said elsewhere on the Web, romance is more about the fantasy of love, and a love story is typically more true to life and bittersweet as it showcases both the joys and pains of love.

Why did I write these books?

Two reasons:

1) I’ve never written a vampire book before, so it was something I wanted to do and I’ve always like the monster
2) It’s an experiment on how much an impact genre makes on book sales.

As anyone reading this knows, I have my fair share of gripes about the so-called “indie revolution” and “Kindle lottery” and all that stuff. Yet, when I look at those having crazy good success and/or getting lucky, I’ve noticed they all write in very popular genres: thrillers, mysteries, traditional romance, erotica, romantica. After loads of perusing the Kindle charts, genres outside that don’t have nearly the same amount of success unless you’re a name-brand author to begin with.

Since I’ve been self-publishing so long and have made every mistake you could along the way, it really bothers me that newbie writers are buying into the hype created by those who’ve fluked into success and/or are doing very well thanks to writing in a popular genre.

To be clear: this isn’t sour grapes. Truthfully, my fear is newbies will stake their all on self-publishing without really understanding what they’re getting into and then will find out the hard–and disappointing–way that publishing on the whole is a giant crapshoot. (It really is; ask any publisher; if we knew what would sell huge, we’d publish that all the time. There are only trends that help us out, that’s it.)

Anyway, because I’m also hard-headed sometimes, I went out of my way and wrote three touching love stories featuring a romance between a vampire and a human. Even more specific, between a vampire and a human who are 16 years old. I really want to see how much my books will move because I deliberately wrote something in a popular genre. I know from the past that my sales really picked up when I added the ever-popular zombie to my catalog. I know that my love story, April, written as Peter Fox, moves very well because love stories are pretty popular. So let’s see what happens when one goes out of their way to write a popular-genred book.

Keep in mind, I’m well aware this whole thing could blow up in my face. But if I’m right, then I think I would have made a pretty significant point about this “revolution” (which it isn’t, but that’s a topic for another time.)

I’ll keep you posted on how the books are doing, and my hope is you’ll glean some useful info as we go along on this journey together. And thank you in advance if you support one or more of the titles on either side of this screen.