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| Cerebus Guide To Self Publishing (2nd Edition, 2010) Art by Dave Sim (Click Image To Enlarge) |
DAVE SIM:
(from page 58-59, The Cerebus Guide To Self Publishing)
One of the most important elements for a potential self-publisher to remember is that sincerity cannot be faked successfully in the comic book field. Further, sincerity is what makes a comic book successful, and insincerity is what makes it not successful. There is a great temptation for people trying to do self-generated comics for the first time to hedge their bets and start asking themselves what kind of comic book is likely to be successful. Although this is usually done with the best of intentions, it is a world-class mistake. I was guilty of it myself in making Cerebus a sword-and-sorcery parody title at first. I had a certain amount of success in the fanzine and small-press world with selling drawings of various Robert E. Howard characters to the burgeoning Robert E. Howard magazine field and hoped to "tap into" that market. After three years, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel of the handful of sword-and-sorcery clichés and felt no great urge to go looking for any that Moorcock, de Lint, et al. might have bypassed. Once I moved from a field in which I had no interest to fields in which I was interested (politics, economics, power, religion, etc) I began to find my voice.
4 comments:
My tattered and beat up copy of the original is dying and I'm having issues finding the updated version.
Since it's not going to be released digitally any time in the near future, is there an online store that may have it in print?
Hey Mas - it looks like Midtown Comics has it for $10.89: http://www.midtowncomics.com/store/dp.asp?PRID=Cerebus+Guide+To+Self+Pub_1092564
@Margaret: Hey, many thanx!
Hi Mas,
I thought I'd ask Dave if The Guide was out of print or not and this was the reply I received:
"THE GUIDE TO SELF-PUBLISHING is out of print. It just doesn't sell. I've got about 40 or 50 copies of my own that I'm hanging onto to send to promising aspiring cartoonists if any of them send me work that looks promising. Not too many recently. I might put it up on ComiXpress or Comixology someday since it's just text. I assume it's circulating illegally where it needs to go."
...so grab any copy you can find!
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