Comics and Graphic Novels Up and Downs

Comicworld is going through a lot this week.

Good news: San Diego Comic Con 2011 sold out in seven hours. Someone out there likes comics, or at least comic con.

Interesting news: Publisher's Weekly spoke to five college-level comics art programs. Enrollment has increased, as has the number of females entering the programs. So there are more people who want to make comics and therefore more possible competition for creators. Not necessarily a bad thing if quality goes up as competition increases, because it can lead to more opportunity. Remember the path in the last decade or so of young adult literature (YA lit): increased interest by consumers- increase in sales of YA lit - increase in publishing houses creating YA imprints or bulking up their acquisitions lists - increase in writers and manuscripts- increase in competition and quality of manuscripts - back to increase in interest by consumers as YA lit becomes better and more accessible. Get it?

Bad news: Borders possibly filing chapter 11 this week. There are fewer and fewer outlets for book sales in general, and the loss of this one is a biggie. Diamond Books Distributors (the kingpin of comics and graphic novel distribution) has already stopped shipments to Borders.

Bad news: Canada's largest book distributor H.B. Fenn filing for bankruptcy. Why? Because there are not that many distributors, either. This one moved material for 90 publishers, including comics and graphic novel groups like Marvel, Yen Books, Tor, Macmillan and Disney. According to Publisher's Weekly, publishers are scrambling to route sales channels in Canada through other distributors.

So, there are more people who want comics and graphic novels, there are more people serious about penning them, but there are fewer physical outlets to sell them, and fewer distributors to get those hard copy books to those retailers. Milton Griepp, CEO of ICv2 (Internal Correspondence Version 2, an information outlet that provides trending information to pop culture retailers. This grew out of Capital City Distribution, Inc. - one of the largest distributors of pop culture products in the 80s through the mid-90s that was sold to Diamond Comic Distributors in 1996) projected a ten time increase in digital comics sales in 2010 over the previous year in a white paper presented shortly before NY Comic Con last fall.

Change is coming. Stay tuned.

How Wired Are Teens, Really?

My critique group occasionally ponders how to deal with technology in our manuscripts. If you don't cite it in a contemporary work are you dooming your manuscript to the bottom of the slush pile, or alienating readers if it does get published? If you do make references to technology (cell phones, the web, computers, video games) in a manuscript, will it be outdated by the time the manuscript makes it to market? What to do?

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project research shows that:

- 75% of teens have cell phones.

-The age at which kids get cell phones is around 12 or 13.

-Ownership and cell phones are not necessarily on a one-to-one basis, and teens from lower income families were more likely to have more than one cell phone (!).

- Teens text an average of 50 texts per day.
- 90% of parents have a cell phone, much higher than adults with no kids in the home.
- 90% of younger adults (ages 18 to 29) sleep with or next to their cell phone (!!).
-80% of teens have a game console.
-79% have an I-pod or MP3 player.
-69% have a computer.
-51% have portable gaming devices.

Kind of hard to avoid, huh?

And now add another layer of possibility- what country are your characters in?

Nielsen (that company that tracks consumer behavior) has info. on that in the report Mobile Youth Around the World. Check out some interesting parts of it on their blog here.

Who leads the teen world in mobile internet use? Surprise! It is not the U.S or Japan - it's China.

And although girls lead in the U.S. in SMS and MMS messaging, a teen character texting a lot in India is more likely to be male, since they FAR outstrip their female counterparts in those areas if usage, as in 70% male versus 30% female in texts, and 82% males versus 18% females in picture messaging. China and Saudi Arabia are the same way, with more males using mobile messaging, but not as drastically.

What does all this mean for a writer of content for kids? Only you can decide.

Upgrade Your Kindle- Trade It For a Zine?

File this one under I-don't-know-what-the-&*@#-to-think-of-this.

Microcosm publishing in Oregon is offering to accept your used Kindle in exchange for it's worth in new and used books from their store. Check here for details. It appears that the big catch is that they are a publishing collective focusing on zines, so you have to be down with their works to make this deal worth it, but it's an interesting idea.

What are they going to do with the Kindles?

Best Reason to do NaNoWriMo This Year: Scrivener for Windows!! 50%-off Coupon!!

For anyone who has been trying to wrangle a large intricate work into an electronic format - all those pictures, clippings, post-its, outline, websites, etc. in one place - software program Scrivener has become the field standard. Hailed by critics EVERYWHERE as the best software for writers organizing any writing project that has all those little details, it has really only been used by a portion of the population because it is only for the Mac platform.

This year, if you "win" NaNoWriMo (see sidebar for link) you get a coupon for half off the software, which is already a veritable bargain at $45.00, but even better is that the developer is releasing a beta version for the Windows platform due out in 2011!

Woohoo!

Kid Lit Big on the iPad - Sharpen Your, Uh, Mice?

Publisher's Weekly reported that since the launch of Apple's iPad last week, "children's stories held six of the top ten paid iPad book-app sales spots as of press time." Check it out here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/455914-The_iPad_Meets_the_Children_s_Book.php?nid=2788&source=link&rid=18792588

I'm of Two Minds- Where's Two-Face When You Need a Coin?

Watching the e-books and audiobooks world after the Macmillin/Amazon skirmish and the introduction of the I-pad has been frustrating. I sit in two seats ringside- one as a writer and one as a voice-over artist. I'm all over the place in terms of my reactions.

Part of me loves hard copy books, and part of me loves e and audibooks, and both parts of me really want both to exist (duh). But the e-books world is becoming very complicated for readers. Used to be if you wanted something to read, you went somewhere, you looked around and picked something and bought it. Now, in addition to just thinking about what to read, a reader has to decide what physical form to read in (physical copy, digital copy or strictly audio?), what device to read on if it is electronic and where to get it, since certain devices only play certain formats, and certain publishers are only distributing through certain content providers...sigh. I like the idea of an e-reader and would love to buy one- I'm usually an early adopter in terms of technology, but having device, file type etc. layering even more decisions on top of my already overloaded consumer brain is annoying.

I'd love to be able to just flip a coin a la Harvey Dent, but this involves coins with many sides in a variety of metals and sizes, all minted by different countries- how to know what toss wins?

The question is what will consumers do? Some interesting opinions are voiced in this post on the The Beat (Publisher's Weekly Blog on Comics and Graphic Novels). For more background, read the NY Times on the Amazon/ MacMillin situation here, and check out Cory Doctorow's thoughts on Boing-Boing, not to mention following his With a Little Help project

When the dust settles I don't know what handful of change we'll be left with, but if you make your living off of creative endeavors, hopefully it'll be legal tender.

iPad (POW!) A Blue Chip Bet (WHAM!) for Comics and Graphic Novels? (AUUGHGHG!)

You know about the Kindle and other black and white e-readers, but now the iPad arrives and the key here is it is in COLOR, and it's a BIG screen. I personally witnessed editors from big NY publishing houses saying re: Kindle and company, that although the e-reader may affect novels and chapter books for kids, picture books, graphic novels, etc., would not be hit as hard because the readers were in black and white, and those materials would not translate well to the digital form becuase they are so illustration intensive.

In this article at Publisher's Weekly, a number of comic book and graphic novel publishers are showing enthusiasm for the iPad.

Something to ponder if you are a creator.

Switching from PC to Mac

"Macs are for creative people. PC's are for business people." What do you do if you are a creative business person?

I've recently purchased a Mac laptop for my creative business needs, but I have not spent any quality time with a Mac since 1994. No really- it's all been Unix terminals and PC's since then. I'm totally comfy in computer world, but when I got the Mac, I felt like an idiot. I may be able to create my own databases complete with crosswalk tables and knowing just enough SQL to get me by, but it took me a few HOURS of playing with my Mac to figure out how to resize the windows. And the "multiple fingers do multiple things on the track pad" thing totally throws me. I gotta get a mouse...

But really, the biggest problem is trying to figure out which software to load. Some decisions are easy- Scrivener for drafting novels, non-fiction and larger projects, and Quickbooks for accounting, billing and reporting, and when it somes to graphics, I'll cough up the dough for the Adobe and Quark stuff. But Office for the Mac is missing Access, and I do like to do my own databases. Or should I do the Bootcamp thing and divvy-up the hard drive so I can run Windows programs on the Mac, like Office for PC's and ACT- a client tracking program? And what about that Open Office thing? Anyone ever use it?

If you run a small business off a Mac, please share your successes and failures with software with the rest of us! Please? With an apple on top?