A Guide To How I Self-Published a Comic

Printed version of my comic ‘Colloquial’

This is meant as more of a way to document my own experience on self-publishing than as a generic guide for everyone. All projects and people are different. Experiment and see what works best for you!

General

“Quit talking about wanting to do make comics and just make them!” — A Wizard

The most important step is to make comics! Below you’ll find advice that has helped me. Items to think about before you start drawing. Please read this Repoduction Guide by Ron Rege´ Jr, Dave Choe, Brian Ralph, & Jordan Crane. This is the best guide I’ve found for comics and they have way more wisdom than I! Also, buy and read The Tiny Report Micro-Press Yearbook 2013.

Scale and Dimensions

In my opinion, it doesn’t matters what size you draw at, what your reduction will be or the dimensions of your final pages. It’s just important to think about it before you start drawing. Understanding what the final printed form will look like. There’s nothing worse than redrawing pages to because of a formatting issue, trust me. Here’s a little check list with some basic items:

Lettering/Font: Will this be legiable when I reduce the scale?
Line Weight: How will your lines look printed/scaled? Will the be too thin?
Dimensions: Can you print your comic easily? Folding an 8.5 x 11 paper in half is a lot easier than cutting full bleed comics.
Paper: Mainly the color of the paper. What thickness
Printing: How is this going to be print?! Don’t make a full color comic for a Risograph!

Prepress

Keeping this step as simple as possible really helps my moral. I think it’s important to keep making art rather than spending all your time preparing it. The Repoduction Guide mentioned above is the best resource I’ve found for comics prepress. My personal process involves

Scanning at 1200dpi
Adjusting levels
Coloring or Halftone
Reducinging to print size and DPI
Layout with Adobe InDesign

Printing

I believe, knowing how you are going to print your comic before you start making it is a big help. Making B/W comics for a xerox copier is a lot different than making a color watercolor comic for digital.

Right now I’m printing on demand. With the easy access to color digital printers you can keep your overhead low by only printing as needed. I try to print 10–20 comics at a time. This make deliverying the product slower, but keeps the upfront cost lower.

Folding

If you’re doing this youreself it can be a tedious process. Recruit friends, or only fold as many pages as you need. Also getting a bone knife is a big help. I use a ligther or a dry erase marker to crease the edges as well.

Cutting

Whoa good cutting boards are expensive! This is a step I recommend avoiding if possible! Make comics that you don’t need to cut. Most comics I buy are 8.5 x 11 folded in half. They’re perfect! Oddly enough I didn’t take my own advice! I decided to go landscape instead of portrait and need to cut. I really recommend buying a good cutting board. Cutting a 32 page comic page by page is an ardious process. I just recently purchased a Kutrimmer and cutting all the pages at once is amazing!

If you have to cut I’d highly recommend sending it to someone else or putting up the money to get a good quality cutting device.

Selling

Online

I’m really working this out myself. Right now I’m selling directly to people online. I recommend these services for selling online

They all have their pros and cons. Do you want to pay a monthly fee or give up a cut of the money?

Retailers

I’ve also been researching consigning directly with small comic shops. Please read this article by Jared Smith from Big Planet Comics: Retailers Tips on Selling Minicomics. Here’s the list I know of right now:

And don’t forget your local retailers!!!

Digitally

I’ve recently started selling on ComiXology. You basically submit a hi-res PDF of your comic. If you’re already creating a PDF for print then this part is basically the same. The only headache is the sign up process is fairly arduous.

Mailing

USPS is very confusing. Make sure your envelope can fit inside the (USPS dimensions). It gets very expensive mailing large items. I’ve been using 9"x12" manila envelopes folded in half. Be careful to not stuff too much in it though. Width matters too! Really think about internation shipping! It’s expensive and time consuming if they make you fill out forms for customs.