Is it hard to get a publisher? by Metaphrog

This month, welcome Metaphrog, talking about the windy road to publication. Over to you, John and Sandra!

Is it hard to get a publisher? We just made a reel sharing our own experience, on TikTok and Insta (so if you'd rather watch a reel than read text head over there) but we do go into a bit more detail here in this newsletter. Getting published is hard! It took us years to get there. Some people are really lucky and get a massive book deal straight away, but for the rest of us, it can be really tough. At first, every time we submitted to a publisher (and there weren’t many publishers in the mid-90s who did what was then called “Indie comics”) they either didn’t reply, or sent rejections. So we self-published, because we come from a punk / DIY background and were used to seeing zines and fanzines (and had both even made some and contributed to others while still at school). So, we self-published for about 15 years, gathering momentum, getting nominated for awards, and receiving great reviews in newspapers and magazines. We still contacted publishers during this period, but every time we made a submission, or asked if they would publish our Louis graphic novels, we still got either ignored or rejected. The rejections we were the most gutted by were one from Casterman (the French publisher of Tintin), who said yes then changed their minds a few months later, and Jonathan Cape who rejected us twice at either end of a decade (once when we sent Louis books, then later with a pitch). But there were many others. Then, 20 years after we first started making comics, a small publisher, Papercutz, in New York finally published us. And it didn’t come as a result of a submission. We had sent a mini-comic as a greeting for New Year with a couple of short, grim comic stories, to industry people we had met before, just to keep in touch (we weren’t asking for anything). Papercutz got back to us straight away asking if we’d like to make a book with them. This was a surprise because, although we had met Terry Nantier on several occasions before, we had submitted to him but only got rejections. We ended up making three books with Papercutz. So it goes to show that a rejection from one publisher one time isn’t necessary final. It can be about timing or about the material, or even just taste. Then the pandemic hit, and the isolation made us think about what we were doing and where we were at in our career, and we decided to approach an agent to try to get a deal with a major publishing house in the UK or US. Graphic novels were not yet a thing in the UK so we had our doubts, but could feel that maybe there was a wind of change in the air. We honed our pitching technique and it took a while and it wasn’t easy, but after a first round of rejections, we eventually got an agent (we wrote a blog about how we found an agent here if you’d like to learn more). Meanwhile, an editor at Harper Collins had contacted us out of the blue asking if we’d like to pitch for their Big Cat imprint for schools. So we pitched and got the deal and ended up working on two books with Big Cat. And it was about this time that we signed with United Agents. But a lot of time had gone by since we first approached them and the pitch we had originally written to find an agent had lost its appeal to us. Plus, we had a new idea we liked better. Molly Jamieson at United Agents was happy for us to ditch the first pitch and work on the new one. It took us almost a year to refine this pitch with editorial input from Molly, at the same time as working on the Big Cat books, but eventually Molly went on submission with it. We crossed our fingers and hoped for the best. But all we got were rejections! Positive rejections, but rejections all the same. By then we were so used to rejections that we pretty much took it in our stride. But more importantly, before Molly went on submission, we had a lightning bolt of an idea. In fact we have never been so excited about a story idea before. We should say at this point that we were going through some heavy stuff on a personal front. John’s mum was very ill and in and out of hospital, slowly dying of heart failure. We think it all fed into our new story somehow (you can’t help writing about your own life when you write - although we promise you this story is super fun and exciting, it's just there is a bit of darkness lurking in it too) and that it was an escape from it too in some ways. So we worked on the pitch, the whole thing took shape very quickly, with editorial input from Molly, and only four months after having the initial idea, the pitch was ready to go on submission. It only took a couple weeks to learn the result. We remember vividly it was World Book Day and we were lunching out after an author visit, and there was an email from Molly with a publisher’s interest. They loved it, but wondered if we could change the age of our main character. Inspiration struck straight away and a couple of days later we sent our revised character design, which we liked better than the first one. Then, a few weeks later, the email “Offer in” came in and we jumped for joy. So this resulted in a two book deal with Scholastic, which was announced just two weeks ago: Wilomina – The Land of Dreams and Nightmares. But we actually signed with them a year ago. We had to keep it all a secret this whole time until they announced it! We’d been so used to a rough ride that we never would have thought we’d end up with United Agents representing us, and Scholastic taking us on. In fact, when we made our wish list of publishers to submit to Molly, Scholastic was near the bottom because, even though they were our dream publisher, we thought they would never go for us. SO, yeah, we started making comics 30 years ago. “An overnight success," some people commented jokingly (in a nice way) on our socials. Everyone’s experience is different, and the path to getting published can be a tough one for many people. We’ve read other people’s experience of it over the years, and a similar story is there for many: that of perseverance, hard work, an open mind, dedication, some luck, and a bit of talent. If you keeping doing all of that, you might end up getting somewhere. Or not. The one certain thing in the arts is that there is no certainty.

Thanks for your kind interest! Best wishes, John Chalmers & Sandra Marrs (Metaphrog) Website: https://metaphrog.com/ Portfolio: https://chalmersandmarrs.com/ And if you'd like to follow Metaphrog through more of the ups and downs of this strange job of making books, join their newsletter here: Newsletter: https://metaphrog.com/newsletter/