test heading (imagine what trouble the Magical Cartooning Elf would get into if he didn't tell people he was just showing up to help them make comics!) We frequently go to industry events -- conventions and book parties and art openings and panels and lectures and classes and workshops. While we're there, we frequently have [...]
test heading (My currently overflowing bookshelves.) We get lots of comics in the mail here at First Second. And we get lots of them handed to us at shows. They're from other publishers as a 'look what we're doing!,' by authors and illustrators who'd like to work with us in the future, by agents who [...]
test heading (I note that this is a really, really specific set of instructions that will definitely help you out with requesting any First Second requests; possibly not so much with other publishers, depending on their own policies.) "I love to read." First Second uses Netgalley -- they're a galley service that lets people request [...]
test heading Not all books that First Second graphic novels are the same dimensions, have the same color palette and use the same paper stock. We do have a few sizes that are more or less 'standard' for our books, the truth is that the books we publish are a number of different shapes and [...]
test heading (cartoon by David Sipress; presumably from The New Yorker) There's a pervasive myth about big New York City publishers, and it's that they're evil -- or at the very least malicious. They're out to break the hopes and dreams of authors everywhere, to be difficult to impossible for the regular person to get [...]
test heading (Edward the horse, from Adventures in Cartooning. So adorable! Unfortunately not for sale.) Sometimes, once they've turned their book in, authors will come to us and say, 'Okay, what happens with the stuff? Like t-shirts and posters and prints and possibly squishy animals that are all based on the book?' All of that [...]
test heading (a panel from Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki's fabulous graphic novel This One Summer) When you typically think of an editor, the picture that comes up in your mind is someone sitting at a desk writing notes on a manuscript. I feel like this is just cultural conditioning -- the same way that [...]
test heading (the blurb from the back cover of Farel Dalrymple's The Wrenchies. It is an excellent example of its kind.) As publishers, we frequently find blurbs to be a pretty contrived thing. I mean, we're obtaining them either from people we know or people we (or our authors) are convincing into reading our books [...]
test heading (Image from here. I will actually be using it to metaphorically explain how the age category system in publishing works, so that's exciting.) We give all the books we publish an age category. The age categories are very small segments of the population when it comes to kids: 4 - 8, 7 - [...]
test heading (art from Jen Wang's wonderful graphic novel Koko Be Good) One of the things that an author can hear from a publisher or an agent when they're talking about the possibility of working together is, 'what is your fanbase like?' What does that even mean? As a person who exists in the world, [...]
