As I’m sure you’ve heard, Apple recently entered the textbook market in a big way. They’ve partnered with Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, revamped the iBooks app/store, and created the iBooks Author application to make publishing and selling books quick and easy. This is a big deal, and I’ve got a front row seat being married to an educator and having two children in school.

But as exciting as it is educationally, as a cartoonist I’m thrilled not only by the self-publishing opportunities for myself and other artists, but by what could conceivably be a whole new market for cartoons.

There’s been a bit of a kerfuffle over the iBook Author license agreement. In essence it states that the software is free to use if you are giving away your creation, but if you plan on selling it, it can only be sold through the iTunes Book Store and Apple gets its 30% cut of the sale.

In addition to depicting a backpack-carrying protagonist, the suit alleges, the “Zombie Kid” cover artwork bears a startling similarity to the “Wimpy Kid” series, including “distinctive striping along the spine, the hand-drawn pictures of the main character on the front and back covers, both illustrated so as to appear to be taped at each corner of the cover, and the miniature illustration of a male child’s head located on the side of the book.”

The lettering is also confusingly similar to that of the “Wimpy Kid” series, according to the suit, with letters stylized so as to look brush-painted.

Via: Tom Spurgeon

I Thought You Would Be Funnier

Grandpa Won’t Wake Up

Oil and Water

Tim O’Shea: Not many folks can say they’ve won an Eisner, but this year’s was actually your second Eisner win. How gratifying was it to get such validation again? Also, how amused were you that you won an award for a collection of work rejected by the New Yorker?

Shannon Wheeler: It was more moving than validating. I didn’t think I would win this time around. I swore I wouldn’t be one of those people who cry on stage at a stupid award ceremony. But once I got up and took the award in my hand I honestly choked up. It meant more to me than I thought.

We are always grateful to readers who buy books directly from us, so we are pleased to offer a new series of mini-comics featuring fascinating, previously-unpublished (or at least way out of print) sketches, drawings and even full stories, which are available for FREE with the purchase of their matching tie-in books, or with any purchase of $50 or more.

If you already planning on picking out some titles for the holidays, might as well get the rare or unpublished work as well.

Via Tom Spurgeon

“I always think of myself as a cartoonist who couldn’t crack into newspapers,” he said recently by phone.

Kinney created the “Diary of a Wimpy Kid” main character, a middle school student named Greg Heffley, after accepting that he would never land his dream job of producing a daily comic strip.

Yet “not good enough” for an adult comic strip could translate into “great” from a kid’s perspective, he eventually decided.

And I can’t help but also remember the news story about Jeff, who despite all his success with the series, chooses to keep his day job with Poptropica.com simply because he enjoys it.

When I compared how much I could reasonably expect to get as an advance from a publisher to how many self-published copies I would need to sell to equal that same figure, it seemed likely I would stand to do better financially by self-publishing. Was I right? Time will tell. I have easily paid off the entire print run and am in the black on the book (THANKS to all who have bought a copy!), but I will need to sell a few hundred more copies before I pass the “probable advance” figure. If I sell the entire print run, I will certainly earn several times what I would have earned with a traditional publisher, even if they had sold 5 times that number of copies, due to the low royalty percentage I’d have gotten past the advance.

It’s an interesting business, of which you now know a lot more that you probably cared to. Publishers still have the ability to tap markets that self-publishers simply cannot access, but unless your book is going to sell tens of thousands of extra copies that way, self-publishing it increasingly becoming an option that makes financial sense in the right circumstances. Publishers also basically leave the promotion of the book to the author, which adds to the attractiveness of self-publishing.

Cory Doctrow over at Boing Boing writes about a new collection of lost, unpublished or early work for Dr. Suess that was recently released. The book is entitled, “The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories“.

Cory writes:

The publication of a new Seuss collection is reason to celebrate in and of itself, and Bippolo Seed is more than a curiosity or a completist’s collection of offcuts — much of the material in this book stands with Seuss’s best-loved work. The illustrations are classic Seuss and full of wit and irreverence, though the ratio of words to pictures is a lot wordier than the typical Seuss, owing, I suppose, to the constraints of the original magazine publication. If I had to choose a favorite from among these, it’d be “The Great Henry McBride,” (MP3) about a young fellow who can’t make up his mind on a single career and demands that the world accommodate his wish for excitement and novelty through his whole life.

Beloved children’s book writer, illustrator Shel Silverstein passed away 1999, but his family is releasing a new book of previously unprinted material entitled Every Thing On It The material is described as material Shel liked “but never had a place for in his other collections.”

Borders Group Inc. said it would liquidate after the second-largest U.S. bookstore chain failed to receive any offers to save it.

Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. It said it would ask a judge Thursday to approve a sale to liquidators led by Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group.

The company said liquidation of its remaining 399 stores could start as soon as Friday, and it is expected to go out of business for good by the end of September.

More details:

Slate live-blogs the announcement

Electronic Harry Potter books? JK Rowling just ruined Amazon’s day

Why JK Rowling’s Pottermore will frighten struggling authors – and remember, she used to be one

For publishers, there’s something that’s just as terrifying as Voldemort: losing the ability to sell the eBooks of a bestselling author. If it ever happened, and if it spread, it’d have a cataclysmic effect on their long-term prospects. In effect, it’s That-Which-Must-Not-Happen.

But today, it just happened. JK Rowling’s announcement of Pottermore.com, a social network for Harry Potter readers with game-like elements, also revealed that for the first time, Harry Potter will be available as eBooks. Not only that, but the books will be sold directly through Pottermore, without the aid of Amazon, Apple, or any other publisher or retailer.

Despite Adrian Hon’s negative assessment of the impact this will have on pubishing, I find it interesting that Scholastic released a press release stating they’re part of this project – specifically to help channel sales via Pottermore. Not sure how they as a print interest partner is going to gain from driving people to the website where the ebooks are available and presumably decrease print purchases.

Scholastic is proud to be a key partner in the Pottermore project, including connecting teachers and parents from our school and online channels directly to ebook sales via Pottermore and providing marketing and promotion support.

Lastly – what does this all have to do with cartoonists? First, this proves a couple of things. It’s important to establish yourself online and interacting with your fans. If you have the means start building a community that will attract fans. Secondly, retain as many of your creative rights as possible. Because Rowling kept the digital rights, she’s now able to keep a much much much larger piece of the profits as well as have control to use her creation as she wants.