Landing a publisher for your indie project can be extremely difficult, and especially so for comics.
That’s why Rolling Squid Bones is providing an outlet for creators to get their works out there, even though they’re relatively new and indie themselves. We spoke with the creators who help creators at this Summer’s Motor City Comic Con to find out a little about their process, and about why they’re doing it in the first place.
SideQuesting: Tell us who you are and how you know each other.
Rolling Squid Bones: We’re Rolling Squid Bones, a publisher outside of South Lyon, Michigan. I’m Chad and this is my partner Blake, who’s out of Ohio.
SQ: When did you start Rolling Squid Bones?
RSB: We actually started last year, back in June, so we’re also fairly new. We were kind of grinding and creating and after a while decided to just get off of our butts. We were like, you know, we’re just gonna do publishing, too. Because I had a lot of friends who were always saying, “we can’t really get a publishing deal.” That’s when I said, “well, I’ll do it.”
SQ: What’s the process of publishing someone else’s work? It’s always intriguing to me, especially in related to comics.
RSB: So there’s a couple of ways you can get your work published. You can do it yourself by finding a printer, printing all your own stuff, but it can be time consuming to track and sell all of your own work. It’s like, we have a bunch of friends that have a lot of cool projects and no way to get them out. We actually go through Ingram, since they have a print on-demand service. What we do for creators is we order all of their books and then the printers distribute them for us. Then we also put our boots on the ground where we go to different comic book shops and comic cons to get the books in. So we’re a little bit more, I guess, green, but also very grassroots.
SQ: And in just a year you already have a lot of great projects here.
RSB: Yeah, a lot of these are projects like David (Doub)’s here. He has over 20 years of book content, so I’m slowly publishing his books. And then Laurie (Calcaterra) has been a friend of mine for a long time and that’s the same with Sean (Meighen). They have so many stories and all of them said, “hey, do you want these?” I’m like, yeah. So there are a lot of books but a lot of them are from the same creators.
SQ: Are you guys selective on the kinds of projects you take in, or are you open?
RSB: Yeah, we’re pretty open. As long as it’s not hurting anybody, yeah, sure. We let the creators create, basically. And we’re not limiting genres, either. We’ll look at autobiography memoirs, romances, Westerns. We’re not we’re not exactly picky on genre because there’s a lot out there.
For just a year’s worth of experience in publishing, Rolling Squid Bones has grown quickly and helped a variety of creators, artists and writers not only get their projects printed but also get them into shops and show floors. That footwork is probably the most valuable part of what they offer.
Making something takes time, but putting it into the hands of a lot of people is often impossible to manager. Unless you have help from some entrepreneurial friends.
You can check out Rolling Squid Bones and their friendly team of creators at their website.
No Comments