Shh! Mat Johnson Is Speaking

Hey, remember the guy behind the upcoming Vertigo book Incognegro? Well, he wrote an essay about self-publishing over at his home port of Niggerati Manor. Here's a small excerpt:

And at the end of that four years, I would probably have several books, having written them in a month or two to expand my product line. And with no real time for craft and my attention completely focused on the market, each would have sucked roughly as much as the first one. Having spent the bulk of my energy on the commerce instead of the art, I would have remained the same shitty writer I was when I started. The moment I chose to self-publish, I would have ceased to make substantial growth. I would have virtually calcified.

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, click on that link and read it. Share it with your friends. He's focus is on issues of blackitude, but what he's saying applies across the vast wasteland of self-publishing, I think.

An explainer, as I've come to understand I need to do at times because of the crossover here, self-publishing in comics is a different beast than self-publishing in prose. Though equal amounts of crap come out of both, it is 'more okay', philosophically, to self-publish in comics than it is to do the same in prose. Why that is is complicated and I'm not about to attempt to get into it.