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Publishers need to “take more of a risk” with graphic novels if they want to try and claim part of this booming market, according to agents and booksellers.
Speaking at The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference on 21st September, Helen Boyle (pictured), literary and illustration agent at Pickled Ink, said publishers are now “much more interested” in graphic novels, but barriers such as cost implications and other risks sometimes get in the way.
“Even though you've got booksellers and retail landscapes changing and saying, 'We can sell these books', I think sometimes that can be a hurdle because obviously, for a creator to put together a great graphic novel proposal, they might not do a whole book for submission—it's a huge amount of work if no one is going to buy it in the end. So I think I think publishers need to take a bit more of a risk,” Boyle said.
Boyle added: “I do wonder too whether they also need to think a bit about editorial staff who come from comics backgrounds as well.” She also suggested it may be worth having separate lists for graphic novels in the UK and separate graphic novels in the book charts, and said publishers and agents should talk more to comic creators, attend conventions, look at comics websites tand run open submissions. She argued that finding more UK-originated comic and graphic novel creators could help grow the market in the UK.
Artist Patrice Aggs agreed, saying the publishers she has spoken to over the decades “don’t really know how to look at a comic book pitch intelligently because they have had no experience of it”. She believes this will improve with initiatives such as the Society of Authors’ new comics creators network, which can act as a resource for the people who want to publish more graphic novels. But despite the challenges, Aggs said she was “very positive” about the market and its recent growth in the UK, which for a long time has lagged behind the likes of Japan, the US and France.
Tom Fickling, m.d. of David Fickling Books and the Phoenix said it is a “really exciting time” for comics in the UK and that “there’s some really fantastic things coming”. Even simple changes, such as moving closer to a smaller B-format, has had a “transformative” effect on the market in the UK, with comics that used to sell 15,000 copies in their lifetime now selling that in three months.
“From Narwhal and Jelly [HarperCollins] all the way through to Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper [Hachette Children's], I think there has been some really great success in publishing them over the last two or three years,” added Boyle. “There has definitely been a change in the last year—you can walk into Waterstones now and there are some brilliant displays of comics and graphic novels that you wouldn’t have seen five years ago, giving them the space and explaining about visual literacy."
Fickling also argued against the term “reluctant readers” when speaking about the appeal of graphic novels to certain children, saying: “It feels lesser, I've certainly known kids who might have been put off by reading a longer novel but suddenly all of the pictures had been taken out after picture books and they have found things like Dog Man (Scholastic) and Bunny Vs Monkey (David Fickling Books) as a book that opened up their reading experience. I don’t think they were reluctant readers, they were just reading in a different way, or visually reading in a different way. I think to be a skilled visual reader is just as much a quality and a skill as being a very literal word reader. It’s not a reluctancy, it just feels lesser and I think it’s a term that implies someone is not good at something—that is not necessarily a way to look at literature or reading.”
The panel agreed. Sarah Judge, bookseller at Stoke Newington Bookshop, said she still came up against a “cultural snobbishness” towards comic books. “A lot of parents still come in thinking that they aren’t 'proper books' or they are only for people that can’t read. I think a lot of parents think that word count and complexity are something that all children need to work on all the time.”
Instead Judge talked about the importance of visual literacy, and of her work with local schools to suggest graphic novels to help children talk about different issues they are studying.
She said myth-based stories, humour, adventure and magic are currently very popular, especially anything to do with witches. However, she hopes to see more British "slice of life" works, like those seen in the US.
Judge said the distribution channels for getting Manga from Japan "aren't the best" and can lead to issues with not having the next title in a series. Nevertheless, she has not found much resistance to a more expensive price point for imported books as the appetite for them is so strong.