The Finances of Making a Graphic Novel

This is PART THREE of a series of posts about preparing for DELILAH DIRK BOOK FOUR, a new graphic novel.

How does someone afford to take the time to make a 200-page graphic novel? The project can take years, and that’s a long time to go without a reliable income.

My first book, Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant, needed only a year’s worth of focused work, since parts of it were pre-existing. To make the connecting material, I dipped into the savings I’d accrued over several years worth of steady animation work. The financial risk was low. I had no debt, no student loans. Even if my parents hadn’t saved for my education, my school fees were very low. My living expenses were modest, too. I owned an apartment with my gainfully-employed partner, afforded thanks to our day jobs, a helpful inheritance from my late grandmother, and a loan from my perfectly middle-class parents. We didn’t eat out much or take elaborate vacations. We owned only one car. And we live in Canada, where we don’t have to worry too much about health-care expenses.

All of this was still true when I was facing the prospect of Book Two, a larger project. To summarize quickly, I could afford to work on DD2 full-time thanks to the first half of my advance from First Second, a grant from the BC Arts Council, and (again) savings from animation work. For DD3, I was lucky enough to receive grants from both the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts. That money combined with the second half of my DD2 advance and the first half of my DD3 advance, plus those bank-account savings again, to allow me to focus on DD3 full-time and to hire artists to help me with colour prep.

Grants are difficult. Between 2011 and 2019, I applied for grants every year. I have received BC Arts grants three times and a Canada grant once. I do not know what makes for a successful grant application. The year I won a Canada grant, my application had not been very different from the year before. I don’t know whether to write the application in the fancy, high-falutin art speak we learned in art school, or to speak plainly, using everyday language. I don’t know how ambitious to sound, or what claims I should make about the work’s “cultural impact.” I don’t know if I’m applying for too much money or not enough.

Compiling the application takes a good amount of work and creativity, but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is the uncertainty and the waiting. When I have applied for grants, I have sent the applications in at the end of August and not heard the results until February or March the next year. That’s six months wherein I have no idea whether I will be receiving $12k-20k to put toward the work. How do you move forward on a project in the summer of one year without knowing whether you’ll be able to afford it until next spring? If I’m not going to receive a grant, then it would be wise to take intermediate work (an animation job, freelance illustration etc) so I have savings with which to afford to make the graphic novel. But then, every day spent on intermediate work—especially if I sign up for an eight-month animation contract—is time spent away from the graphic novel, and it seems as if traditional publishing rewards momentum and the maintenance of a steady rate of output. For sanity’s sake, it has always made sense for me to assume that I won’t get a grant, which has been a saddening way to operate. I’m glad these grant programs exist, of course, and I’m grateful that I’ve been lucky enough to receive a few. I accept that they are a gamble as a price to pay for their mere existence.

 Meanwhile, publisher advances cannot be thought of as production funds. “Advance” is short for “advance against royalties,” and it’s a wad of cash a publisher agrees to pay you when they sign up to publish your book. However, you don’t get the full amount all at once. In my experience, it has been half on signing, half on delivery. When I sign the contract, I receive the first half of the advance. The other half is sent after I deliver the completed book. And what “advance against royalties” means is that this amount is counted against the royalties I might earn through sales of the book. Let’s say the advance is $10k. Once the book hits shelves and starts earning money, I don’t actually receive any of it until the book has earned me $10k worth of royalties. After that (if that ever happens—it’s relatively rare), I receive regular royalty cheques representing a certain percentage of the sales. When I sign up, publisher pours me a drink from a pitcher. Then a second one. And then I get no more drinks until the pitcher has been refilled.

The difficult thing with advances is, of course, the fact that I most need the money while I’m working on the book, not after it. For example, $50k is a very, very good advance. You’d be lucky to get it. I never have. But only a portion of that impressive number would be available to me during the year and a half I am working on the book. For starters, my agent will take her commission (I am happy to give it to her, she deserves it). I would have to make 21k work for me during production of the book. With my eighteen-month DD2 schedule, that’s only about $1200 per month, so if I’m thinking about it like a paycheque, I’m making well below minimum wage. (I have floated the idea to my agent: “can I just have the whole advance up front?” and the idea was not warmly received.)

Of course, it’s nice to get another 21k at the end of the project. You could immediately apply it to production of a new book, but then you’re looking at a whole new set of uncertainties. I suppose you could borrow against it during production of the first book, but I’ve never liked that idea. My grandmother told me never to spend money I didn’t have.

Now, clearly I’ve been making this work, swinging between advances and grants like George of the Jungle. But it’s a tenuous arrangement, and I’ve been fortunate, both in my initial set of circumstances and in my luck with grants.

I can’t shake the feeling that there must be a better way to do this. On the financial side, there must be a way to soften or bridge the unpredictability of grants and the nature of the “advance” system. For DD4, my personal circumstances mean I need to find a different way to afford production. 

But before I think about how I’m going to afford it, I need to consider exactly what I want DD4 to be, and what I want to accomplish by making it.