On my last post I made note that I don’t actually know anything about the world of Comic Book publication. So I went ahead and looked into how it works. For self-publishing, I think it’s pretty standard, you write the thing and then publish. You need to market it and do all the things, find an audience and market the comic to that audience. But for traditional publishing you write a pitch or synopsis and send that in along with some sample art. Which I was wrong about not doing your own art. Apparently that is more just in Kid lit.
This article has some really great tips about how to publish comic books/graphic novels: https://www.woodmanmaynard.com/blog/2025/9/29/5-tips-for-breaking-into-graphic-novel-publishing.
A couple of the important tips from the article are:
- Look at comics that are similar to your own. Target those publishers.
- Only submit to agents and publishers that already like and publish the type of work that you do.
- That tip above applies across the board to any kind of written work.
- Publishing timelines run long, so start working on your next project before you get published.
- This last tip also applies to any kind of publishing with written work, unless you are self-publishing because you know your own timelines and can start working on your next project whenever you want.
So to sum it up, for publishing, you don’t need to have written the whole comic. You need a synopsis and some of the art. You need to target agents and publishers who are looking for work that you are writing and then you can start the process before you’ve finished your story.
Next in the write what you love series, we will talk about game narrative.
