Erik Larsen on good comic submissions

Image Comics :: View topic - The official SUBMISSIONS THREAD:

I’m going to off on a bit of a rant here. It’s not aimed at you in particular but rather the collected body of people that are thinking about submitting books to Image comics.

A submission is essentially a SALES PITCH.

You're trying to SELL ME on YOUR BOOK.

A lot of these questions seem to forget that. Use some common sense. If you're trying to sell an anthology--it doesn't make sense to show five pages from one guy. To REALLY sell the book--you should have samples from EVERYBODY involved.

A lot of folks in this thread are getting all worried about things, which are pretty irrelevant. It DOESN’T MATTER if you include more pages—it DOESN’T MATTER is you include a letter—it DOESN’T MATTER if you try to suck up. What matters is the work itself. The work itself speaks for you. We need an e-mail address in order to respond to you—we need to see a few pages to know that you have a clue what you’re doing and we need a brief overview of what your story is—and that’s it.

There is NOTHING you can do or say to get a BAD submission green lit.

If the work is good—everything else is irrelevant.

We’re not going to pass on a good book because the person submitting it included more than the required number of pages. We’re not going to pass on a good book because the person submitting it DIDN’T include a résumé. We’re not going to pass on a good book because the person submitting it DID include a résumé. We’re not going to pass on a good book because the person submitting it didn’t include a nice letter with his submission. We’re not going to pass on a good book because the person submitting it didn’t sing the praises of Image comics.

We’re NOT looking for excuses to pass on good books.

If you have a good book—we WANT to be the ones to publish it.
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-Erik Larsen

Publisher
Image Comics