reMIND

How to apply for the Xeric Grant.

Over the last few weeks I’ve received a few emails asking if I would show exactly what I submitted to the Xeric foundation and how I filled out the paperwork needed to win the grant money.  Most of the information they request is pretty standard in the business world like a cover letter and Statement of Purpose but I know for a fact that most artists are unfamiliar with a lot of this stuff and an example might be helpful in pushing someone to finally submit something.

Before I give you all my secrets, a little on the Xeric Foundation as stated on their site here.

“The Xeric Foundation is a private, nonprofit corporation established by Peter A. Laird, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Planet Racers. The Foundation offers financial assistance to committed, self-publishing comic book creators in the United States and Canada.”

Every March and September are deadlines for submitting. Among the list of things they require to be eligible are six copies of the following:

1. Traditional cover letter
2. Creator’s statement of purpose
3. Traditional resume
4. Financial statement
5. Disbursement of funds
6. The complete work to date

Make sure to look at their website before submitting to make sure you are following their directions specifically in case something has changed. Here is where you find their submission guidelines.

Here is a digital copy of everything I sent, minus my financial information (obviously).

1. Traditional cover letter

I just went on the internet and searched for traditional cover letters and I found a bunch of examples. They were all different so I just used the simplest example for my template and here is what I sent. (obviously the date is wrong)

2. Creator’s statement of purpose

This one took the most thought and time. When you are writing your statement of purpose for the funds remember what the Xeric Foundation was created for. They want to help “committed, self-publishing comic book creators”. Your statement of purpose is basically “a page or two explaining what your book is all about and why you want to self publish.”

Here’s the secret. Just be real. Be yourself. They just want to make sure you are dedicated to your book and you are taking it seriously. It probably helps if you are passionate about your project. It probably helps if you are as professional as you can be. It probably helps if you come across as an honest, genuine and creative person.

So here’s what I wrote.

3. Traditional resume

A resume may seem like a no-brainer to a business man but as an artist it can be a bit confusing since we mainly use a portfolio and word of mouth to get jobs. It might seem weird but I have NEVER gotten a job from a resume. So in turn I’ve never had one.

So once again, I looked online for traditional resumes and found a bunch of examples. I read up on what made a resume good and bad. I talked to friends who knew what they were talking about to get some advice. I ended up stripping it down to one page and here’s what it looked like.

4. Financial statement

You’ll have to figure this one out for yourself. Basically, you can download a PDF file here which is a high res version of this form below.  Fill it out and there you go. you might be wondering how this can affect things but I don’t really think the amount of money you make is a factor in the decision. I believe this is more or less to see if you are responsible with money or not. After all, they are just giving you thousands of dollars.

5. Disbursement of funds

According to their site this is, “An itemized, proposed budget/disbursement of funds for the amount requested (in US dollars), including an intended time period.” I just took a stab at this one really. My funds would all go towards the printing cost so it was an easy list.

6. The complete work to date

This part should be easy to understand. Give them everything you can as complete as you can. For reMIND I printed out my spreads on 11×17 sheets of paper. The first and second chapters were finished but the 3rd one was only in sketch form.

Make six copies of everything and put it all in the mail to the Xeric Foundation. Easier said then done. This took me several weeks of planning and work. It cost hundreds of dollars to make all the color photocopies but it paid off.

Obviously the most important thing about your submission along with following their guidelines is your comic.  According to Lars Martinson, in this video, who interviewed the Xeric Foundation, about 12 grants are given out each year out of 150-200 submissions. 6% to 8% of applicants are successful.

See more of Lars’ speech on the Xeric grant in this great video.

Hopefully this helps get the ball rolling on your submission. Good luck!

Every comic publisher starts out making black and white comics that are 20 something pages long right?  So what happens if we challenge that train of thought for a second.

Why are you selling gumballs?

Several years back when I first got married, I came across a magazine advertisement for, believe it or not, a gumball vending machine. The advertisement promised buckets of cash every month if you had one of their expensive gumball machines. All you had to do was put it in a store and fill it with gumballs. That’s right, you can make thousands of dollars a month buy just filling up vending machines weekly and the kids will come out of the woodwork drooling.

I, being a very smart business man (sarcastically speaking), convinced my wife that we should try it so we brought the magazine to my father-n-law to see what he thought. You see, he had a small venting machine business back in the day so he knew the ropes. Another motive was to see if he might want to lend us some money to buy some machines.

He listened to our case patiently and then paused for a minute to think it over. I noticed a slightly confused look on his face and then he said, “Why gumballs?”

Let me make this clear. He was happy that we were thinking about this business and trying to invest our money in assets that would give us money in return but he had a point. We would be spinning our wheels to first try to get our expensive machines in a store that doesn’t already have one, and then if we did get it into the perfect location we would constantly be worried about kids kicking it over or breaking into it for the coins. We would be buying candy at bulk and lugging it around town every week just for a few quarters. Suddenly my blinders were removed and I could see his point clearly. In fact, I felt pretty silly afterword.

Okay, why are we talking about gumballs on a blog about making graphic novels?

Because spending all the time that it takes to draw and write a comic only to package it up as a 22 page magazine for $3.00 is a lot like trying to sell gumballs. If you find a good printer that can print your comic for half that price then you are still in trouble. Minus the cost of shipping to a customer, store or convention. Convention fees, taxes, hotels and travel expense. Maybe you’ve gotten your comic into Diamond who takes 60% of your cover price to stock the shelves of dying stores and you still have to pay to ship it to their warehouse. After all those expenses are paid for, guess how much you made from your hard work. Mere cents. The same profit as selling a gumball.

You still wanna print 22 page Comics?

(Obviously I have a one sided opinion here but below are many reasons why I am doing the things that I am doing with reMIND. I’ve been putting all my eggs into this basket and only time will tell if I am on the right track. None-the-less here is my argument.)

First of all, the only people who seem to buy floppy comic books are the people who goto comic shops regularly to buy their superhero titles. So to start off, unless your comic is a superhero comic then I don’t really see the point in trying to convert everyone else into this format when they are used to reading books.

It doesn’t help that these comic shops sales have been dropping year over year for the last 15 years. [EDIT] So I am told that my statement of these comic sales are wrong and I apologize to Comichron.com for misinterpreting their information. I was linked to another article that reflect actual comic sales over the years here. Notice that trade sales have been increasing like crazy over the last 12 years while comic sales have been flat. Factor in the 3.4% annual inflation rate and comic sales are still down.

I went back home to Idaho to visit my family and while I was there I swung by the local comic shop only to find the doors closed. It was the only shop in a college town of around 60,000 people. It’s been almost 3 years since it closed down and still nobody is stepping in to profit off the niche. Why? Because there must not be a profit anymore.

I had coffee with the original owner of the comic shop and he said that all the Barnes & Nobles and major bookstores are now the way to get comics. But it’s mainly trades and graphic novels they sell. Now days it’s pretty hard to find a good comic store unless you’re in a major city like L.A. where I live but even in L.A. I have to drive a while to find what I’m looking for and I usually don’t find it when I get there so I go online and pay a cheaper price to have it sent right to my doorstep.

All the major book stores carry graphic novels and trades though. Some are even better than comic book store selections because it’s not just the Marvel and DC books. Major publishers, like Scholastic and Random House, have been taking notice of graphic novels and started selling books like Bone, Amulet, and Ghostopolis.

Sure, comic titles in the movie industry are hot right now with all their superhero movies making millions and I think it’s the main reason pamphlet comics keep selling at all. Even so, I don’t understand why Marvel or DC doesn’t hand out a free comic with each ticket on opening weekends for each major comic movie to try and introduce people to the medium again.

Sitcom Comics

“My nephew loved Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Batman, Wolverine and all those characters from the movies, and was enthusiastic to get into the comics. But after reading a few collections he figured something out. These aren’t stories. ‘Batman’ is not a story. ‘Spider-Man’ is not a story. They’re intermingled systems of stories, loosely connected by continuity of various levels of accuracy, written and drawn by people with wildly different styles and goals, staring characters in their twenties who have mostly been around for forty to seventy years.”- Near Death Blog