Graphic Novel Insider

The newsletter that gives you an inside perspective (mine!) on the business and art of graphic novels.

Welcome back, or welcome for the first time! The goal of this newsletter, as always, is to demystify the publishing industry for you, while letting me talk about graphic novels!

Today’s topic: What kinds of graphic novels are publishers looking for right now?

Because, yes, you could have an amazing graphic novel project—expressive, compelling art; fast-paced storytelling; delightful characters—and you may have trouble placing it with a publisher. This is because (pay close attention to this part), publishers exist to make money. So they want to acquire projects that they believe will sell to consumers.

How do they know what will sell to consumers? The short answer is that they don’t. Publishers regularly bet big on projects that fizzle in the marketplace, and turn down projects that go on to become bestsellers. They are humans just like the rest of us! But they do have tools they use to make educated guesses.

One of the biggest tools they have is access to a sales database called Bookscan. Publishing folks LOVE Bookscan, because they can look up any book, from any publisher, and see how it’s selling (and you can look at the data in all sorts of different ways—how did this book sell in its first year of publication; how did it sell in its tenth year; how many copies did it sell last week; etc.).

And another tool that they use in conjunction with Bookscan is comp titles. “Comp title” can mean different things: when you are adding comp titles to your graphic novel pitch, they should be the books that yours will sit next to on the shelf. When an editor is adding comp titles to an acquisitions memo, they are trying to tell a sales story. They are saying, “This graphic novel about summer camp that I want to acquire will sell similarly to this other graphic novel about summer camp that was published two years ago.”

Most editors have gotten really good at telling this story. If your pitch has gotten this far—an editor taking it to an acquisitions meeting—that editor believes in your project. So they want to get their team to believe in it as well. And they do this by telling a story with the comp titles they choose. But does that editor know whether your book will sell well? Of course not, but they want to give it a chance. So the comp titles they pick will be ones that also sold well.

Caveat: They cannot pick books that sold too well. They cannot pitch your coming-of-age friendship story that also happens to feature orthodontia as the next Smile, because no one knew that Smile was going to be the hit it was. Same with Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Same with Harry Potter.

So editors will pick books with good sales tracks, but not amazing sales tracks. And after many years of doing the work of finding books with good sales tracks, editors and publishers and sales people start to get an idea of what will sell. They start to be able to make educated guesses.

There are some problems with this approach though:

1. Bookscan is not the whole sales picture. Particularly for graphic novels, which tend to sell pretty heavily in markets that do not report to Bookscan (comics shops, schools, libraries, some independent bookstores), the Bookscan sales can be around 50% or less than actual sales. [How do I know this? Many years of comparing internal sales figures for books I have published to their Bookscan sales figures.]

2. Using comp titles to predict book sales is essentially looking to the past to predict the future. Again, this issue is more acute with graphic novels, which can take anywhere from 18 months to 4 years (or more) to go from acquisition to market. And markets change rapidly. For instance, five years ago many of us thought that YA graphic novels were on the verge of a popularity explosion—middle-grade graphic novels were already hugely popular and those readers were about to age into YA, we reasoned—but what ended up happening was those middle-grade readers graduated to manga and webtoons, rather than the books we had bet big on.

So, again, publishers don’t really know what will sell. But they do have an idea of what they think will sell, and that is what they are looking for. So here it is, what publishers think will sell, based on my personal analysis of Bookscan data, as well as my reading of industry media, book announcements, and tea leaves.

• Middle grade is still where it’s at. But the current reader is pickier than they were ten to fifteen years ago, when you could basically publish any middle-grade contemporary story and have it find a readership. Now you need a hook or a twist to help your book rise above the noise. Think Allergic, The New Girl, Swim Team. Note that fantasy and sci-fi are not doing well in middle-grade, so your hook/twist should not be a portal to another world or a shipwreck on the moon.

  In the middle-grade space there are a few smaller, but growing trends:

  • Books with pets. Think Katie the Catsitter, PAWS

  • Detective and puzzle stories. Think InvestiGators and its new solve-along spinoff, InvestiGators Case Files.

  • Ensemble casts. The Baby-Sitters Club books, Curlfriends.

  • Adaptations. These are really taking off; I think the key here is series books (like The Baby-Sitters Club). Remember to pitch an adaptation idea to the original publisher of the prose material—they have graphic rights in most cases, unless the original book is in the public domain.

  • Series potential. OK, this doesn’t mean publishers are looking for your five-book multi-world arc. They want to publish a book with a beginning, middle, and end that, if successful, could spawn many more self-contained stories in that same (probably contemporary) world. Think Click and its sequels.

• Early reader graphic novels. These are often multi-story books, and tend to adhere to a similar construction: two (or more) mismatched friends who get into scrapes and potentially engage in some light social-emotional learning. This category really started heating up about 8 years ago (the OG was Ben Clanton’s Narwhal and Jelly books) but took a hit during the pandemic. My theory is that retailers hadn’t quite figured out where to shelve this new format—with the picture books, chapter books, or middle-grade graphic novels?—and once stores were closed down, readers hadn’t really discovered them yet so didn’t know to look for them online. I’ve noticed acquisitions of these types of books have picked up significantly in recent years.

What publishers are not looking for right now:

• Nonfiction. Yes, Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales has sold really impressively and I’m assuming First Second has strong institutional sales for their Science Comics and History Comics series. But this tide does not seem to have lifted all boats, and one-offs are particularly hard to sell right now.

• Fantasy. I love it as much as you do (and you really do love it—probably half the graphic novel pitches I’ve seen in the past decade are fantasy), but it doesn’t sell. I don’t know why.

• Most YA. As noted above, this audience seems to be getting their comics on webtoon or doubling down on manga. Of course there have been some really successful webtoon to book conversions, but for every Lore Olympus or Hooky, there are plenty of series that just didn’t sell well in print, regardless of high online engagement.

Finally, there are caveats to all of this. I’m sure there are lots of really smart people in publishing who will tell you something different. We are all reading the tea leaves available to us, but we’re not always reading them the same way. And there are always exceptions. Your portal fantasy may be the one the breaks through! Your one-off nonfiction may the book that changes the whole category. We just don’t know. So when it comes down to it, write the book that feels the most you. Because authenticity ALWAYS comes through, to the editor, the publisher, and the reader.