Flipping the bird at answers

I’m really glad to be working on a book that’s not government funded. A stack of money has been poured into this and we need to earn the money back to pay off the debt.

This just came to mind when I was talking to a guy who put out a bunch of comics with a group called Silent Army. He said they never had a real distribution model – they used half the grant to make an approximation of the funded book, then the rest to make the book that didn’t fit within the funder’s criteria.

Fine, but this guy was disappointed they could never really get the books out to a broader audience. Government funding has a tendency to hinder considerations of sustainable business models in the arts – especially with literature, which is so labour intensive, in a culture where production skills outweigh business acumen considerably.

Today we figured out we need to sell half our print run to break even, then we have the potential to make enough to for Breakdown to do another book.

This is the sort of thinking that I’m really happy to be a part of.