The gatekeepers of legacy print and comic book publishing have a habit of referring to themselves as “the Industry“. Claiming that exclusive label may have been justified when the only alternatives were underground comics Xeroxed at the library or vanity presses. That claim started to sound disingenuous with the explosion of web comics and the launch of the Kindle. Even if indies only had a small share of the market, it was by definition more than nothing, which made them part of the industry.
Now that indie authors outnumber their tradpub counterparts, sell most of the eBooks, and earn most of the royalties, Tradpub calling itself “the Industry” to the exclusion of indie sounds about as sane as claiming to be Abraham Lincoln. Corresponding to reality isn’t the point, though. The Marie Antoinette act is about reassuring their fellow travelers that the Big Two and the Big Five are still in control.
To the SJW artists and editors in New York, everything is a power play. They can look down their noses at indies who out-earn them because from the gatekeepers’ point of view, money is just one metric of social capital. They care more about wielding the power to influence what your kids think. Because they’re cargo cultists, folks like Mark Waid and Teresa Nielsen Hayden believe that telling each other they’re prestigious really gives them prestige.
What blue bloods generations removed from the grunt work of making a profit forget is the old truism that money talks. If your business is selling to readers, declining sales mean fewer people are listening to you. In a relatively free market, money corresponds directly to mindshare.
Consider the recently concluded crowd funding campaign former DC Comics artist Ethan Van Sciver held for his indie comic Cyberfrog. EVS is a Trump supporter who was harangued into leaving DC by SJW fanatics who crowed that he’d never work in the Industry again. He went out and raised over $500,000 from folks the Big Two had cast out as unclean. Thanks to those disaffected readers, a formerly obscure title from the 90s is playing at the same level as flagship books like Batman and X-Men.
What a coup like this should tell the smarter DC and Marvel aristocrats is that they rule over a shrinking gated fiefdom that’s daily surrounded by more and more ex-customers who are seeking entertainment elsewhere. The comics SJWs aren’t having conniptions over lost revenues. They’re beside themselves with fear over lost influence.
Take the recent cannibal feeding frenzy among the SF SJWs at World Con. People with confidence in their control over an industry don’t fall apart at the seams when someone publishers an author bio using correct English pronouns. The hard data show that guys like Jason Anspach and Nick Cole are gaining market and mind share at John Scalzi’s expense. Nobody’s heard of this year’s Hugo nominees. Meanwhile, indie authors are winning Dragon Awards voted on by twice as many readers.
The comics and SFF publishing gatekeepers have been disintermediated, and the industries democratized. Amazon and Indiegogo are doing what the old guard haven’t been able to do in a dog’s age: take a new talent from the proverbial slush pile to the A list. The cultural implications are staggering. SJWs converged comics and SFF publishing. Now, for the first time, we’ve taken their ill-gotten spoils back from them.
Comics and science fiction are back where they belong: in the customers’ hands.
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