Here we see a couple of pages of my King Lear work in progress, coloured in experimental spot colours. These were done on the suggestion of the editors who I went to meet this week, along with my agent, all as part of the process of, hopefully sometime down the line, getting my work traditionally published.
It's definitely going to be a long game, with a lot of waiting and a lot of potential disappointment, and it could all wind up with nothing getting published by anyone. But it feels like we're making progress, and today was very exciting because, as far as I can remember, I've never had a meeting with a publisher before.
To bring myself up to speed, and to keep some sort of record of things (which I will inevitably forget as we go along) here's the story so far. September 2023 I sent Richard The Third out to every agent I could find. October Emily Talbot got back in touch, and by November I had myself an agent. From October to February I worked on spec pages of a new Midsummer Nights Dream, Twelfth Thing and King Lear to give Emily work to send to publishers, which she started doing in February.
5th March, first response came from Chloe at P*** R*** H*** who said "I discussed this with the team yesterday. We're being cautious about how many colour/graphic novel projects we take on at the moment, as we have several in the works and want to see how they sell-in. For the right project we would definitely be keen, but in this case the feeling was that the level of detail younger kids study Shakespeare at is perhaps a bit more general than is covered in these retellings. We weren't so sure about the art style ageing up.
Thanks for sharing, always interesting to see what author/artists are up to and who is out there, because I do think these projects are more manageable with one creator."
I found this quite promising, it's nice to be being taken seriously.
Then we heard back from H*** who asked Emily and me in for a meeting, which we had in London on April 4th. It was a good meeting. They'd like to see some new pages, experimenting with a different style of layout. I'll also do some spec pages on a new Shakespeare title (R&J), and on another angle of book we discussed.
As I say, this could all come to nothing, because as Emily explains, even though my two editors (another Emily, and Aliyana) seem very keen, the next people they'd have to take it to, at the publishing and marketing level, could very easily say no. So it's a long and unpredictable process, but it feels like something's happening, and it gives me work to get on with, which is exciting. And I end up with work which, if nothing pans out, can still turn into self published books. So it's all good.
To be continued...
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