Did anyone else give up on making a comic and just write a novel instead?

Kura 2017-02-27 21:54:54 UTC #6

I did the opposite.

I was writing a series of novels and decided to turn them into comics.

I'm not good at life choices.

dan 2017-02-27 22:06:19 UTC #7

I did the opposite XD

phen 2017-02-27 22:06:29 UTC #8

That's hilarious, just like @nessiefynn and @kurapikasuki, I did the opposite as well. I finished the novels but I'd always been drawing out scenes and particular sequences so it just made sense to translate it into comic form (plus it's a series and set of characters I'm endlessly fascinated with, definitely a bonus).

Now, I have started a comic that doesn't have a nice, neat novel base for it that I'm considering doing now. I don't want to give up making the comic but I certainly hope to organise it as a novel soon.

digitalvalium1 2017-02-27 22:06:46 UTC #9

Did the opposite as well. Wrote shorts and novellas. I have a mountain of unfinished manuscripts.

Marvin 2017-02-27 22:20:37 UTC #10

I kinda thought my story as a book first but I was completely incapable of writing it (it had to be in English for scenario reasons, and I'm French soooo...)
Then I thought my English was good enough for basic dialogues and decided to make a comic out of it, even though it's probably way too long...

But I hope I'll find another story for a novel one day... one I can write in french !

randomladyaj 2017-02-28 01:38:03 UTC #11

I wrote a few (unpublished) novels and for me they've taken a long time to write. My last one, I spent a full year writing it and now I'm letting it sit so I can forget about it and the come back to it and edit it later (It's almost time). But anyways I just started making comics and at first I didn't know how it was going to go because I've never made one before but now I feel like I a little bit used to it. It does take time, but I think creating in itself in any medium is tough and takes time and effort to make. Novel writing has worked for me, it's fun to do as well and so far comic book making is fun as well.

So if you switch from comics to novels or novels to comics or do both, it's all good. It all depends on how you want to express your creation.

indagold 2017-02-28 01:40:52 UTC #12

I have no sense of grammar or structure so nope. Thought about it, most i'll do is write screenplays/scripts since it doesn't require the same amount of stress.

Houndstooth 2017-02-28 02:56:42 UTC #13

I used to write novels, and then a feature film script, but because i use non human characters such as fauns, selkies and anthros, it can be really cumbersome to describe them in novels. However, some ideas i've had simply aren't viable for comics in the way i write Laid in Lavender, so i'm toying with the idea of a novel, light novel or VN for certain things in the future.

VermillionWorks 2017-02-28 04:31:23 UTC #14

I'm working on a dark fantasy novel right now (oh hey look free chapters) because I decided it'd be too epic a length to make a comic...though the urge to comickize it is still VERY strong within me, I might eventually make short comics based on it. XP

...but seriously if I tried to make the whole thing a comic, I'm pretty sure I'd die of old age before I could finish it. XD

Shanny8 2017-02-28 06:18:35 UTC #15

I've fluctuated between writing stories and doing comics(not at the same time though). Between 2010 & 2013 I used to do a lot of writing...then I got interested in comics again and dropped the writing.

MST3KFan 2017-02-28 07:38:05 UTC #16

I attempted to do that once for an older project years ago. I knew my artistic skills were not up to the task of doing what I wanted with this particular idea and ended up writing stories around it instead. Even somehow got a publisher to look at it, but that's as far as it good as I got quickly dissuaded from doing this due to another person I knew online getting her work published, only to see her and her family (they helped her finance things) fall into debt instead of actually earning anything big.
Sure the publisher got her tours and reviews and all that stuff, but if no one is buying the book it can really hurt.

OliviaMerteli 2017-02-28 08:25:48 UTC #17

I'm much more of a writer so I took the opposed road too. I wrote a lot of novels, some published, some not, but feel blocked every time I want to do something longer.
So I choose to turn my roman projects into comics. But since I'm a very slow learner in drawing and have too much projects anyways, I'll probably just returns to the roman format for some of them.
(On a side note, learning comic scripting helped me to better plan my stories. I didn't know the middle and end of most of my novels until I had written it and, if it works (more or less) for this format, I quiclkly got burried in plot holes on bigger project. So by turning to comics, I stresslessly beat my weakest point in writing.)

GoldenPlume 2017-02-28 17:32:08 UTC #18

We did the same too (opposite direction). Spent a very long time writing an epic for a niche market and piled up a lot of rejections in the process. Rather than take the money we had saved up to print-distribute we decided to crowdfund the thing using all the print-distribution money for marketing instead. All that accomplished was to find out that publicists' words should be taken with a grain of salt and that advertisers as a whole give deliberately innacurate numbers and CTRs so they can get your money. We also found out that the niche market we had written the book for was very negative towards it. We got turned for almost every interview and news article that we attempted, in a niche that doesn't have a whole lot of news or anything going for it. Needless to say the entire process was a massive failure, especially financially. After that we stopped writing books completely. We decided to switch to comics instead because images tend to be shared on social media far more than text. So far we've found comics to be easier to grow a following for, but still, writing for Seeking Alpha is far more lucrative than anything else we've ever done in writing/comics.

When the 30 Day Writing Challenge thing came out we got some confidence back to write another book, but the results of that reminded us to stick with comics. Comics don't get the same level of writing scrutiny that books get.

ZatchZ 2017-02-28 18:24:40 UTC #19

I was about to do that, but I noticed that I have a hard time writing since I want to show instead of tell.

randomladyaj 2017-02-28 19:18:17 UTC #20

That's really messed up. Who were you marketing the book towards and do you know why they turned on you and was negative?

GoldenPlume 2017-02-28 21:40:53 UTC #21

We were marketing the book towards fans of a particular niche industry. There are previous books for that niche that have done very well so there was precedence that our book could do well too. It wasn't like this was something that was a complete first time gamble.

We honestly can't answer why everyone was negative, because we don't have an answer, as few people were truthful with us. The niche market has one dedicated cable station. We spoke to several people from the station and management refused to let us run ads on their network for reasons they would not give. All they said was "they are not interested". This didn't make a lot of sense because they had run ads the year prior for a non-fiction book on their station so we weren't asking them anything that was out of the ordinary other than our book was fiction. All we eventually got as far as an answer was from a third party that stated the cable station thought we would steal everyone's money from the pre-order and they wanted to protect their viewers. All we can guess is that the station management didn't know how a pre-order or a Kickstarter works.

Most of the phone calls we made to the media in the niche industry were never even returned. Maybe 3 out of 10, and most were no/not interested. One business hung up on us several times after we tried calling back for a follow up.

The industry also has one major newspaper. We bought a lot of digital ads from them and was able to coax the person selling ads to let us have an in person meeting with the editor-in-chief. We were able to meet that person who only spoke for us for about two minutes and said that, "None of our readers are interested in books. Thanks for all your ad money though." (paraphrased) We cancelled what we could of the contract the very next day.

It pretty much was the same with everyone, even the small email only newsletters. No one wanted to have anything to do with us even though we were giving them the manuscript so they knew what they were going to be promoting and that the book was done and ready for print. We had several good reviews from independent editors attached. One podcast did an interview with us because we bought a lot of ads from them (their listener numbers turned out to be grossly exaggerated), one website did a blog on us (bought a ton of ads again), one magazine did a review on us (because one page of the DPS was a review which we had to end up writing since they backed out at the last minute), and one website ran a no effort carbon copy press release filed under classifieds rather than news (again bought lots of ads from them). That was it. The publicist was not able to make anything happen when they previously assured us they knew everyone who was anyone in the industry an would be able to call on their extensive contacts list. The publicist came highly recommended so we figured they were legit.

The only other thing we ever heard was one person we knew personally called our book "schlocky" and posted it on a public forum for others to troll when they hadn't even looked at the manuscript. That was really a shock.

Alll in all the Kickstarter took about 4 months from start to finish to get everything set up ads wise and what not, 100s of hours, and $10,000s and it was a huge failure. After that we pretty much gave up on doing anything creative. It took about a year to work up the courage to switch into comics instead. The manuscript we've pretty much shelved indefinitely since the market has more or less spoken they have no interest in reading it.

randomladyaj 2017-03-01 00:17:45 UTC #22

I'm very sorry that happened to you. I hope comicing is treating you better.

SynergyEclipse 2017-03-01 00:25:01 UTC #23

I wrote a few short stories, but I always found writing descriptions for characters, scenery and actions to be the most difficult part of them. I turned to making comics to portray my ideas visually, but I originally started with writing stories because I had no confidence drawing people or scenery!

GoldenPlume 2017-03-01 02:01:54 UTC #24

Thank you. Yes, comicing is treating us better. It has its own set of frustrations, but everything has its share of problems. Along the way we have met some very nice people.

We've planned to follow this road for 5 years and then reassess. Currently we're only 10 months in.

ghostmaya 2017-03-01 13:54:34 UTC #25

I thought of that before. I try to wattpad it but then I just miss to draw... and my hands want it so badly