How often do publishers accept finished work?

[akitsukino]

What the title says. I imagine any publisher, comics or otherwise, wants you to be open to editing, but how would publishers feel about you submitting something like a completely finished graphic novel?

Most of my research says that comic publishers want pitch packets with only about 5 - 10 pages. How well or badly would it go down if you tried submitting something way longer, like say 60 pages?

[darthmongoose]

I think first, it's important to understand why publishers ask for a pitch packet rather than a full comic:

• They don't want you to waste your time working for months on something that they might reject. They'd rather give you a chance to show them what you're planning first and let you know if they like it or not before you work on it for months.
• They may want to assign you an editor to help raise the quality of the storytelling through feedback and advice.
• They probably only need to read 5 pages and a quick synopsis to know if the quality or style of your work is what they're looking for and don't feel any need to read a whole graphic novel.
• They might have requirements for things like page sizes they'd want you to work to and would ideally like to give you a template before you start.
• They might have suggestions for changes to the content to shift the target market a little, or just to target it better.

With a completed comic, your best bet is probably smaller indie publishers, because they might be fine taking on a small, independent graphic novel that's possibly niche interest and not drawn to the same technical specs as everything else they make. Though a lot nowadays might be surprised that you didn't just put it online, or go via Kickstarter to publish it yourself.

I don't think it's impossible to just cold submit a graphic novel to a publisher and get picked up, but pretty much everyone I know who made a comic with a bunch of pages then got published, it was because they already published it themselves either online, or by printing and selling it at events and through an online shop, so publishers saw it could sell. That said, even in those cases, it's nearly as common for the publisher to commission that creator to make a new comic for them than to pick up that one.

[Mallory]

Everyone I know who submitted a pitch to a medium-to-large publisher told me they didn't end up using any of the art they used for the pitch once they were accepted. Friend of a friend did draw a whole graphic novel (only pitched with the usual 15 pages) and wound up having to redraw almost everything. Publishing is much more collaborative than people think, and editors are hired to understand what marketable, successful stories are supposed to look like by their publishers, so... yeah they will have edits and suggestions for you. A lot of creators will often act like that's terrible, but it's actually not. Most of the suggestions are meant to make your story stronger; and in the rare case where you REALLY don't like a suggestion, you can often talk it out. But in the end the finished product often looks very different from the original pitch and vision.

On the flip side with the indie publishers, many of them often expect 20+ finished pages (Image I think requires 3 finished issues, which is like 70 pages). I have seen a few people pitch and sell finished webcomics, but they usually get very little (if any) advance because it's technically already published and for the publisher the relationship is "we'll print and distribute this, but because we had almost nothing to do with the creation, we're not interested in financially investing in this product".