Joe Dator Shares How He Made His Book.
Bio: Hi, I’m Joe Dator. I’m a cartoonist, and a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 2006. I’m the author of “INKED: Cartoons, Confessions, Rejected Ideas and Secret Sketches.” The book is mostly a compilation of my published and unpublished cartoons, with peeks behind-the-scenes, and lots of extra fun stuff.
Tools: The first tool I used was a plastic bin. I started by going through pretty much every single piece of paper in my office that had a drawing on it. Cartoons, rough sketches, doodles, sketchbooks, you name it. Anything I thought might be fun to put into a book, I put in the bin and labeled it “BOOK.”
Then I started organizing it, putting things together in file folders. All my death cartoons in one, all my old prospector cartoons in another, and all the while in my head I was tossing around possible amusing ways this stuff could be presented.
I spent several weeks scanning all of it. I stood next to my scanner, turning the pages of my old sketchbooks and scanning every page. Once it was all in digital form, I opened a Word document and spent a couple of months writing the text that would tie it all together.
The biggest problem I ran up against was that I couldn’t keep track of everything at once in my head. Once it was all written, I needed to be able to step back and see the big picture of how it would all fit together, and be able to quickly rearrange it. Doing that on my laptop wasn’t going to cut it, so I got an enormous 36” x 48” cork bulletin board and printed out every page of my book in 25% size, and pinned them all to the board. I’m sure there must be a program that can do that virtually, but it would have taken me six more months just to learn it.
What do you wish you had known before making a book?
I wish I’d known even one single thing about book publishing. It was a massive learning experience, and I started from scratch.
For one thing, I found out that what goes in the book is an editorial concern, but the cover is very much a marketing concern. The cover needed to be locked down before I finished the book, so that it could be promoted. There were about twenty people c.c.ed on every email when we were finalizing the cover, with lots of notes about what they felt they could or could not market. It was a long process, but once the cover was locked down, they pretty much let me do whatever I wanted to do on the inside.
Another thing I learned is that the book publishing schedule goes something like this: “Slow… slow… slow… slow… and NOW EVERYTHING HAS TO BE DONE YESTERDAY!” The final weeks before the book went to press were a whirlwind. I’d done a very stupid thing which is that I was laying out the pages using my rough sketches, which were going to have to be finished at some point. Once we’d locked down what would go on each page, I had about two weeks to create something like 70 finished illustrations. It was a lot of work but it was also my favorite part of the whole process.
Tips and tricks: The hardest part, as you probably suspect, was getting a publisher to say yes. There was no trick to that other than dogged persistence. It was a nearly two year long process of pitching the idea and tweaking it and pitching it again. I got a ton of “no”s, a bunch of “maybe”s and a couple of “yes.. wait, maybe.. actually no”s before the book finally found a home. If there is a tip to be found there, it’s to just keep on trying.
What did making a book teach you about yourself? Cartooning is a lonely job. On this book I had a great editor, Colleen Dunn Bates at Prospect Park Books, who I really enjoyed working with. I guess I learned that I really like the back-and-forth of working out ideas with someone else, and I would like to do more collaborative things going forward.
Where can we buy the book?
This is an easy one! It’s available October 19th wherever books are sold, and you can order it now on all of the big, famous websites. But if you don’t want to support poor working conditions and unnecessary space travel, you can order from a fine indie bookstore like the Astoria Bookshop in Queens, NY. Bonus: they will even let you request a copy that is signed and personalized. By the author. Me.
Website, Etc.:
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