The Daily Cross Hatch interviews Fishtown creator Kevin Colden … currently Fishtown can be found on Act-i-vate, but soon it’ll be published by IDW:
We initially discussed setting up this interview at the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund party, back in December, with the caveat that we wouldn’t set it up until you got a certain piece of important news.
Yeah. I thought it wasn’t going to happen. And then I was contacted shortly afterwards, and now it can actually be told. Fishtown is going to be published by IDW. It’s slated for a hardcover November release. It will be the complete story.
He also talks about how he gave up a Xeric Grant he received for the book because he wanted to keep publishing it online:
… I would have had to have stopped immediately. My reason for not accepting the grant was, if I keep it online until these 23 pages are done, I can sell out the entire print run, but if I take it offline and just print it up anyway, I’ll probably be out however many thousands of dollars it takes to print it.
It was ultimately a fact of, I was reaching thousands of people on weekly basis that I would have had to have cut off. And I wouldn’t have had any basis for promotion. The Web serialization is an amazing promotional tool. We’ve seen evidence recently, actually. The best selling graphic novel of last year was Diary of a Wimpy Kid, which is more of an illustrated book, but is still the best selling graphic novel of last year, and it was still available entirely online before that. So was Shooting War, Dan Goldman and Anthony Lappe’s book. A large portion of that was online, and that’s doing gangbusters. So, it was just really a marketing decision. Eventually I was going to find a publisher for this, one way or another. And Lo and behold, I did.
