In this interview with Zack Smith for Newsarama, I get to talk about the latest Princeless Kickstarter – aimed at getting some hardcovers for volume three.
Jeremy Whitley sees his long-running story in Princeless ending in the next few years, but the future is bright with “a whole world of new possibilities.”
The penultimate arc of the main Princeless story begins August 28 with Princeless Book 9: Save Yourself, but at the same time Whitley and publisher Action Lab Entertainment are raising funds via Kickstarter for a hardcover edition of Book 3 aimed specifically at libraries – which the writer said is the franchise’s most-prized market.
Long story short? Paperback books don’t last long in libraries.
Nrama: So why hardcover then?
Whitley: That’s a great question as, as I mentioned, we already have the book out in softcover. The thing is, being an all-ages comic with a message of reaching a diverse young audience, there is no market that’s more important to us than libraries. In libraries we have a chance to be a kid’s first comic or to reach kids that might not have the money or comic shop to go get the book in stores.
And when you talk to librarians, their number one complaint about trade paperbacks is that a number of them don’t last more than a few check outs. Kids are rough on books. Dropboxes are rough on books. Trade paperbacks aren’t built to sustain the kind of abuse they do in a library. So, if we’re going to reach this audience and help librarians do the same, hardback is the format we need to be using to reach them.
Smith, Zack. “JEREMY WHITLEY on PRINCELESS’ Future & Its Future with Libraries” Newsarama. 2 July 2019.
You can read rest of the interview at Newsarama.
You can also help support our efforts by backing our Kickstarter and picking up some copies of Princeless and Raven: the Pirate Princess comics for your own shelves!