Yes, PW Select, our new quarterly supplement listing self-published titles, is for graphic novels and comics too. Launched by PWxyz president George W. Slowik Jr., the PW Select registration site is now live and accepting submissions for the first supplement, which will appear in our year-end issue in December.
PW Select will provide a quarterly listing of self-published titles that have been submitted to the magazine for listing and will charge a $149 processing fee to be included in the inaugural listing. Self-publishers who are PW subscribers get one listing for free and the processing fee also includes a six-month subscription to a digital edition of PW. While each supplement will also review at least 25 books, the processing fee does not guarantee a review. Titles to be reviewed will be determined by the entire PW editorial staff. In addition to the listings and the reviews, the supplement will offer news as well as an overview of trends and a look at authors in the self-publishing marketplace.
The rise in self-publishing, DIY, subsidy or vanity publishing—whatever term you prefer—is probably one of the most significant changes in the publishing industry in recent years. Since the magazine was founded in 1872, Publishers Weekly has strived to cover the entire publishing industry and this new supplement is simply our latest effort to fulfill our historic mandate. Over the last 20 years, self-publishing has produced an explosion of new authors and new books. Nearly 800,000 books were produced in the U.S. last year and were characterized by Bowker as "nontraditional." Much of this was self-published and POD.
Comics and graphic novels are no strangers to delivering self-published print titles through print-on-demand technology. It has been an accepted and ordinary part of the comics publishing landscape for years. The PW comics department has always accepted a few self-published graphic novels for reviews in addition to our regular coverage of news and interviews and features on self-published authors in PW Comics Week.
But the process of choosing which self-published titles to review has always been highly subjective and restricted to a few books that, in our determination, deserved our editorial attention. We will continue to cover the self-publishing sector of the comics market as we always have, but PW Select will provide comics and graphic novel self-publishers another more predictable outlet for announcing the publication of their books.
