Marketing Without the Customer, Selling Through Librarians & Why Fantagraphics Says No to AI with Tucker Stone

Hi, I’m Tucker Stone, the Executive Director of Communications and Marketing at Fantagraphics Books, publisher of comics and graphic novels for the last fifty years. I’ve been in the business about fifteen years. I’ve worked as a retailer, in book distribution for Ingram, which I believe is the largest wholesale book distributor in North America, as an editor, and as a publisher. And now I’m a marketing guy.

I came from comics criticism first, and then I worked in comics retail. I thought people would walk in and ask what’s good, I’d tell them what I thought was good, and they’d come back and say, you’ve got great taste. I very quickly learned that’s not what people want. They may use that language, but what they really mean is that they’re looking for something that fits their taste. Your job is to play detective and shut off the part of you that says what you think is great. What did they actually want?
That’s not manipulation, because you want them to come back. It’s not like a used car, where I can trick you because I won’t see you again for a while. In books and comics, it’s your neighborhood. They want to trust that when they talk to me, I’m actually trying to help them. That translated into the work I do now: working for publishers who are trying to find the people who like their stuff.
Books are a little different from other products you might market. Librarians who are in charge of collection development, meaning librarians who buy for libraries, are not going to wake up one day and decide to go into air conditioning repair. They’re in books for good, so you’re going to be working with them, hopefully, for the rest of your career. They need to remember you as someone they can rely on and be honest with.
They’re also trying to solve specific problems for their patrons, the kids and readers who come to them saying, these are the kinds of graphic novels I want. If I sell them a bill of goods, they’re going to know. That’s the thing about retail that I think is so beautiful: you can’t fake it.
I remember the first sales conference I attended after I started working for a publisher. I was talking to sales reps about a book I hadn’t hand-sold to a real reader, and I knew right away that I was now making something up. I wasn’t using language that had been road-tested with an actual reader. I was inventing a reader, imagining what they’d like, and telling a rep it was going to work. It’s been a long time since I worked retail, so I’m ten years into making stuff up, saying this is going to work on somebody. I don’t really know, though.

Almost across the board, you have to let them speak. The only time the voice of Fantagraphics should take over is when we’re speaking on behalf of historical work. We’ve published George Herriman and Charles Schulz, so there we have to make the case for their history and importance, sometimes alongside their families.
But with contemporary authors, it would be insane for me to try to speak on behalf of someone like Joe Sacco, whose book comes out next week. Nobody is ever going to want to hear what I have to say about Joe Sacco if Joe Sacco is available. In comics and graphic novels there are also fewer authoritative critics, like a Dwight Garner at the New York Times for prose. So when you have the artist, they should be the one talking, not the company.

That’s the main struggle. Fantagraphics has an ethos of maintaining the history of comics, and comics history has been so neglected that you could spend years having that be the only thing you do. It really comes down to acquisitions. Our founder, Gary Groth, is still in charge, and he has opened things up. Eric Reynolds, who has been with the company since the nineties, publishes our anthology, Now, which features young cartoonists from all around the world. Our acquisitions team is signing younger and younger people, often from Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Germany and Latin America.
It’s just taking risks. American audiences have historically been pretty insular, apart from manga. They’ll find one person a year to represent, say, Italian literature, and everybody reads that. So it’s about taking risks and keeping yourself honest, making sure we’re not just publishing the same people we’ve been publishing for twenty or thirty years. That’s the hard part.

I actually learn more from them than I can say. When you work in a publishing or distribution environment, you’re focused on what the editor wants to do and what the author was trying to do, and how to translate that into something a sales rep can take to a book buyer. It’s a middleman job, a translation from the language of an author into a sales language.
When you talk to teachers and librarians, they tell you what these kids actually need and want to read, and it’s often so different from what you read in the trade magazines like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Shelf Awareness. You go talk to a librarian and they say, it’s just not the same concern. They present challenges you didn’t even think of.
I remember librarians telling me, we don’t have good baseball books anymore. The episodic baseball series my brother loved when we were kids weren’t being made anymore. That’s a need not being fulfilled, and you don’t learn that without direct conversations with those people, because teachers and librarians are talking to actual children. It’s not okay for me, the marketing guy, to ask little kids what they think. I need that buffer.

Two pretty basic things. One is Airtable, which keeps me honest. It’s a funneling system so I make sure I’m not forgetting smaller-tier titles, for example books by authors who have passed away. They’re not emailing me to ask how their book is doing, and there are no interview requests coming in, so I have to come up with ways to promote those books myself.
The other is a CRM. I used to use Contactually, which I loved even though it was built for real estate professionals, and now I use Relatable from the same founder. When I started out in publicity and marketing, there wasn’t Meltwater and those tools to pull all that information, so I was managing my own list in Excel. Did I reach out to that librarian who has the cool podcast about books on mining? There are too many people to keep track of, and you don’t want to keep reintroducing yourself and asking, what is it you like again? Relatable has been really beneficial. I’m in that system every day.

I don’t use it at all. Part of the reason is that none of our authors and artists use it, as far as I know. Comics artists in particular are some of the people who’ve been harmed most by the blanket acceptance of AI in illustration work. I can only speak for myself, not give you the official Fantagraphics position.
I don’t use AI because it’s messed things up for people I really like, some illustrators I really care about. You’ve got to respect your friends sometimes and stay loyal to them. I also came from a world of writing and finding my voice through online writing, and that was hard to get to. I like doing that hard work. Would I have found my voice with AI? I don’t know, and I’m not going to roll the dice to find out.

My favorite is My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris. The works of Daniel Clowes and Simon Hanselmann are constantly doing well. We also have critically acclaimed graphic memoirs by women about their experiences, really honest, challenging work that there wasn’t an opening for forty or fifty years ago. Manga is huge, too.
One of our middle-grade graphic novels this year, a beautifully illustrated book, didn’t get a New York Times review or a big podcast review, and it outsold a ton of higher-profile books. We’re already doing a big reprint and a special hardcover. It showed me again the power of libraries, schools, and trade outlets like Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal and Booklist. Those people came to bat for that book. It didn’t become a viral sensation or take the traditional NPR route to market.
That’s something people don’t totally understand about comics and graphic novels from the outside. The cool hit book of the season has often sold to cool hit people, not necessarily to boots-on-the-ground regular folks, who are the ones saying, I’ve got to see that really beautiful book.

What makes me so grateful to work at Fantagraphics is that we’re not obsessed with endless growth. I’ve worked with publishers that have an investor group running things, or a big C-suite to fund, so they have to hit profit numbers every year that aren’t realistic. Reading doesn’t grow exponentially. It grows in a tiered way, and there are only so many hours in the day to read.
Part of the reason Fantagraphics gets to keep taking chances is that we’re not forced to chase that. We just got the New York Public Library’s best graphic novels of the year list, and we had seven titles out of fifty. That’s pretty amazing considering we’re not a Big Five company and we’re distributed by Norton, a smaller distributor.
I have an okay life. I get to travel the world, do really cool stuff and work with amazing authors. You don’t have to chase a crazy number that isn’t real and that will mean losing a job and finding another one.

It was my pleasure talking to you, Stephen.