[ScottC]

I'm looking for advice in adapting my young adult dystopian novel into a graphic novel.

I have a design team who is interested in collaborating with me, and we have talked in
general terms about a royalty sharing agreement.

I am no expert on graphic novels, but I imagine there is a lot of work involved... perhaps as much as writing the novel. I will contribute/collaborate with the team on providing the dialog/text. They will drive the storyboarding process.

Does anyone have tips or advice? Are you aware of any contracts that I could use as a basis for our arrangement. What should I think about?

Lastly, I need to look into whether graphic novels work best in paperback, or if ebooks work, and how that would be done in epub or mobi.

Thanks

Ps. If anyone has a recommendation on a young adult dystopian graphic novel, I would love to hear it.

 

[NikOK]

I did a comic book series a while back.  Definitely not an expert on this, but I have a little experience.  And, my experience is more with design, layout, and writing and not anything with illustration.

Honestly, I think having a team for dialog/text may make for a clunky end product.  I guess I'm just not sure if you meant a team strictly writing text, or if they are doing the illustration descriptions too.  Writing for a visual medium takes a level of interplay that is different from writing a book.  When I was working on the comic book, I found that the majority of my writing was in the descriptions of the visuals and the dialog more supported.  I'm not saying that's necessarily how it has to be, but for it all to mesh, I really do think it takes one person looking at the whole thing and thinking about how the visual information and the text information play with each other.

If one team was doing the storyboarding and cell layout (which is very fun to get into) to get plot points and visual appeal, and the other team was doing the text and also the illustration descriptions, it might be a good system.  I guess all I'm saying is beware not to get your two ways of storytelling (visual and text) delegated to two different teams.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a graphic novel gives the reader a lot, and it all has to add up to one singular story.

Art style is also a big part of the end result.  I don't know much about YA or the dystopian genre in general, so no real good idea about what is popular for those books.  But, it's all part of making something new!  I hope that it ends up being a fun experience for you, and that the books come out as a great visual representation of your work.

 

[jdcore]

I did a graphic novel all by myself a few years ago. Kindle comic creator was the only tool I could use for creating mobis at the time. It was clunky and mostly useless. I wanted to do pop out panels, but just couldn't make it work. The software may be better now.

Also at the time, the big player for graphic novels was comixology. I don't even know if they still exist. I did get a nice paperback version from CreateSpace, but since Amazon gobbled them up I don't know if I'd have the same experience today.

 

[ScottC]

Thanks for your input. Interesting things to consider.

 

[NikOK]

I did a graphic novel all by myself a few years ago. Kindle comic creator was the only tool I could use for creating mobis at the time. It was clunky and mostly useless. I wanted to do pop out panels, but just couldn't make it work. The software may be better now.

Also at the time, the big player for graphic novels was comixology. I don't even know if they still exist. I did get a nice paperback version from CreateSpace, but since Amazon gobbled them up I don't know if I'd have the same experience today.

Comixology was very cool. I haven't looked at it in a while either, but I had a pretty good experience using it.