Q&A with James Spooner

My punk tattooist filmmaker artist writer ex-neighbor on "The High Desert," his graphic memoir about being the only Black punk kid in his dusty hometown.

“Watch a Writer Bet on Himself” will return next week. Not much happened this week beyond queries sent and rejections received. I did use ChatGPT to search for agents who share the interests discussed in the book. Surprise, surprise: it was useless.

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This week I’m running an interview with writer-artist-filmmaker

James Spooner

. I’m going long because everything he said is so useful to new authors. Oddly, I used to be neighbors with Spooner and we’d nod in passing while walking our dogs. Then we moved. But the lady got me this graphic memoir, The High Desert—about growing up the only Black punk kid in a small town—and I realized the author was that guy in the Circle Jerks t-shirt with the sweet dog. So now we’re not neighbors but we’re friends.

The High Desert was his first book, published by Harper. He co-edited Black Punk Now, an anthology curated from the perspective of Black punk writers and artists. His third book, an illustrated novel called It Starts With Anger, comes out next August from Pantheon. And a stage adaptation of The High Desert is in the works.

1. In doing memoir, how do you keep yourself honest about the awkward / embarrassing / regrettable moments from your younger self?

I’m a believer in being vulnerable. If you’re not, what’s the point? People enjoy art where you either can’t say the thing or you’re afraid to say it. Those are usually poeple’s favorites. Whether song or book or whatever. It gives you permission, right? Those kind of vulnerabilities are important in memoir. Like with The High Desert, some characters are amalgams or characters I split into two. But life is messy, and some stuff isn’t relevant to the story I’m telling.

2. Your first book wound up with Harper, but were you also making preparations in case you had to go a more DIY route? What would that look like?

Yeah, my first agent was good but not a good agent for me. She knows how to sell books but they weren’t in my genre. She was well-versed in the children’s market. Because The High Desert is about teenagers, she tried to sell it to First Second and Scholastic, places that are great for that. But my book has sex and drugs and Nazis, you know? Not a middle-grade book. So I got 30-40 rejections, I dunno. I didn’t really care. I heard their notes and the ones that made sense I was happy to integrate. Covid hit and I had so much more time to work on it. It was fully on my mind that I might have to self-publish. I wasn’t really afraid of that, the people who need this book will find this book. That’s what happened with my film, Afro-Punk. It’s like running a band, I know how to tour and stuff. I was prepared to do it myself but I’m glad I went with Harper. There’s legitimacy that comes from a real publisher, and they made a nicer looking book than I could have done on my own. And I got a decent advance.

3. What’s the best advice you got about the business of writing?

My first agent was great but not a good fit for my work. So then I was back on my own. When the rebellion around George Floyd started happening, all these white-led corporations took up Black Lives Matter to look good, so I started researching agents that understood punk. I felt that was important. Agents are not just pitching the book, they have to be connected to publishers and editors and know the right people for the project. But I didn’t know any of that. I got interest from four agents who either talked about punk in some interview or had repped books with punk themes. Two were interesting in different ways. One had repped a bunch of musicians, almost like a music manager, they were cool in that pop culture kind of way. The other reps big names in literature, whether Pulitzer winners, presidents, best sellers, that kind of stuff. He just seemed more enthusiastic. I was thinking about my long term so I went with PJ Mark at Janklow Nesbit. I understood that you can’t submit to big publishers without an agent. It was a nice compliment when publishers like Drawn & Quarterly and Fantagraphics approached me after The High Desert came out and said they’d have loved to publish that book. And I said: Well it’s sitting in your slush pile, I submitted it. So now I can email any number of people and skip the pile. But I still think even though I give 15% to my agent, it’s worth it. And with prose, it would be next to impossible—especially for a first timer—to get noticed. Or even have a manuscript accepted at the Big Five.

4. What surprising thing have you learned about yourself in the writing of your books?

I was surprised that I could even write prose. I definitely was intimidated by that idea. One of the surprises was that a giant publisher only cares about your book for two weeks to a month. If it hasn’t become a bestseller by then, they’re onto the next thing. You have to take it into your own hands. A shocking number of books are published each year, and like 98% of those don’t sell more than 500 copies. Of those that do, only like 2% sell more than 5000 copies. A “bestseller” is not really that. What constitutes a bestseller is selling like 10,000 copies in the first week. When you think of that in terms of records, it feels like nothing. A really successful book might only sell 20,000 copies. What it really is, is these huge books—a president’s biography, or some fiction smash, or a movie based on a book—basically fund the entire publishing industry.

5. How did you take it into your own hands?

I did just tons of events. The first year I did like 50 or 60 events. Those could be anything from a Comic-Con or a zine fair. I sold books at a pizza place and they made a beer label with my illustration on it. So any kind of way to get a new audience to see your work, you know? Thankfully, the graphic novel world is very DIY friendly. If you go to a zine fair or comics arts fair—as opposed to Comic-Con—it feels like a punk show without bands. A room full of merch tables. It’s that energy of people who really want to support DIY storytelling or creator-owned work. This is a world that’s not embracing AI, you know? I leaned heavily into that. Whenever I could, I did collaborations with libraries. And figured out how to monetize along the way. You can speak at industry book fairs but they don’t pay you. They also don’t let you sell your book. They’re there to promote booksellers, not you. So I’m upfront with them that I need to sell my own books. I did one in Florida run by John Grisham and David Baldacci, who write best-seller airport books. It didn’t really make sense why they’d ask me but it was an all-expenses-paid stay at the Four Seasons, so we turned it into a vacation. I talked about problems with the industry and why they don’t let us sell books, so they bought 200 books and gave them to students, which was great.

6. Did these efforts move the needle?

I personally have sold probably 1,500 copies of The High Desert. Maybe 2,000. And that’s not nearly the majority of books sold. That work just allows you to keep doing it. It’s like being in the van, going on tour, and playing for gas money. You’re just trying to get to the next gig. And pay the rent. But two years just doing these events led to college gigs. In Tacoma, WA, I did a talk at a DIY bookstore with Sasha LaPointe, who wrote a Native American punk book, to basically four of her friends. I didn’t have high expectations. But two of the people in the audience later got me paid gigs. One was a $5,000 speaking engagement in Seattle. The other runs the Seattle Film Forum and we put together a whole weekend of Black punk documentaries. You never know who you’re talking to.

7. Tell us about a funny / awkward / awesome reader connection you’ve made?

Even just meeting you. It took my book getting in front of you to be like: Wait, I knew that guy. I walk by your old house every day and wish I knew you when you were right there.

NPR Music

did a piece about The High Desert and a film producer reached out about turning it into a film. That fell apart but in New York we went to a dinner party with him, and his close friends are all in various parts of the industry. One of them is now producing the High Desert musical.

As I get older, a part of me doesn’t want to talk to people. I just want to put my head down and work. But it’s about putting yourself out there and people noticing. I wanted to do an event in my hometown where the book takes place. Some local punks put together an event me and it was rad. A hundred-some kids came, bands played, I sold a ton of books, and the local record store has sold probably a hundred copies of the books. A professor at the local community college hit me up a year later to come do a talk at their zine fest for $3000. If the goal is to be wealthy, books are probably not the way to do that, but if the goal is to keep writing books or making art, the business piece of it is how you do that.

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