Author: Matt Janacone

If you are a cartoonist, in particular a gag cartoonist, there is no question about it. The New Yorker magazine is the place in which to publish your cartoons.

In 2023, I pursued cartooning professionally. I sent single-panel gag cartoons to the The New Yorker as regularly as their policy permitted.

The first cartons I submitted where Rub Me the Wrong Way and Yard Sale. I thought I had a great shot of landing them into the magazine, especially the first one.

I guess, though Rub Me the Wrong Way just was not New York enough.

Not so terrible, right?

Well, The New Yorker has this policy—they will not permit you to publish your cartons elsewhere. They want exclusive first rights to them. If you publish them elsewhere first, even on your website, to The New Yorker magazine, they are deemed damaged goods.

You have two choices: Wait. Re-submit the cartons, or you can put away your pride and publish them elsewhere, like on your website.

Honestly, did you really want the permanent home of your cartoons to be on your hard drive? I certainly did not.

It is almost as if you are giving up the rights to your cartoons to The New Yorker before you even publish them there. It is like you are in The New Yorker magazine jail or have become a member of their cartoon cult.

However, if you are willing to swallow your pride with a gulp and look elsewhere to publish your cartoons, I am willing to bet your work will still be seen, for example, on popular social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

While you are waiting to get a cartoon published in The New Yorker and receiving rejection and rejection, you could be getting views somewhere else—if making money from your cartoons is not your sole goal.

Getting your cartoons published in The New Yorker magazine might be formidable feat, but it can also be thought of as a cheap thrill. You will only get paid, make money once, once you have gotten a cartoon accepted for publication in the magazine. However, on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, you will be receiving regular checks long after your cartoons are published there. You will only receive a one-time payment from The New Yorker.

Of course, on social media, the truth is that you will need a lot of views, thousands of them, to begin making money, but it is still better than waiting on The New Yorker just to accept your cartoon.

It look some time, a month or so on Instagram, but I am now receiving thousands of views for my cartoons. On TikTok, it took four months, a bit more challenging (probably because they are still-life cartoons, not animated) but two of my cartoons made what I like to call the 1k Club. One is approaching the 2,000-view mark, and the other the 4,000-view mark.

Yes, The New Yorker magazine is the place to submit and sell your gag cartoons. The question is, though: How badly to you want your cartoons to be seen and enjoyed? You can be prideful and prestigious and wait on The New Yorker forever, or, you can turn to social media meccas like Instagram and TikTok.

With The New Yorker, it is more about prestige, I bet, than a paycheck.

I have been drawing cartoons since childhood. Only until 2023 have I realized it was one of my super powers and have begun drawing them professionally with gag cartoons, which I began submitting to the New Yorker magazine on a regular basis.

Rub Me the Wrong Way was one of the first cartoons I submitted to the New Yorker. I believe the first cartoon was Yard Sale. I thought that Rub Me the Wrong Way would be the perfect fit for the magazine. Apparently, I was wrong. I guess it is still not New York enough.

That did not stop me from submitting more cartoons, but, still, the rejections came.

The one thing that I do not like about the New Yorker magazine is that they want to be the first to publish your cartoon. If you publish it somewhere else, even on your own website, they will not accept it.

Well, cartoons like Rub Me the Wrong Way were not meant to be homeless on my hard drive. They are meant to be shared, to make people laugh, to brighten up their day. Why punish the cartoon or the folks who could be enjoying them?

That is when I decided to turned to TikTok against my will.

On TikTok, although the platform is ideal for short videos, 15 seconds or less, I posted my cartoons on the platform anyways. For a while surprisingly, my cartoons performed pretty well, well, as well as can be expected on a platform that favors videos and not still, one-panel cartoons. In the first week, I averaged 500 views per cartoon—enough that I believed in a month I would have received 100,000 views!

I had received 700 views on Rub Me the Wrong Wrong within a week after I had posted it, but the celebration was short lived.

There is a dark side to the platform.

The TikTok virgin that I was, I had made one mistake—I allowed TikTok to choose the background music for my cartoons.

The background music that TikTok had chosen for Rub Me the Wrong Wrong was infected with the F-word. In fact, the song was centered around sex. Four beats to a measure. Well, this song was more like four F-words to a measure.

I could not live with that. I had no choice. I took the cartoon down; with it went its views.

I investigated my channel.

It turned out that a lot of my other cartoons were also infected with the F-word or music I had not chosen. I took them down as well—at least 20% of the videos were infected with unacceptable music. TikTok, as popular as the platform is, can have bad taste in music.

Actually, I was not even aware that you could choose and add background music until a family member informed me.

TikTok, I discovered, has a library of music. If you know what music you are looking for, you will most likely find it. I enjoy jazz and classical music; both work well for the gag cartoons I draw and the jokes I tell.

Still, I guess there was a price to pay for taking down cartoons. Suddenly, my cartoons, the newer ones, were not receiving more than 300 views. I had had enough. I deleted my TikTok account.

What I did not know is that all during this period of TikTok pitfalls, I had forgotten that I had an Instagram account, which was not receiving many views. Of course, I had not posted anything on it in years either. The account was just there, inactive.

I began posting cartoons on Instagram. About a month later, one of my cartoons, No Trespassing, approached 1,000 views. I know. I know. 1,000 views is not a lot, but it was for me. I had made what I call the 1k Club!

Lately, in the last month or two, I have been hitting 1,000 views more regularly on Instagram. This also includes dad jokes that I write and tell through seven-second videos, which are also on my TikTok page. I first post to TikTok then to Instagram, with captions. Whether or not captions make any difference in views like TikTok claims, I do not know.

Now, not all of my cartoons and jokes on TikTok and Instagram make the 1k Club, but I can live with that.

What I discovered, though on TikTok is that two of my gag cartoons reached 1,000 views. One is approaching 4,000 views, and the other 2,000 views, which I am grateful. I wonder why, though they are in the 1k Club. Maybe because they are made for adults.

I guess platforms like TikTok and Instagram come with growing pains and learning curves. Growing a successful platform takes time, not just a month or so but years. It takes time. If you have a niche the algorithm will find you. You are an acquired taste, I guess.

This fall, I will have been writing prose for thirty-three years. It is the one thing in my life that I have stuck with.

The journey as a writer began in college in 1992. I did not attend a fancy or prestigious college but a small, modest one, a community college, where writing prose found me through those mandatory English requirements.

I wrote, and I wrote a lot, a lot of bad prose from 1992 to 1997. They were the “apprentice years” as the late author, Paul Auster, called them.

I wrote novels then, miserably failing at the Great American Novel and having to settle for what I called “The Great American ‘Short’ Novel”.

In 2003, my first work of prose got published, a collection of three novellas through a semi-vanity press who claimed they rejected over sixty percent of the manuscripts they received. I had written entry-level fiction, I like to call it, by this time. Not Pulitzer Prize-winning prose but good enough prose to get published, or hoped to get published, and a publisher that rejection most of the manuscripts they received was good enough for me.

Very modest book sales followed. Not what I had hoped for. I was, sadly, naive.

Up until that time, I had a literary agent from Peoria, IL, who failed to land me a publishing contract with a traditional publisher for a collection of short stories I wrote.

In 2008, Clarion Books (Random House) request the first three chapters of a novella I had written. Suspense. Women’s fiction.

That ultimately fell through.

When you come that far and that close as a published novelist and look back at what you have been through, you cannot just turn back. For me, it was already too late. I had already fallen too deeply in love with writing prose.

I still wanted more than anything to become a traditionally publisher author. Can you only become an author through traditional publishing? Does self-publishing even count? Perhaps I am being too hard on myself.

Then the demon of digital publishing emerged. All you needed was a half-baked book and an internet connection, which I had and turned to. I felt I was proven enough, had paid my dues enough, to venture in this direction, and I have been published through that route ever since as, I guess you could call it, an “amateur author”.

But you have to be careful with the self-publishing platform. It can easily be mistaken for a “plank” as in “walking the plank”. Self-publishing, in particular through Amazon, makes it dangerously too easy to publish prose, prose that is not polished, and that, I believe, has been the reason I have not succeeded, why I have not been read by a wider audience.

So, I am trying to resurrect my career, being much more precise at polishing my prose. I thought, several times, about taking on a pen name, but frankly, I believe, it is both as hassle and taking the easy way out, and you are really starting over, throwing those thirty-three years away. Maybe if you are just a few years in, but not two thirds of your lifetime.

I am not saying that I am turning to the dark side of publishing with self-publishing; what I am saying, which I now believe, is that sometimes, the road to being traditionally published goes through independent publishing. Maybe an easier, more comprehendable was of saying it is that “you have to go through the minor leagues of publishing to get to the big league of book publishing or traditional publishing”.

When you choose independently publishing, you have to put your unpublished book through “book camp”, though editing it, creating its cover, in writing the book blurb, which, I think, can be way more difficult to write than the book itself.

When I began the journey writing prose, I had two ultimate goals—one, to write the Great American Novel, and two, publish it through a traditional NYC publisher. Let’s face it. There’s no point in trying to deny it. NYC is the publishing capital of the world. There is a reason the Writer’s Guild East is headquartered there. For me, it was a pride thing—getting published through a traditional, NYC publisher.

So, I wrote prose and sent prose in, only to receive an avalanche of rejection letters. Round after round, I sent prose in, and round after round, I received avalanche of rejection letters. Not enough to wallpaper an entire room but enough to fill a few shoe boxes.

I was determined to become a published novelist—nothing would do but a traditional NYC publisher.

I felt I had no other option—I turned to the necessary evil of self-publishing. For around $250, they published a collection of three novellas.

Reality check.

I assumed—and you know what happens when you assume—this publisher edited manuscripts.

My collection was published “riddled with errors”—typos, misspelled words, and an onslaught of semi-colons. It was embarrassing!

Lucky, I corrected the problem before the book had been on Amazon for too long.

Then KDP emerged, and I went with it, in the meantime, still receiving landslides of rejection letters from literary agents and traditional publishers. Yes, you guessed it—from NYC.

KDP, as most of you know, is a Print-on-Demand publisher. They do “not” edit your manuscript, they do “not” design your book cover, and they certainly do “not” market your book. Just publishing your book, throwing it up on Amazon, and hoping for the best is “not” book marketing. It is more like pinning your book up on a bulletin that looks like a pinata of Post-it note—which will eventually be buried under other Post-it notes.

To be a self-published author, you cannot underestimate your readers, believing your story is so good that they’ll let a book “riddled with errors” ride. There is the suspension of disbelief—not “the suspension of bad grammar”.

It turned out I still had not edited my novellas well enough. You have to edit the shit out of you books, over and over again. You have to design a book cover that is good enough for an art gallery—”not” your refrigerator door. But that still is not enough. You have to keep the book in their hands by writing a bad-ass book blurb—from the first sentence to the last. It has to arouse the reader!

My strategy still hasn’t changed—I still believe that sometimes, the road to traditional publishing goes through self-publishing. You won’t write a story for everyone. Writing a story for everyone is simply impossible. Some readers will love it, and some will hate it.

What you “do” have to do is make sure your book is reliable and readable, edited as close to perfectly as possible. You have to make sure your book is wrapped with a book cover that is worthy of a work of art, something seen in an art gallery, and the blurb—it must arouse your readers.

Then if “that” does not land you a traditional book deal, then maybe you are not meant to be a writer.

I have been writing about independent publishing, about how sometimes, the road to traditional publishing has to go through independent publishing.

Now, I am wondering: Is there really a difference between independent publishing and traditional publishing? How can you tell if the story is a damn good story? Easy. If it excites you. If it does, then there is a good chance your readers will get excited about it, too. It is all about emotions.

Do I dare say it?

I do. No.

Why?

Well, whether you choose the independent or traditional publishing route, it shouldn’t really make a difference if you have written a damn good book.

What I mean by a damn good book isn’t about grammar. What it is about is story. Is the story you’ve written a damn good story?

Yes, grammar is important, very, very important, but story, whether one wants to admit it or not, comes first.

In other words, you can construct eloquent sentences, poetic sentences, poetic prose, prose with accents like alliteration, but, if your story isn’t there, if there is no story, then all you have is, although eloquent sentences, sentences that go nowhere.

Ask any author. Go ahead. Ask them. They will say that when they’re trying to get the first draft of their story written or captured down on paper, the last thing they’re concerned about great grammar, correct grammar. They’re main concern is getting it all, the story, on paper, “then” worry about the grammar later. The late Jimmy Buffett wrote the line of a song: “And if I could just get it all on paper….” There is a reason why they call it a first draft or the vomit draft, well, the people in the screenwriting world do.

Of course, if the story is there, and your lucky enough to win over an agent or traditional publisher with it, they have the people, they have the staff to polish the grammar to mirror finish.

But, if you’re not one of the rare lucky ones—we rarely are—but, indeed, the story you’ve written is, you believe, is exciting, then, if you feel you’ve exhausted all the possibilities, all your options, all your strategies of attracting a traditional publisher, then you must choose the only other option left—independent publishing. This means that you must make sure, whether through you or a paid professional editor, the grammar in your story is as precise and polished as it can possibly be, and this means to a mirror shine.

But, it does not stop there.

Then there is the book cover, then the book blurb, and both must be artistically and verbally superb, enough that the potential reader strolling by the bookshelf has no choice but to stop, pick it up, and read the blurb, and holding the book close to their heart, take the book to the register.

Yes, traditional publishing houses have the staff do it all and do it all very, very well. They have the editors, copy editors, and the artists to bring out the best in your book.

The difference with self-publishing is, well, unfortunately, you have to do it all, including the marketing, which has always been without question, I admit it, my greatest weakness. But, I am still betting on, I still believe that word of mouth can work wonders. Write an damn good book, tell a damn good story that will stir the hell out of your readers’ emotions, and their experience with it will spread like a wildfire to everyone they know—even, I am willing to bet, people who don’t read books!

If I had heard it correctly, the author himself, R.L. Stine, of the Goosebumps books series swears that the success of the book series came about because of word of mouth, not because of marketing, and he is, if you have ever watched any of his interviews on YouTube, dead honest. He simply tells it like it is.

So, that’s the path I am on right now, making sure that every story, every thriller novella that I write is not just edited but edited incredibly well, and its cover is a work of art, and its book blurb is superb. You only get a moment, or two if you’re lucky to win a reader over in a book store. How long do you want your book to stay in their hands?

Good grammar, not necessarily great grammar, starts with constructing good sentences.

From there, you move into constructing great stories, and constructing great stories is more important than constructing great sentences.

Please, allow me to elaborate.

Okay, let’s say, you’re just moving along, living your life, when life happens.

In this particular case, what I mean by “when life happens” is not when life interfere with your schedule.

What I mean is “when life happens as a writer”.

Suddenly, quite unexpectedly and quite miraculously, an idea for a great story just drops in your head, and you scramble, you do everything in your power to write it down, as quickly as you can!

You write an outline, a road map of your story.

Now, you’re ready to write the story, in novel form.

This is where good grammar matters, because it you don’t have it, it becomes a distraction and can destroy your story.

What do I mean by “distraction”?

If you don’t have at least good grammar, bad grammar will slow you down, will keep you from writing your story.

The very last thing you want to be thinking about is grammar when you’re trying to wrote what could quite possibly be the next Great American Novel.

What you need to be concentrating on is story, not grammar.

How good should your grammar skills be? Good enough that when you’re writing that Great American Novel your grammar skills are in autopilot, or have become second nature to you.

Your grammar skills do not have to be perfect or as good as a professional editor in a publishing house. It just has to be good enough to get you through the first draft of your novel.

There is a reason why they call it a “first draft”. You can get the grammar right on the second and thirds drafts. The important thing is that you get your story written.

Structure first, sound grammar last.

I like to use alliteration when I write prose, but it is not something I am thinking about until I believe I have written a solid story first. Think of things like alliteration as part of the finishing touches you put on your story. Alliteration has nothing to do with the story but it makes for a story that flows or reads like poetry. But remember. You’re not writing poetry. You’re writing prose.

Write a great story, and I bet, in a perfect world, an editor won’t care about the grammar. Even an editor knows you can fix the grammar later.

Book titles are everything. First impressions. Book titles should be catchy, whether they are for books or films.

There are times I’ve finished a first draft or even several drafts of a novel or screenplay; for some reason or another I couldn’t find a title for it. Well, I couldn’t find a good one.

I enjoy watching movies. If you pay close enough attention to them, at some point in the movie, you’ll hear either a character say the title of the movie, or you’ll see the title of the movie on something like a sign—not counting the title in the beginning credits, of course.

I had a hard time finding a title for this one screenplay I had written. I just couldn’t seem to nail a title for it. It was a road trip romantic comedy. The main characters were on the run to Mexico. Mexico. This was the title I had when I began the screenplay. Even though it did seem like its natural title, I wasn’t happy with it.

It wasn’t until the fourth revision that I found the official title. The title was given to me through the dialogue of the main character: “This ain’t no vacation, sweetheart.” Bingo. It fit perfectly.

Some book titles reveal themselves in the very beginning, when the lightning of a story idea strikes. They stick. We then write the story around them. Other book titles, however, are stubborn. They come in reverse, after the story is written, sometimes even after several drafts are written.

If the title doesn’t come in the beginning, don’t worry. It will come by the end of the first draft. If it doesn’t, it will come by the second, or third, or fourth. Trust me. It will come. It’s like spaghetti sauce—It’s in there.

Does technology help us, or hurt us? I think it would depend on the generation or understanding of what technology really does.

I have visited quite a few schools to read my children’s books and talk about writing. There is always a little time after a reading for children to ask me questions. The one question I am asked all the time and first is “Where do you get ideas for your book?” Every once in a while a child will ask “Do you have a computer?” “Yes,” I reply, “but not always.”

Yes, computers or word processors are wonderful writing tools. Word processors can certainly help you write more efficiently. You can highlight blocks or paragraphs of text and move them around with ease with a mouse. There is a built-in spell and grammar check.

The truth is no matter how advanced in technology computers are and most certainly will become, they will not and cannot write for you. Sure, they will suggest where to put a comma. Sure, it will tell you when you do not have subject/verb agreement, when you have a fragment. But, do you understand why the computer is pointing these things out? More importantly, do you know how to correct them? Is the computer even correct? Writers have this earned privilege called a poetic license.

It is not so much about the technology the computer has in correcting spelling and grammar as it is about pointing errors out. An example is misspelled words—not necessarily typos but misspelled words. If you meant to type too but typed to, to the computer you are correct. See? You cannot trust the computer. You have to be able to check your work much the same way as you do with math. That is why math teachers want to see your work or calculations.

They want to see if you really understood how you got your answer. Some students think they can get by or away with memorization, but eventually you will have to know what you are doing.

When I tell students I started out as a writer with a manual typewriter, I might as well have said to them that I painted pictures on cave walls. They look at me rather strangely like a dog when he tilts his head. Some of them have never even seen a manual typewriter let alone heard of one.

The truth is manual typewriters will teach you how to write, not necessarily come up with a story—that is all you, something that cannot be taught—but teach you how to write it grammatically correct. Word processors can spoil us. They can make us lazy, and this is dangerous for aspiring writers. With word processors, you do not have to write or think through your thoughts carefully. Manual typewriters, on the other hand, will. You will think twice, even three times about your thoughts before you type them out. Otherwise, ripping out typed page after typed page will get old fast and rather frustrating.

Before you move up to a word processor like Microsoft Word, your grammar skills should be sharp enough to be on autopilot when you write. If you think bad or mediocre grammar skills are distracting while you write, imagine what it will do to the reader. With good grammar skills you will not always have to trust the computer, or be at the mercy of the computer. When it claims you have an error, you will be able to think about it, debate it. If the computer tells you to jump off a bridge, will you?

A couple of months ago, well, more than a couple of months ago now, I heard on the radio that college loan debt had exceeded credit card debt. Wow, that surprised me.

That said, I remember when I had discovered screenwriting. I remember writing my first feature screenplay—I also remember receiving my first script coverage report. Even with an associate’s degree and good basic writing skills I had to learn about screenwriting, particularly structure, and that meant film school.

Of course, the first film school that sprung to mind was New York Film Academy, but the reality of how expensive film school was quickly deflated all my excitement. My wife and I simply could not afford it—even in a marriage with no children.

So, New York Film Academy—or any other film school, for that matter—was, pardon the pun, out of the picture.

I had heard some pros in the film industry say that film school was necessary, but then I felt a whole lot better after I had heard what other pros like Sydney Pollack had said—just get out there and start shooting.

Well, thanks to screenwriter Carl Kurlander (“St. Emo’s fire”) I had a solution to my film school tuition problem, and that solution fell somewhere between books-on and hands-on—more toward hands-on or “butt-on” after what mystery novelist Lisa Scottoline had said so bluntly about writing—“Apply butt to chair.” I would go a much cheaper route to learning to screenwrite. I called this route “poor man’s film school.”

With poor man’s film school, I would learn how to screenwrite through script coverage, which is basically a report all screenplays receive before and when they go through the studio system.

During the time—this is going back to, I think, the winter of 2008, the script coverage company I had chosen—and am still with today—was Screenplay Readers, and what was, I think, $59 per coverage report—pretty damn cheap, I think—is up to $97 today—which is still pretty damn cheap.

I sent in the second screenplay I had written “This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart” for screenplay coverage—I did not send in the first feature I had written “Abstinence” written in for screenplay coverage probably because I was already onto the second—and the second one would be the one I would learn how to screenwrite through coverage.

Four drafts, a lot of bitter sweet notes, and $236 later I received a Consider for the screenplay. A Recommend, which I did not mention, is the highest rating a screenplay can receive. It is also a very rare rating and very difficult to get—only a handful of them were given out through their entire time in business—but, since only 4% of screenplays receive Considers, a Consider is good enough and what they would give the green light to to submit to studios and agents.

“This Ain’t No Vacation, Sweetheart” and script coverage got me off to a good start as a screenwriter, enabling me to build a good foundation as a screenwriter.

Poor man’s film school might not work for everyone, but it worked for someone like me who had limited financial resources to work with.

You poured your whole heart and soul into writing your manuscript. It may be good. It may even be really good. It may even be perfect, even in Pulitzer Prize contention, but do not. I repeat do not tuck the manuscript into an envelope, do not seal the envelope, do not send the manuscript to NYC. Please put the manuscript down and slowly move away from the desk.

But why do I have to put it away? Ever hear of the saying “Absence makes the heart grow fonder”? It’s true—for lovers, and for writers. It’s only the first draft, and falling in love with it could be fatal! There are visions that must be done!

Do I have to call the writing police? Save me the trouble. Set the manuscript down for revisions. Put it away. Hide it if you have to! Whatever it takes! Leave it for a few days, a week, even a month! The longer the better! Well, do not wait too long. Then go get it. Sit down with it. Go ahead. Open the manuscript. Read it. Go ahead. I dare you. Read it.

OMG! Wow! You did not think you wrote a pop-up book, did you, but it seems like you did. The errors! You did not see before, did you? They are leaping from on the page like firecrackers, are they not? Now, after all the smoke clears, begin the revisions. When you are through, I guarantee it. What you thought was good manuscript is now even better, right? See. I told you so.

Well, that is the good news. Wait. There is bad news? Yep, it is not over, not by a long shot. Set the manuscript down. Put it away. Even hide it if you have to.

Ugh, writer, do they have to break down the door of the sanctuary your writing room? Do they have to point their firearm like a laser beam right at you? Do they have to say, “Please put the manuscript down and slowly move away from the desk”? Do I have call the writing police?