Book Pitch: Let's Talk About It

Hey, uh, so Matt and I are working on a book for teens. Let's Talk About It: The Teen's Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human will hopefully be coming out from Random House Graphic in 2020, provided I don't miss too many deadlines. Thankfully, Maria Frantz is helping keep me on track by making the preliminary page layouts, on top of which I draw the final art. She's been a godsend.

This is the project I've been thinking about and soft-starting for over ten years now and for it to actually be turning into a real book... ! Haha, it's difficult to describe how it feels. There's lots of pride and joy, with a fair bit of fear and insecurity mixed in too. Ultimately, I feel like we're making a valuable resource and I'm so grateful to be a part of it.

With the generous permission of our publisher, I'm sharing our book pitch with you folks here, including an advance look at two of the finished chapters. 

Two things:

1) Please do not share this.
This is just for you, as a thank you for being a patron who directly helps support me to make the work that I do.

There can be unpredictable consequences to creators and projects when the general public gets its hands on early development work. I know, I know, this is the internet, there's accounts set up solely to scrape content, etc., etc. But please, if you're an actual person reading this, please don't repost this, it would be really cool if you kept this just to yourself, as it's meant to be. 

2) Books evolve from their initial pitches
This pitch was assembled in early 2018 to entice the publisher with the possibility of what our project could be. Once you actually get started working on something, though, it takes on a life of its own and turns into It's Own Thing. 

What you see here is the starting point of our project, but the final product may take some deviations. 

As I said, this was all assembled in early 2018, which means it's already been delivered, approved, and we've been cranking away on the final product for most of the last year, so there's not much to be done about feedback you may have on the pitch /:) Apologies for typos and rest assured that qualified experts in the relevant areas and sensitivity readers will be going over the finished work, so delicate subjects will be handled with care and thoughtfulness.

So, here you go! If you're curious what a book pitch can look like: here's ours! If you want an insider's advance peek at some finished pages from a book coming out in two years, here it is! 

Thanks again so much for supporting my work here over the years, folks. This book deal wouldn't exist except for the fact that you have directly been making it possible for me to draw the sex education comics I've been producing for the last five years and proving that I can deliver a valuable, finished product to the people who have the resources to make this next book happen. Very sincerely, I wouldn't be able to have this job without you.