Merch Books and Why They Suck
An observation from a writer on YouTube
“Blink twice if you’re in trouble…”
So hey. I’ve been at this YouTube thing for almost five years now—it’ll be five in November. And I’ve been writing for a lot longer than that, publishing for over a decade. I don’t know everything. Some lessons have come the hard way. One such lesson is this:
Not everyone cares about doing it well.
“Graham, what are you talking about?”
Last year on the channel I was covering a book put out by a guy who was famous on YouTube. The book sold successfully, and also drew plenty of criticism. Someone asked if the book really deserved this level of success.
My reply was that “deserve” didn’t enter the equation so much, if the creator had an audience willing to purchase the product. From a commercial standpoint, I was correct. From an artistic standpoint, there’s more to it than that.
It’s not ground that I’m eager to cede, mind you—there have been people complaining that fantasy is still dominated by Tolkien even fifty years after his death (without appreciating that he defined the genre and his work is timeless). He didn’t just write something creative or imaginative, he wrote profound spiritual truths into his work that will continue to resonate with human souls for generations to come. Nobody’s going to be reading 99% of fantasy written today in another century, and that’s fine. Right now there are people willing to spend money on copies of things they like.
Whether they are satisfied with that purchase is a matter of individual reporting. “Did this book deserve my money?” is a retrospective question. And now, 6 or 7 years after buying my first couple of crowdfunded novels and comics, I’ve got a list of books that—to some degree or another—I regret buying.
Only because they weren’t really worth it and I’m not likely to ever read them again. They weren’t books for the sake of art and composition. They were merchandise put out by a briefly popular personality and they quickly faded into irrelevance.
“Graham, do you mean the art or the artist?”
Heh.
Anyway.
In no particular order, here’s what I’ve got.
THE NORTH VALLEY GRIMOIRE by Blake Northcott
Now, in general this one doesn’t suck. But it was rather underwhelming. The first time I read it, I enjoyed it up to the 75% mark, and then it slowed to a grinding halt for the climax, which I thought might have been a “just me” thing. Years later I read it again and had the same experience. Since its successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 (where it raised like $60k), it’s also been adapted to a comic book, and I bought the first issue…and was again underwhelmed.
The selling point for this book was about 35% the pitch and 65% the pitcher, Blake Northcott. She’s generally a nice gal on Twitter, easy on the eyes, and posts strategically angled photos wearing T-shirts that are maybe a size too small. She’s not dumb, she knows exactly what she’s doing. The fact that she’s likable doesn’t make the book a better read, and I know this after three runs through the gauntlet.
It had tremendous potential to be a perennial Halloween book but I can’t think about it without dreading the slog through the climax—which should be the most exciting part of the book. So yeah. Successful campaign, but not a book I recommend to anyone.
STARBLADES VOLUME 1 by Kyle Ritter
Make absolutely no bones about it: Kyle Ritter is one hell of a colorist, and he really brings CyberFrog to life with his work on EVS’s drawings. I’ve enjoyed CyberFrog so much that when Ethan boosted the signal for one of Kyle’s own books, I jumped at the chance to back it, even though I was juuuuuuust this side of broke at the time.
And even when it shipped, the tracking number led to some address in Texas, where I’ve never lived before. I DM’d Ethan on Twitter and he forwarded it to his customer service, they immediately got me a copy at the right address. So great on that front.
Why do I have any regret with this book?
Because there’s no story. Like at all. STARBLADES is basically an art book where Bad Guy wakes up and starts doing Bad Things, so oh no, Venjers Semble! And we do a little bit of planet-hopping as we Get The Band Back Together. Probably doesn’t help that the main StarBlade guy, I forget his name, looks like a buff Kyle Ritter, making this a self-insert book.
Once again: the art kicks all kinds of posterior. But it would have been cool to have a writer actually write something happening. Alas.
Various CYBERFROG Installments by Ethan Van Sciver
UNFROGETTABLE TALES isn’t the only offender in this lineup, but it might be the most obvious one, because it’s an expensive and paper-thin hardcover book with not much happening between the pages.
EVS wrote a bunch of CF books back in the 90s before ComicsGate kicked off in 2018, when he put out the newer, better iteration of the character. He’s since published a bunch of trunk content for the series, including Red Extermination and Heartsick Deluxe that aren’t doing anything to advance the story—and in some cases, it’s got duplicate content from other collections in the 2018-onward run.
This in conjunction with the fact that he’s still not fulfilling several of his years-late campaigns (because he spends all of his time livestreaming) is obnoxious as hell. It’s an audience grift and I’m mad that I fell for it on at least two titles. If I’ll call out Patrick Rothfuss for doing it, I’ll call out EVS too.
THAT UMBRELLA GUY’s Comics, by TUG
TUG might be the most glaring case of this phenomenon, wherein a popular creator puts out a tie-in book and it accomplishes two things: amuses the creator, and pumps cash out of the audience. Is it a meaningful artistic composition? Does it stand on its own? Ha. No.
I discovered TUG in 2022 and I liked his videos—he covered certain ongoing cases in the “men’s mental health” space that the mainstream otherwise ignored, and for a while I found value in it. In some of his streams he also talked about being a fan of comics and he had a series of graphic novels that dramatized his YouTube persona as a P.I. in a horror world.
I thought that was cool and a great combination of YouTube clout and artistic ambition. Nope. Turns out it was just the clout. The story in these books is extremely basic and toothless. They’re more or less a love letter from a father to his daughters, which is great and all, if you’re the father or the daughter. For the reader, you’re financing a vanity project that won’t retain its artistic value outside of that family. I was really annoyed once I finally got these books and finished reading them. Not worth it. I didn’t follow his channel any more after that.
TRUTH JUSTICE AMERICAN WAY by Gabe Eltaeb
I’ve seen Gabe on livestreams in certain YouTube spheres. He’s a nice guy with a decent personal story, and I like his ethics…that said, the first major book of his that I backed was a dud.
TJAW is an off-brand version of the DC Trinity that more or less has no teeth. Colossus Superman, Punisher Batman, and Starfire Wonder Woman could be the names of these characters. They do basic right-wing superhero stuff in a basic left-wing dominated culture. This was conceived when left wing culture was a monolith in America, composed as it began its decline, published right around the time it started to die, and delivered when the body was in the ground.
Books like this aren’t going to have staying power. Art was above-average and I’ll probably thumb through it again the future, but I expected more. I wanted this to be a case of “Here’s a guy with a 5-star book who is ONLY being kept down because of his personal values in a tyrannical industry.”
I’m sure that was part of it, except for the book being five stars. Nice guy, Gabe. But if I didn’t know that, I’d have had significantly less motivation to actually read the book.
FOUR SECRET NOVELS by Sanderson
And finally, lest you assume that this was only for guys on my level who managed to vault higher than my station, I’ve been pretty critical of Sanderson on this project ever since 2023 wrapped up. Maybe it’s just me…but this felt like an audience grift. “Here are four books I wrote during lockdown, in a hundred days!” Yeah dawg, it feels like it.
Fans of the Cosmere will enjoy peeks into other corners of Sanderson’s multi-dozen-book-spanning fictional universe. Me, I didn’t want to have to read twenty-three other novels to understand why two of these even mattered. The tie-ins could have been lighter on projects 3 and 4, the titles of which I’ve already forgotten. Yumi Painter and Sunlight something.
Project 1, TRESS AND THE EMERALD SEA, was actually enjoyable, I’ll stand by that. Project 2 was a skidmark of a comedy attempt, worth two stars at best. In the end I got sucked into the magnetism of setting records for a guy whose work I had always been first in line to buy, at least until Stormlight started chipping away at my will to live. The campaign was the most exciting part of this process, not the reading of the books themselves. Which makes this whole thing an artistic failure.
Conclusion
At the end of the day…just be honest. If you like something, cool. If you don’t, cool. Personally I want to base my recommendation on whether reading the book itself was a pleasant or rewarding experience, not any of the peripheral marketing gimmicks.
Did any of these books deserve their success? No. But their marketing did.
So the takeaway from me is…I need to figure out how the hell to do that part. Because I’m great at the writing, IMHO. Prove me wrong, go read HOWLING WILDERNESS.