PIVOTING INTO BREAKNECK

A large part of my success as a creator has been knowing when to pivot.

My first creative passion was comic books. I aspired to be an artist and had piles of completed pages. Some of them are pretty good, too! But I wasn’t fast enough, and there was a pretty good list of things I just could not draw well. Like clothing. And cars. And straight lines. It was around that time that I realized my art (comic books, painting, and drawing) was all about storytelling.

With that epiphany, I started thinking about other ways I could scratch the itch. Being a big movie guy, I tried my hand at screenwriting. That was my first pivot. I moved to LA, worked at an agency, and had a manager. My projects were going out, getting a lot of interest, but ultimately not selling. That’s the way of Hollywood. It was during that time that I read the novel Subterranean by James Rollins, and had the realization that people actually wrote novels about the subjects that interested me. Not once in my formative years was I introduced to a novel that wasn’t boring. The result was a complete lack of interest in reading novels.

I read all of Jim’s books and then found more and more. It was a revelation, and it wasn’t long before I realized that my BIG stories that would cost a lot of money to make as movies, could be written as novels with no concerns about budget. So I pivoted again, adapting my screenplay, The Didymus Contingency, into a novel. Then Raising the Past. Then Beneath. I’m no fan of the slush pile, so I self-published the books and did well enough to attract a big agent, and a three-book deal with St. Martin’s. I have since written nearly 100 novels, the majority of which have been published by my own imprint, Breakneck Media. Then I pivoted again, focusing on audiobooks, which exploded in popularity during COVID.

Keep in mind that when pivoting, I’m not moving away from what’s come before, I’m adding to it. My desire to publish comic books never went away. In fact, it continued to grow, until three years ago when I felt it was time to pivot back to comics and fulfill that lifelong dream.

I’d gotten accustomed to being my own boss, publishing e-books, print books, and audiobooks through my Breakneck imprint. It was only natural that I decided to add comic books to our roster. Thus, Breakneck Comics was born. A sane person would have started with a single title. But I had years and years of stories waiting to be told, so I started with FIVE. Not five issues. Five different comics, four issues each.

And now here we are, co-publishing all five comics with our amazing partners at Vault Comics, just three years after deciding to pivot, with NECTAR and EXCOMMUNICATED both being massive hits out of the gate. Mind. Blown.

Now all I need to do is get a screenplay made into a movie and my storytelling trifecta will be complete! I look forward to that future, and I’m thrilled you have found Breakneck and hope you stick around for the craziness to come, and maybe the next big pivot.

–Jeremy Robinson