Hey, folks. Campbell Award-winning author Mur Lafferty and I are back with a new episode of Ditch Diggers, *the* podcast about writing as a job. I’m stoked because this time around we welcomed guest host Shawn Pryor onto the show to talk about the comics industry, and

We met Shawn during a private gaming convention at a castle in the woods of Ohio (no, really) and got to know him over a few rounds of the spaghetti western card game Bang!. It only took a few minutes of conversation for us to realize Shawn is a true comics ditch digger. In addition to being a writer and creator he is the co-founder and former president of indie comics publisher Action Lab Entertainment. He’s recently started a new company, Crowntaker Studios, which publishers his all-ages comic CASH & CARRIE (one of the best titles of anything ever, IMHO). He’s run several highly successful Kickstarter campaigns for creator-owned comics. He’s written/created countless other titles over the past few years, and he’s been wading knee-deep in a very tough business few people fully understand.

We talked to Shawn about his history with comics, creating and publishing indie comic books, starting a publisher from the ground up, how comic book distribution works and the politics of it, and race and representation, or the lack of it, behind the scenes in mainstream comics.

We covered a lot of really great, honest ground and I can’t thank Shawn enough for sharing his knowledge and experiences with us and all of you. Mur and I have been wanting to do shows about writing/creating comics since we started the podcast, and this was an amazing introduction.

I’m hoping to have Shawn back some time to talk more.

In the meantime, please listen and enjoy this episode. Share it via your social networking media-type things, and/or just tell a friend.

You can also support Ditch Diggers by becoming a backer of Mur’s podcasting Patreon, and I highly encourage you to do so.

And please do subscribe to Ditch Diggers via iTunes and spread the word!