I had new stock, new fans, and we were able to continue.' 'I brought 200 copies to San Diego that year and sold them all. 'He took all our stock and made it instantly our most popular thing,' Gownley said. Since Gownley didn't have the money for a new printing, Buchholz shaved the staples of the single issues and bound them together. 'I thought, if I can just hang in there, there will be an audience there,' he said.īy issue #5, Amelia was selling 'a few thousand copies,' Gownley said, and Harold Buchholz, then a print broker and now executive director of publishing and operations at Archie Comics, prodded him to publish it as a trade paperback. Gownley was encouraged when local newsstand distributor Harrisburg News picked up 500 copies and sold about 75% of them, a huge percentage. We had to start off knowing there would be that natural dropoff and be able to weather it.' If we were going to start off at 1,000 or 800, most self published books, we would be done by issue 2. 'Our sales for that first issue were in the thousands, which is pretty good,' Gownley said. To get retailers' attention, the Gownleys printed 3,100 extra copies of the first issue and sent them out with the catalog in which they were solicited. 'I was under no illusions that the comic book marketplace was dying for a comic book about a little girl,' he said. Initially, Gownley self-published Amelia Rules in 2001 as single-issue comics that were sold in comics shops with his wife Karen handling marketing and promotion. I went on to talk about the Iraq war, divorce and poverty, but it was all filtered through Amelia's sensibilities.'

'It was an accident, but it was brilliant,' he said, 'because it gave me the whole hook of the series: I can deal with anything in these stories because they are told from Amelia's point of view. Then he had an inspiration: He would have Amelia talk to the audience between stories. Most comics are 32 pages, and 'Freeze Tag' was only ten, so Gownley wrote a few more short stories but couldn't quite fill the gap. 'He called me back a few weeks later and said 'You should self publish this,'' Gownley said.

Gownley sent his first Amelia story, 'Freeze Tag,' to his friend Dave Roman, then an editor at Nickelodeon Magazine.

Amelia Rules! Volume 1 by Jimmy Gownley