However, if you plan to self publish, you can write it all, because you KNOW it will be published.
Of course, for something like a 10 part, 22 pages per chapter book, unless you're gonna do the art, I suspect it will be nigh impossible to get an creative team to work for a back-end deal on 220 pages of sequentials. If you're lucky, you MIGHT get a penciler, who inks his own stuff, to work on something for about $50 a page ($11,000), though for that kinda project and required commitment, I'd guess you'd be looking at least twice that ($100 per page and $22,000 for the book) and a letterer who gives you a flat fee of maybe $1000 for the book. Then you have to add on printing of your book.
In order to sell a book like that, without color, you are pushing it if you make your cover price much about $25. JUST factoring in the costs of art and letters in my slimmed-down example, you'd have to sell between 480 and 920 issues to just break-even. That DOESN'T include printing costs.
I did a quick calculation from the comixpress website and it gave a set-up fee (this is just setting your book for printing, it assumes you have sent the files in the correct format and layout) of $26.90. After that you have a unit cost of $6.82.
So now you have to sell EVEN more copies to break-even, or bump your cover price to $32.
AND you didn't even pay yourself in the above calculations.
You MIGHT be able to negotiate a cheaper press price if you ordered a massive amount of copies in one go, but I'd guess anything less that a 1000 copies won't get you much of a discount and that is another $6,820, plus shipping & handling on top of your existing costs.
You should also note that going this route you will, in all likelihood NOT be able to get a wholesaler to distribute your book to comic stores or book stores, so then you have to factor in attending cons (which all cost - even if you can get in for free as a professional, you have to get to the con, pay for a hotel and buy a table to sell your book from) to sell your book. You can obliviously sell on line, either via your own website or the printers (comixpress does this), and you could get it on Amazon or through Ebay. But in all honesty, without advertising to let people know you are there and you have a product to sell, everything but the con route is a waste of time.
You COULD do a lot of leg-work and get local comic stores to get them to handle your book, but there's the time and cost of gas, PLUS they will only take your book on consignment, so after six months, if they have stock left, you get it back, it's dog-eared and you can only sell it as used. AND they want their cut of the price, so you gotta take less money OR bump the cover-price. Same for small traditional book stores. You should also be aware that at best, the store will take maybe five copies, if you're lucky - one or two copies is most likely. And without marketing you'll likely get those books back.
THIS is why I suggest a pitch-bundle. You have a much higher chance of get an artist to do six pages for free. If you are lucky, you might get a full issue for free. Once you have that, you can sub to the vast array of indie publishing houses, get a deal, pay your artist (and thus retain their services) and get your book out there AND distributed through a wholesaler.
Another way to go might be to do an Issue #0. A self-contained one-shot that's, at heart, a prolog to your graphic novel. You can get this POD'd, sell it at cons AND use it as a slick sample to submit to publishers to get them interested in picking up your REAL version.
