In light of recent events, artists and writers may need to start offering content directly on their websites, not just in storefronts like Comixology and Graphic.ly. It’s not that this is a new feeling for me, but in the wake of Graphic.ly’s pull out from the app store, the closing of The Illustrated Section store, and countless other also-rans, here are the benefits of a different model:
1. Revenue
The reality – no matter what store front a creator is using – is that if you’re an independent creator, much of the traffic is generated by your promotions directly, with tons of leg work involved. After this you also pay either an upfront fee or percentage to a storefront company like Comixology. If you’re one of the brands these types of companies make money off of, they’ll do some promotional work for/in conjunction with you. How often have you gotten a Comixology email offering special sales or highlighting books it thinks have topical relevance to current events, for example? St. Patrick’s Day around the corner? Time for a Green Lantern tie-in sale. The non-Marvels and DCs though, likely get nothing of the sort, so why not direct customers to your site?
Micropayment options like the one offered by PayPal (which will be covered in the next blog post here) are provided with a fee of $.05 per transaction and 5% of the total cost for any digital goods under $12.00.
2. Flexibility.
iTunes has firm pricing tiers for its offered products, and they’re entirely at Apple’s discretion. For simplicity’s sake that might be fine, but what about all the other options you’re missing out on? There’s also the issue of a company validating your content. Any work you submit to iTunes is subject to Apple’s terms and conditions, making them gatekeepers in a supposedly democratized environment. Direct sales offer us complete control over our work.
3. PERMANENCE AND OWNERSHIP
Cloud storage is a fancy new term. It’s really just paying for streamed content. Because comic images are relatively small we’ll ignore the data caps and penalties mentioned in most “drawbacks of the cloud” discussions. The potential losses of access and customer confidence are more relevant. So how do we give a sense of permanence with digital content? To me, the first priority is easy transfer to multiple devices (DRM-free). This provides an option for offline access in addition to the online content. The second is the confidence that you’re getting something from a person, rather than a generic source, which is the entire thinking behind Google’s attempted “rel=author” initiative. The third is the sense that what you’re getting isn’t easily obtained for free by others.
Simple solution to give all three? How about a password protected folder on our site? This isn’t like Comixology – there’s no in-depth review system, commenting section, or share functions – but it does offer an easy-access location with all of a person’s content, and the downtime on your end is minimal.
Let’s use The Call since it’s already been embedded for our past demonstration. We’ll put 5 frames in each issue for demo purposes. Issue #2 is now out. Customer Suzie Watterson bought issue #1, which gave her a personalized folder on our site. Her personal folder includes:
- The web version of The Call (any image gallery style you want)
- A downloadable PDF
- An Android App version since we can sell those directly on our websites without any problem (shocked more people don’t take advantage of this)
- An oversized version specifically made for iPad 3′s increased resolution
She’s notified that new content is either available for purchase or already added to her folder (if she’s a subscriber, possible through services like PayPal) and logs with a username of swatterson and a password of calvin. This can all be setup through cpanel or by modifying your .htaccess file.
Try it out here: LINK TO SUZIE’S DIRECTORY
Keep in mind the limitless customization options we have. Most e-readers for comics are already based on HTML5, so you can use all of your transitions, throw in Flash, and even re-directs based on customer’s browsers (for example, an option to show them a different index page if they’re viewing on an iPad). It should also be noted that it’s easy to add pages to a digital graphic novel in this way, then prompting the user to simply overwrite their existing file.
4. Avoiding the Walmart model
To be fair, Walmart isn’t actually a monopoly so much as a monolithic presence. But if the goal of democratized content distribution in the internet is collapsing already, how is this storefront model progress? We can learn a great deal from Walmart when it comes to retail of digital comics.
Companies that work with Walmart have to agree to pre-negotiated, extremely low margins. Walmart has a group of people whose job it is to go to companies and say “we’ll give you this much less than a regular grocery store would for your product, and in exchange you’ll do this much more in volume”. As a content creator you’re the one with the product, and storefronts are like Walmart, offering volume in exchange for percentage loss. That’s fine if your volume is so massive that the margin difference is made up, but it shouldn’t be the primary option. If people browsing the aisles find your stuff at “Walmart”, great! Take that smaller profit as found money. Just don’t make it your focus.
by Steve Broome
