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.

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

Thanks to the thousands of folks who’ve visited and read The Call first issue online over the last 5 months. I’ve now put the graphic novel for the entire story up as a kickstarter project, which you can check out HERE. It’s got tons of affordable options and also features some higher end bonus rewards, like a custom graphic novel with a one of a kind cover, and a photo album retrospective edition. Thanks in advance for checking it out:

Premise: In terms of the new mentality towards content, storefronts seem to be popular. It’s logical in the era of excessive noise and limited screen space. As a result it’s logical that someone would also offer a way for comic creators to distribute content to several outlets at once. Graphic.ly has done so with their new tool for publishing partners, designed to allow a single upload to create an output to multiple targets including Kindle, Nook, and Facebook. Is it worth the fee, and how well does the process work?

.

First let’s clarify that as Micah Baldwin says, this is a beta which means problems. What I found impressive yesterday (the day of the email announcement that it was live for testing) was that the steps that did not work were corrected very quickly. By this morning all issues had been ironed out and the book was submitted.

.

The steps are simple and the process is highly intuitive:

.

1. Upload your book file.
2. Describe the title, including description, genre, listing of any objectionable content, and rating.
3. Now that the platform has finished with the upload, it will divide your pages into subsections, which you label accordingly. Sections include the cover, table of contents, pages, and plenty more. What you should like about this is the simple GUI (a drop-down menu) as opposed to doing it manually in HTML or Microsoft Word for Kindle Fire output as an example.
4. Nice bonus step here, the ability to manually set the navigation order for readers going through your book. Drag the definition area using an easy targeting tool, and number it accordingly.
5. Select your target markets. Options include the web (free), facebook (free), Kindle Fire (paid), iBookstore (paid), Kobo, Nook, and Google Books (paid). For an extra fee you can also target the Newsstand Series app (an Apple feature) and a collection app, which claims to integrate the book with extra features for the Android marketplace. We will ignore these apps sections for now.

The fee is $150.00 from graphic.ly, which considering the massive development costs that likely went into making this, probably isn’t much. The question is whether or not the fee is worth it compared to deploying on the different platforms yourself. For the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming you’re a comic creator/distributor, but the principle is the same no matter what. I’m also going to assume that we can take the fee of $150 and break it down to $30/target. A few important things to keep in mind:

1. Many of these services are done by smashwords as well, and smashwords does not charge set up fees. However you earn 60% of revenue at major outlets and 85% through smashwords’ web site.
2. Graphicly does not take any of the revenue from the books being sold.
3. Smahswords’ customer service is notoriously slow whereas I got multiple responses back within minutes from graphic.ly.

Target Values:

Kindle fire

Kindle Fire distribution is remarkably easy with the release of Kindle’s latest developer tools. It prefers the documents in Word format, so just place your images into a Word document, inserting a page break after each image. This shouldn’t take you longer than a few seconds per image. Then use kindle gen and command prompt or DOS prompt to generate an output file based on the created Word file (works almost as easily with an HTML document), and upload the file to amazon. Then enter your typical description information, which by this time you should probably have saved in a file for quicky copy/pasting. AFAIK Kindle does not support ePub, but keep the PDF emailing/reading option in mind.

.

Value: $5

Cost: $30

iBookstore

This one is interesting. Apple already set up the model for creators to directly submit their ebook content to them as long as the creator meets the requirements LISTED HERE. So it’s not as if the $99/yr developer fee was an issue, although if you do not have a Mac(since Apple loves to be proprietary) you’re required to work with one of Apple’s pre-approved aggregators (i’m assuming graphic.ly is now in that category). So let’s give 25 bucks of value for the Windows folks who don’t feel like running VMWare and paying $30 for a Mac OS. They also require books be in ePub format, so we’ll add another $20 for the folks who aren’t comfortable creating content in that format.

.

Value: $45

Cost: $30

Kobo

Kobo also requires epub format, and is a huge digital bookstore outside of America. So the questions here are (a) is your target audience in America only and (b) are you expecting enough income from outside of America to justify this being one of your destinations? Also keep in mind that once we had (at one point) created our book as an ePub document this would be your second time USING it, so the aggregator service offers a diminishing return. We’ll say $15 of value now for the folks who didn’t want to go through the ePub creation process. Kobo also offers conversion to ePub for a service fee of $29, so keep that in mind with our $30/target site cost.

.

Value: $15

Cost: $30

Google Books

Google accepts books in PDF or ePub format. This means further diminished value in having someone else do the conversion to ePub for us, as this is now a third outlet that accepts it. We also should remember that we have the option to quickly create a PDF from a series of images using Adobe’s Bridge. This is especially relevant to comic creators since they almost always have Bridge along with Photoshop.

.

Value: $5
Cost: $30

Nook

Barnes and Noble’s huge e-reader does not accept PDF or Word documents. Yep, once again we use ePub, so let’s now say the value for that third party conversion has gone down to $10.

.

Value: $10
Cost: $30

.

Conclusion: Whether the service is worth the $150 depends on how much of a hassle ePub creation is to you. I create them with no problem, but remember that I work in tech (web design) so my perspective on the ease of doing so may differ from yours. It also depends on how your release is formatted. Is this a single issue? If so you probably will not want to spend $150 every time you release something on a service that doesn’t actually generate any sales. Also graphic.ly is not taking any of the sales percentage, but this does not spare you from the revenue share that you’ll find at each store. That’s 30% at amazon for any book priced at less than $2.99, 70% otherwise, which is the same as itunes. You may want to project sales, divide the fee in terms of cost per unit sold (potentially) and determine how much of an impact it has versus the amount of time it would take you to do these steps separately on various sites. Cost per final unit sold is also crucial. A little quick math shows the problem we’re encountering by trying to justify this service:

I also would be remiss if I didn’t point out that iPad HAS a kindle app, so you can create a book for Kindle and sell it for iPad as well.

.

Meanwhile as our next blog post will cover, you can sell the product (or access to it) yourself on your own website for any price you choose, and keep 90% of the revenue using paypal’s micropayment system.

by Steve Broome