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:

When you want to stream the activity from a facebook page to your website or blog, you copy and paste a site-generated iFrame code. We’re going to do the same thing for syndicating our webcomics without using Flash, which was covered in Pt. 1 (you can READ THAT HERE. Using iFrames and hosting it ourselves gives us a large number of options, from easily customized navigation to quickly added or removed access (if you’re licensing the webcomic for example and a payment is late).

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Let’s consider the needs we have which would not be addressed by our Picasa usage from PT. 1

We want the gallery viewable on mobile devices including tablets
We want to keep the content identical to that of our regular webcomic, meaning limited separate updating
We want to host the images on our server instead of google’s (Picasa)
We want to make it possible to redirect traffic anywhere we like when an image is clicked

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The advantage with iFrames is that they are embedding another website in whatever area you designate. So all we have to do is make a gallery that runs on OUR end (server) and send the iFrame code to our affiliate, it’s a natural marriage of our content and someone else’s open space. This also means you can run whatever gallery type you feel comfortable with. For this example, assuming we have more horizontal real estate than vertical (it’s going in a header after all) let’s try a gallery with little impact and easily customized features.

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CLICK HERE to see this in action.

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So what did we do? We just used a quick slideshow code from javascript source found HERE, and modified the next and previous buttons based on our design. Remember that you don’t want to get into customizing your syndication for every single prospective website out there, but maybe 2-3 designs that people can fit into their sites? Our favorite advantage of this technique may be that unlike lightbox and some more sophisticated solutions, adding images to the array doesn’t require naming them with a “rel” tag. Observe the method below which uses absolute naming, although relative naming would be even shorter of course:

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And just to demonstrate how easy it is to customize, observe how simple the code is that we would sent to OUR AFFILIATE. This is all they’d have to paste into their header area. Any appearance should be changeable on your end with some simple CSS, and the embedded file will work great in both HTML and blog pages. I’ve also added a link back to this blog entry from the gallery, it’s as simple as adding a hyperlink to the cover image.

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Coming in Pt. 3 – Can we Syndicate our Webcomics with a Fluid Display?

by Steve Broome