How To Sell A Digital Comic

http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=14383

by locopati • 14 years ago

30 30 14 years ago

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

It's questionable whether you need to sell the comic itself. Look at MS Paint Adventures, ala Homestuck. The comic itself is done for free, the author, Andrew Hussie, lives comfortably off the side sales (merchandise and the like)

And that's not even counting the 2 million dollar Kickstarter for the game... that's one hell of a dedicated fandom. The average marketer would kill for something like that.

engtech• 14 years ago

It's the difference between having a team of people vs working alone.

The comic book industry at a minimum would have a writer, artist, editor. In reality they have an entire ecosystem of people because they are a corporation.

If it wasn't for the proceeds from doing movies with non-creator-owned IP, I doubt that Marvel and DC would still exist.

I would love it if they went subscription based for access to old digital releases and pay-as-you-go for 6 month old content.

There's a lot of former comic book geeks who have gotten out of the habit because shelling out $100-150 a month on comics is kind of ridiculous when you have a mortgage, day care, and car payments and don't even have time to read comics anyways.

shardling2• 14 years ago

Did you even read the article?

This isn't some generic advice on how to sell a comic -- it's about a very specific aspect of the process. Your comment is completely irrelevant to anything Ellis had to say here.

Karunamon2• 14 years ago

Admittedly no, I was going off the title.

nicholas_tuzzio• 14 years ago

I bet you've been eagerly awaiting the moment when you could bring up Homestuck and the Kickstarter on HN...unfortunately, you didn't read the article and jumped the gun.

ZanderEarth324• 14 years ago

I used to read comics as a kid on and off, but stopped at some point. I then got an iPad and learned about Comixology and figured I'd pick up an issue or two from my childhood. Well, a couple of hundred digital comics later I am fully committed to reading comics again, almost 100% digital.

Comixology's app makes the buying and reading process so easy and enjoyable, that I thoroughly look forward to Wednesday's new releases. Their "Pull List" companion app and website are great too. I can create my pull list for the week and have it emailed to myself.

One thing I really like about Comixology's ethics is they aren't trying to kill the traditional comic book store. Their app has a feature to locate the nearest comic book store to your location, and has helped me find a bunch of stores I didn't know existed, which have earned my money. They even have a program where your comic book store can set up a Comixology store front and sell comics through that platform and make some money.

On a side note, Dark Horse opted (from what I understand) to use their proprietary app for their comics and my experience there has been completely different. The app runs extremely slow, and crashes often. I bought a couple of Usagi Yojimbo book, read them and deleted the app. The experience was too clunky to deal with.

kmfrk• 14 years ago

The same happened with me.

I think there's another important thing to note, and that is that many comics go out of print, and if we don't digitize them, we lose some true treasure of comicbooks as a result.

I think a lot of people pirated comics for this reason. Especially outside the U.S.

That said, having all my comics on a digital device or in the cloud instead of a row on my shelf just feels weird. But the upside is that owning content digitally means that the publishers can update it constantly, as some did with retina-resolution comics.

ZanderEarth324• 14 years ago

Your point of out of print books is very true, and for another reason. Unless I can hunt down a 50th printing of the first appearance of Spider Man or the first Captain America, odds are I would never get to read them. Having a digital copy for $1.99 and seconds away is a very comforting thought.

The other upside of having all you comics in the cloud and accessible by one device is that you don't end up with 50 long boxes of comics that you have to store.

I do still buy some comics in print, those that I find truly beautiful, or when I find one in a comic book store that I want to support. And it is important to note that Comixology doesn't have every comic book ever, there is still a huge percentage of books that haven't made there way to the digital space.

droithomme2• 14 years ago

> I used to read comics as a kid on and off, but stopped at some point.

I relate to this. I always had a few small business ventures going from age 10-18 and all brought in income. I spent most of it on books, records, comics and graphic novels. The only comic book store within walking distance I'd go in there weekly and pick up several titles each time. I'd also look through the racks to find new titles. How I find new titles is I read the beginning and see if I like it. When I do, I start picking up that set as well. All together I was spending around $100 a month of my own money on this stuff, learning about new releases, and telling my friends what the cool stuff was and they would borrow from me and often start buying on their own.

The store owner was pretty unfriendly. One day, I went in as usual and collected to buy around 5 new issues of comics that I was getting each month, then picked up another one I hadn't seen and was flipping through it. The owner came over and started arguing with me, telling me he wasn't "running no fucking library" and I could buy or not buy but reading wasn't allowed.

I was confused and shocked. I said, "You ring me up every week. You know I am in here every week and I buy a hundred bucks worth of titles a month. How am I supposed to find new titles without looking at them?" He said, "I don't give a fuck, but you don't do it using my store as a library."

So I put the titles back and that ended up being the last time I bought serial comics. Completely turned me off to the whole scene.

Yeah, there are good store owners too, but there weren't any within walking distance.

I did tell all my friends what happened though and that shop went out of business a year later.

Now this tale is not really about comics. It's about a lesson in customer service and experience and reality. Customers need to find out about products without having to pay to sample.

Right now, this site sounds good and I am momentarily tempted to get back into buying comics, but then, I'm not really buying them am I. There's DRM and some discussion here about some strange licensing terms. Sounds like I'd be paying a fee to read a title once.

Best to stick with my technical manuals and history books instead, where I actually own the books and know they won't be suddenly taken away from me after I thought I paid. This DRM stuff is even worse than an obnoxious store owner driving away customers. It's certainly just as user hostile as far as I am concerned, and it prevents fans from developing a sense of investment in a given artist; there's never any real buy-in that one gets from sorting through one's little stacks of titles. There's only temporary access, as if you checked it out from the library and you're not going to have it for long. There's a reason we called this collecting comics and not renting them. Collecting comics, like baseball cards, stamps and other serialized artifacts, appeals to the obsessive-compulsion to get the whole set, to have them all, to feel invested in having gotten them all. If you miss seeing a show on TV, you just catch the next one. If you are missing only issue #47 of an entire comic series, you are going to be looking to find it. When you can't keep them on various devices, and can't sell them, and can't leave them to your heirs in your will, you don't own them, you're not invested, and you just don't care. It's amazing that the various art industries that rely on serialized releases of artist branded art such as music and comics don't understand this. How many fans of baseball and Pokemon cards, and even Beanie Babies, would there have been if users were prohibited from owning their "collectibles". Not many.

shawnc• 14 years ago

You know, I totally love Warren Ellis and his writing (for the most part, there are some duds) - and he makes an excellent point here.

But it would been great if he took those five minutes to create a visual example of how he thought it could be better. Because even as he explai a it I can't quite picture how a cropping of the cover would actually be better.

As a comic lover and buyer - a thumbnail version of a full cover seems more enticing to me than a cropped one. It's what I'm used to (moving from print) and I can tap it to view info and a larger cover. I can't picture how a cropped version would be better. Possibly a shot from inside the comic but sometimes covers are part of the fun.

dmorgan2• 14 years ago

He's not talking about adding cropping.

He is talking about optimizing the cover image for Comixology cover display.

What he said, is that even with (i.e _despite_) cropping, the iD cover images still look better than the comic covers ("It’s not a great way to display their covers. And it’s obviously a little bit reduced here. They cropped the damn covers into squares themselves, so the logo is truncated in almost all images.").

So, what he asks for is larger legible titles, the heroes showing better in the small thumbnail display, etc, instead of a plain shrank version of the actual cover.

cstross• 14 years ago

It's not just comics; at least one major US publisher of trade fiction isn't bothering to optimize their book covers for legibility at Amazon thumbnail size (120x80 pixels). Even with authors biting their ankles on the subject and ebook sales heading towards 60% of the total.

edj• 14 years ago

So true.

The dilemma is similar in the iBookstore, but over there iBooks Author is at least partly to blame. What appears to be a book cover (called a "title page" in iBA) actually appears full-size on an iPad only for a few seconds when a book is opened. The title page mostly appears as a thumbnail either in the store or in a reader's library. However, it's not actually a different image; the same image is scaled down to thumbnail-size. And yet there's no indication that the title page will ever appear thumbnail-size during the design process. You have to preview the book on an iPad to see it that way.

flipstewart• 14 years ago

I'm a bit confused. At least compared to the given magazine covers, they comic covers look amazing and present a ton of information.

What is he suggesting would work better and where can I see an example of it?

pixelbath2• 14 years ago

The magazine covers are the example he was referring to. He's suggesting that each comic book company hire a specific person to lovingly crop every comic book cover into squares for release specifically on Comixology. Not an auto-crop script, because we could end up with covers that convey less information, and runs a risk of obscuring the book title.

It's as asinine as it sounds.

xsmasher• 14 years ago

He's suggestion creating better thumbnails for the issue, instead of just shrinking the cover. The icon for MS Word is not a scaled-down picture of the box; you don't create a banner ad for your website by taking a screenshot of the site.

There's no reason the thumbnail for a comic has to be a scaled-down version of the optimized-for-print-and-shelf-space cover.

I'm thinking something like the right-hand thumbs on this page: http://www.comixology.com/DC-Comics-Digital-Sneak-Peeks-10-3...

inkaudio2• 14 years ago

The author makes the assumption that people use Comixology for discovery of new titles, but the vast majority do not. There are many blogs and magazines for that type of discovery. Comixology is used primaryly to buy and read what you've discovered elsewhere. Comixology works, which is why Comixology and a few other comic apps usually rank in the top 25 grossing apps for the iPad.

dmorgan2• 14 years ago

>The author makes the assumption that people use Comixology for discovery of new titles, but the vast majority do not. There are many blogs and magazines for that type of discovery.

I don't use any blogs or magazines for "that type of discovery". And not many people do, because of lack of time, except if they are scene-obsessed teenagers.

I do however check new titles and stuff in Comixology, and ocassionaly buy some I haven't read.

inkaudio2• 14 years ago

Not many people like you do, but reading a blog or magazine is not regulated to scene-obsessed teenagers. Moreover these so called scene obsessed readers contribute to the majority of sales. Comic book fans represent the majority that count in this case not the occasional reader with not time for your so called comic book scene. To illustrate outsiders may think HN readers are tech obsessed minority, when compared to general population they are, but the traffic HN readers can provide is significant to a tech based startup.

DannoHung• 14 years ago

How to sell a Digital Comic (to me): Don't use DRM.

I'll buy the fuck out of Digital Comics if I have some reasonable assurance that I'll get to keep those files forever. I feel super, super hesitant on buying any digital media with DRM these days, even from major players. I do buy a few TV shows, but I internally rationalize that it's roughly equivalent to a cable subscription (which I don't have) and in the meantime, those particular digital purchases act sort of like a DVR.

I bought one movie and its sitting in the menu list, taunting me, telling me that I'll never have access to it in a few years time. Not doing that again.

ZanderEarth324• 14 years ago

That is something that concerns me as well. I don't know what Comixology's DRM technologies are, or if they even have any. I haven't looked, but it would be nice to know that I can export those books that I have paid for to another DRM free format, like PDF.

flatline3• 14 years ago

The storage format is proprietary and some kind of obfuscation of the image data is done.

According to the ToS, you don't own a license to the comics, so you can't export them, or even hold onto the comics if comiXology disappears.

mikeash• 14 years ago

On the example that's supposedly good, I can read, without putting in excessive effort (but trying some!) seven covers, or 1/5th of the total.

Of the comics, I can read every single one, and they all look pretty good to me.

I had to re-read this article several times to make sure he was actually praising the top image and criticizing the bottom image rather than the other way around.

mgk1• 14 years ago

How about titling the link NSFW, some of us have jobs....

pixelbath2• 14 years ago

Setting aside for a second I couldn't find much that would be too risky for most workplaces, you clicked on a link was about comics while you were at work. What, honestly, did you expect to see?

Also, I'd find it hard to be sympathetic were you sacked for browsing a social media site and reading about how to sell comics while you were at work.

wtracy• 14 years ago

What, specifically, was NSFW? If there was any nudity or gore, I didn't see it.

... Now you're making me nervous, because I pulled the page up at work.

GFischer• 14 years ago

I only knew of Warren Ellis because of his webcomic FreakAngels:

http://www.freakangels.com

which, ironically considering the title, is free (though it does have a print version and associated merchandise)

Now that I read his bio on Wikipedia I realize he's a big name:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Ellis

droithomme2• 14 years ago

The UI of the fashion magazine isn't very useful.

The comic one is more useful and looks just as good.

The main flaw in the comic one is that the title text below is truncated with a ellipsis "…". Apple has been doing this a lot, but it is still as terrible a practice as when we had 8.3 file names in MS-DOS.

How To Sell A Digital Comic

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