How To Sell A Digital Comic

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

It's as asinine as it sounds.

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.

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.

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.

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