had managed the same amount of downloads for even a micropayment price of ten cents each, Andy Weir would have earned over four hundred dollars. by Darc and Matt offers full color versions of their otherwise black and white comic for a subscription fee of $2.50 a month.
The comic had 10,000 readers in April, but has just 77 subscribers, only 11 of which are permanent, but what's interesting here is that Darc understands that people subscribe for one month so they can download the comic to keep. As Darc herself said on the Webcomic List forums..
. I'm aware that what most people will do is wait until the end of an arc, plop down the $2.50 and then save copies of the color version on their computer and that's fine.
If you have a big enough computer and really love a comic by all means keep a backup for yourself. In effect, then, Darc and Matt are selling the comic in all but name (although it's not as convenient since the reader has to save the images themselves). They recognize that there is a market for downloadable webcomics and it would be interesting to see how it would go if Darc and Matt starting actively pitching it as a sale rather than a subscription.
The data from those is useful but only suggestive. Starline and Ryuko represent the real test, but unfortunately Ryuko wasn't able to go through with it due to real life events that got in the way. She still intends to do it, though, but simply wasn't able to do it in time for this article.
But Starline has been selling her first year of for a couple of months now. In total, she made fifty nine sales, totaling $157.82 over the two months.
It's a solid, but not impressive amount. Whether or not this will be more successful over time is still a matter of belief and speculation but the important point is that it make money - and for very little effort. In fact, this was the most important advantage from Starline's own perspective as the artist in the middle of the trial.
With a popular comic that can already sell merchandise, it wasn't the cash that made it a good idea for her so much as the return on investment. As an artist, the whole process didn't take up a lot of my time. And for me, this was the best part.
Aside from the Keenspot check, the only way I usually made money from my comic was through donation wallpapers. I haven't had time on my hands to make a new wallpaper for the last 3 months, let alone try and come up with other merchandise like books and t-shirts. For once, then, you can get paid for the work you've already done, not for more work you have to do on top of it.
Webcomics are shortly to have the chance of a lifetime, one that CBRs, PDFs and even - in a pinch - downloaded webpages can put us in position to take advantage of. With the release of Apple's iPhone, it seems that most of the technologies are in place for the elusive portable document reader to finally get some serious attention from consumer electronic companies (Indeed, the iPhone arguably already is When these devices eventually hit, the webcomic market has a chance to break out of its limited demographic and grow like never before. Downloadable chapters of webcomics are not just something else to sell among the wallpapers and the sketches, but is also setting up webcomics for the future.
When these devices hit, the market will be there to support it. But surely that's the wrong way around? Surely the devices come first and then the content, right?
Music as MP3s were popular long before MP3 players existed. In the meantime, people happily downloaded millions of tracks through Napster that they could only listen to on their computer. TV shows and movies were popular on the file sharing networks long before there was a convenient way to get them to your widescreen TV and even Apple started selling video through iTunes over a year before it offered a way to watch them on anything bigger than a computer monitor.
They sold over 1.3 million movies that you could not watch on your television in comfort You had to watch them on a two and a half inch iPod screen or sitting in an office chair in front of your computer. And yet they sold.
The format comes first, not the device, because the format represents the demand. It is the content that drives the devices, not the other way around. In the meantime, people have proven time and time again that they're more than happy experiencing their digital content on the computer while they wait.
And if we can position webcomics to take advantage of the document readers ahead of time as Apple positioned movie downloads ahead of the release of Apple TV, then once the devices arrive webcomics will slide effortlessly on to the new platform and increase the collective market for webcomics. The comics will be out and about where they can be seen, shared and talked about as casually as that great new track you heard on the radio or, indeed, have on your iPod. Like MP3 players, they could cease to be locked in the narrow demographic of the IT-savvy websurfing crowd and move into the mainstream.
And then we might just manage to make a real business out of them. had managed the same amount of downloads for even a micropayment price of ten cents each, Andy Weir would have earned over four hundred dollars.
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