"So you mean to create a man?"

After all the recent posts about the writing of my interactive Frankenstein book app, you may like to try it out. And now you don't even need an iPad or iPhone, as development wizards Inkle have put a Frankenstein web demo up on their site. Pop over and have a conversation with Victor about what he's got in that tank - just click where you see the words "Give it a try."

The digital future of comics

It's kind of odd, as I'm not really that much of a tech-head. I've designed videogames, but I always had a team of coders to handle all the complicated techy stuff. And suddenly Leo and Martin and I are embracing all the new-fangled digital media - and the biggest surprise is that I find I'm really getting into it. Not just the tech side, but the whole big picture of how it's going to change comics.

Like collecting an armful of books every month. That's in my bones, been doing it since I was 9 years old, but more and more I found I was saving all the latest issues of Hellblazer or BPRD or whatever till there was a complete story to read. If you're doing that, you may as well just wait for the trade paperback, but of course that's not much fun for the publisher, who really needs the regular cashflow of monthly sales. However, the cost of paper has gone up and the number of places you can find comics on sale has gone down. Monthly comic books are never going to be on the shelves in Waterstones. Hmm, problem.

Now, I know a lot of old-school comics fans hate digital comics with a passion. They shouldn't, though, because digital comics are the answer to that problem. What's more, digital comics don't spell the death of print; they're going to rejuvenate it. Now I can dip in and try the first few pages or even the first couple of issues of a comic for free. If I like it, I can buy all the issues I want straight away, and I can read those on my iPad, phone or desktop. That's the kind of freedom Steve Jobs was talking about when he said:

"Your den, your living room, your car and your pocket: I hope that gives you a little bit of an idea of where we're going."

So that's cool, but here's the thing: I now buy more TPBs and print graphic novels than I ever did before. Digital isn't replacing the whole comics reading experience, it's just gradually taking up some of the slack lost to falling monthly sales. E-comics sales aren't (yet) at a level that Dark Horse are going to drop their monthly books altogether, but already we can see how e-comics can add to and enhance the raft of formats available for fans.

Our own toe-dipping with Mirabilis began with our dedicated iPad app - still the best digital comics reading experience for my money, and I can say that because I did actually have to pay to buy my own issues through the App Store! We've got an update coming for the app that will introduce social networking features, reorganize the in-app storefront and improve the UI. But a dedicated app for each title, even if that's the jewel in the crown, is not going to be the future of e-comics. We're seeing the rise of... are they publishers? are they stores?... sites like Comics+ and Graphic.ly, who take a modest share of revenue for adapting and hosting your comic on multiple platforms. This week we launched Mirabilis on Graphic.ly (iVerse's Comics+ will follow later this month) and that means readers can buy once and then read the comics on iOS, Android and PC/Mac, with Sony PSP not far off.

Why is it good for creators? Fifty to seventy percent royalties, and a means of cashflowing your work without having to sign away any ancillary rights. Why is it good for publishers? Digital sales can give a title a leg-up to the point where it's ready to come out as a collected print book. And all those digital outlets build the brand so there is a ready core market for the print book. Also, because comics are no longer tied to the narrowcasting inherent in selling via hobby comics stores, that means the end product actually can sit on a shelf in a store like Waterstones and not look out of place. Comics can be for everyone.

And that's why, most importantly of all, e-comics are good for readers - even for those readers who prefer to stick with print. Because digital editions will create more choice, lead to a more robust business, encourage creativity and innovation, and broaden the appeal of the medium. It's all good news for comics fans, so look forward to some exciting things coming your way in the very near future.

Mirabilis on Android, iPhone, Windows Phone 7

A picture may be worth a thousand words but, in the immortal words of Tony Stark, is it too much to ask for both? So here's the thousand words: Mirabilis season one launches this week on Graphic.ly's multi-platformed storefront. If you've had your nose pressed like Tiny Tim to the Apple Store window wondering about that iPad, save your money - the new version's out in a month or two anyway, and in the meantime you can now get Mirabilis on a whole bunch of smartphones and other devices.

Which devices? Well, desktop or laptop for starters. You can get the free Adobe AIR application which really is a nice presentation frame for your comics. Then there are the iPad, iPhone and Android versions - also absolutely free, naturally. And if you prefer to go old school, there's Graphic.ly's web reader that lets you have a look inside all their latest titles and to view the ones you collect on stunning fullscreen view. Setting up your Graphic.ly ID takes a couple of clicks and then you can read your comics on any or all of the supported platforms.

Is that not enough great news for you yet? Okay, well try this: as an introductory offer you can get both Mirabilis #1 and #2 for free. And Graphic.ly offer a whole bunch of other great titles in their online store, many of them free, and all backed up by the kind of extras we're coming to expect in digital comics: creator info, interviews, trailers, character tags and so on. Having just raised a further $3 million investment, Graphic.ly are ramping up to be one of the major forces in the new comics media, and we're very proud to have Mirabilis as part of their 2011 flagship line.

Know what, that's not even three hundred words - but I don't want to hold you up. I'm sure you'll be eager to get your phone out and start reading!

Mirabilis on Android and iPhone

Big shout out today for Kate Lauder and the rest of the awesome Graphic.ly team, who have been pulling out all the stops to get Mirabilis season one converted to all their platforms. I've just been taking a look at the online proofs for issues #1-#3 and the work Kate's guys have done is stunning. Even if I wasn't the writer, I'd be one of Mirabilis's biggest fans.

Those first 8 issues will be going live next month, and what that means is that you won't need to buy an iPad to read Mirabilis any more. It'll be on iPhone, Windows Phone 7, Android and Adobe AIR for Mac/PC. And you only need to buy once to have the issues on any of those OS/devices that you own. (I'm still going to say you should have an iPad, though.)

Graphic.ly aren't just about putting the comic pages out there digitally, oh no. They appreciate that comics are about community as well as content. This was a big part of what made me a Marvel rather than DC fan when I first got hooked on comic books in the (gulp) late '60s. The DC stories were fine and all, but they didn't seem too interested in the stuff that surrounded that. Often you didn't know who'd created a DC story, while Marvel credited inks and letters as well as story and art. DC often dropped the letters page, whereas Marvel usually gave you two and made sure to reply to them. And most importantly, Marvel comics had the Bullpen Bulletin page. When you look at some of the news snippets, it sometimes seems to me like Stan and co had foreseen Twitter :

Our own STAN LEE and his old friend CARMINE INFANTINO shared a lively lunch together recently. They got all misty-eyed talking over old times and speculating about what might have been and what new excitement is still in store for all of comicdom.

Speaking of JACK KIRBY, he and his radiant Roz are now building their own home in sunny California. He should worry how much we haveta spend on postage stamps!

How about RASCALLY ROY THOMAS finally seeing his life-long idol, Elvis Presley, during his recent West Coast vacation?

Maybe you had to be there. Anyway, Graphic.ly's Micah Baldwin totally gets this. What first attracted us to getting Mirabilis on their platform was his comment that, "Digitial comics need to be more. [We need to] grow the comic experience."

So part of what Kate's team has been doing is tagging characters (so that new readers don't confused - something a book like X-Men could do with) and setting up the feedback, comments, creators' cameos and other extras that turn a bunch of words and pictures into a full-blown comic community.

Mirabilis on Android, iOS and Adobe AIR. The whole of season one. Next month. Be sure to have your phones charged 'n' ready.

It all starts here

Mirabilis has been in the App Store a little over 2 weeks now, and in that time we hit #12 in the UK books chart, #24 in France, and #74 in the US. Not a bad start to 2011. In a few weeks we'll have news of the iPhone version, and some other digital platforms too, along with more details of when readers in the UK and Eire can get their hands on those gorgeous Print Media hardback editions.

Stateside and Canada, you can get the trade paperback already: Mirabilis: Winter volume one from Amazon and from Barnes & Noble and volume two will be on sale before the end of January. There's never been a better time to make it a Year of Wonders.

More of the Sime

This is for Peter Richardson, artist and co-creator of the marvellous Cloud 109 and host of the fascinating blog that bears its name. If you would like to read the stories that Lord Dunsany spun around Sime's pictures, "The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller" is here and "How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles" (illustrated above) is here. It looks as though you can buy the whole book on Kindle - or for reading in the Kindle App on iPhone, take your pick. I heartily recommend it to aficionados of Edwardian English (well, Anglo-Irish) fantasy.

A grand ship out on the ocean, all mounted with silver and gold

We are currently making plans for what we’d do with Mirabilis if we can get full control of the publishing rights. To explain that remark and put it in context, I need to take a short historical detour.

As I’m sure you’re aware, Mirabilis originally appeared in the last few issues of Random House’s short-lived weekly comic The DFC. Consequently they are the company that currently controls the publishing rights for those initial ten 5-page installments.

Leo, Martin, Nikos and I have plans for how we would turn that original stub of material into an 800-page epic. But of course to do so we need to be able to publish the first 7% of the story, namely the pages from The DFC. We’re still hopeful we can make some kind of deal to free up those rights. Currently it’s not doing any good for anybody, and the longer it languishes in limbo the harder it is for our whole team to resume, so we're trusting that reason will prevail. (Short pause while I bang my knuckles on this fine oak desk.)

So, if we can get back control of that first chapter, what will we do with our baby then? First of all, we’d reinstate the flipbook episodes on the Mirabilis website. The next step would be to immediately start publishing Mirabilis as a monthly comic book. Eventually there would be collected book editions too, of course, but I like the sense of community you get with a monthly comic, and even a small print readership would help to sustain the team (moral support being far more vital to creatives than financial support, though both are nice) as we continue to work on further installments.

Our current plans would lead to at least a three-year run for the Mirabilis comic, with the four big books (Winter, Spring, etc) appearing at six-monthly intervals once we are well under way. We have to ensure there’s not too much of a gap between release dates for the books because Mirabilis isn't like Alex Rider, for example, where each book is a standalone story. This is one continuous epic – more like Lord of the Rings, say - so readers won't want a long wait between volumes.

One thing we’d be able to consider is whether to stick with the old comic’s A4 format or go with regular US comic book size, which I prefer. It may be too late to change, as any resources we have are better spent creating new material rather than reworking the earlier stuff. That’s not a priority, then – though I do think it’d be a shame not to change it, as Mirabilis leans towards America rather than Europe in that split personality thing we Brits have going. A4 is not a format that would find much favor on the far side of the pond.

We’d look to put the comic out in electronic form too, of course, with PDFs on DriveThru and an app for both iPhone and iPad. All the episodic formats we can release it on would bring in regular revenue - maybe not a lot but it's cashflow, and that’s vital if we’re to keep the whole team together and have any chance of completing this Herculean task we set out to do.

That's not forgetting the Royal Mythological Society stuff, which could serve a useful peripheral function like the Black Freighter to Watchmen, or the Animatrix to The Matrix. We actually have the RMS shorts all ready for publication on the Kindle - and that material has the advantage that it could quite easily be repurposed if need be. I'll just keep touching the desk.

So those are all the what-ifs. What if we can’t get control of the opening installments, though? Well, in that case I suppose you may end up reading the adventures of blond John Spark and red-headed Astrid Fieldweather under the mysterious blue comet, in Fabulosia: 365 Days of Miracles. Or maybe we shouldn't even joke about that, judging by the look on their faces there...

Hanging by a thread

The Bookseller last month published a special issue reporting on comics and graphic novels in the UK. Available here it makes for interesting, if at times uncomfortable, reading.

Take Philip Stone’s analysis of GN sales figures. Mr Stone notes that sales this year are up “a mouth-watering 14.5%” and that the UK graphic novel market is worth some £11m. But the actual numbers on the opposite page paint a slightly less rosy picture. Leaving aside Watchmen, graphic novels in the UK are typically selling around 6000 copies a year – and that’s based on just the Top 20 adult titles. Sales figures in the children’s market aren’t even half that, with the Coraline graphic novel (a movie tie-in, after all) shifting about 2500 copies in the year.

Another telling statistic was that seven times as many people bought Watchmen in paperback as in hardback. And that despite there being not a huge difference in RRP: £17.99 and £24.99 respectively. So there seems to be no real premium market here.

The main lesson is one we all knew already. To work as a business, graphic novels need to be aimed at an international market. For whatever reason (and Paul Gravett discusses this in another of the articles) the British are not much interested in the medium of comics. In France, the graphic novel market is massively bigger, with the top adult titles shifting more than fifty times as many copies as UK sales of Persepolis, Killing Joke or Death Note. Stateside, the average graphic novel sells 15,000 copies annually – and that’s across five hundred titles, not just twenty, so figure on the top-sellers doing more than ten times that.

Another thing about the top-sellers – in most cases they didn’t start out as graphic novels, they built up a following in regular monthly comic books first. Not many people want to take a leap in the dark and shell out $17.99 (around $30) on a story they haven’t had a chance to sample first. Now, I grew up reading comic books and I’d love for Mirabilis to come out every month, but – like it or not – those days of the regular printed comic may be behind us.

Suppose you start up your own comic imprint next year. If you’re aiming to get to a wide readership you need to get into newsagents and comic stores, and by the time you’re breaking even you’ll be spending as much on printing and distribution as you are on actual content. You won’t get any advertising revenue because your imprint is tiny and unknown. And you won’t build much of a wide readership anyway because you won’t sell many copies in newsagents, and only the hardcore fans go into comic stores these days. Frankly, you’ve got a better chance of beating the laws of thermodynamics.

All of which leads us inevitably, inexorably, back to electronic publishing. And bear in mind I’m talking about e-comics as a stepping stone now. A way of ensuring that there can be a commercially viable version of the story in print form.

First, you need to reach an international market. App Store and the PlayStation Network will get your work out in front of potential customers in 70+ countries. (On DriveThruComics you’ve got the whole world, though personally I’m less keen on reading a PDF on my PC screen.) As Sandy Spangler pointed out here recently, being in App Store doesn’t mean you’re going to get noticed. But that’s even more true of bookstores, where failure to get a window or table display at the front means that your expensively-printed graphic novel about zombie tech support guys (“I.T.’s Alive” – ho ho) will lie scrunched up and unnoticed next to a Bash Street Kids annual.

One advantage of putting out the episodic version on phones and handhelds is that you can structure the payments much more flexibly than you can with a printed comic book. I’d give the first two or three issues – or “chapters”, if you prefer – of Mirabilis away free. Then maybe $1.50 for the other six, so you can get the whole of book one on iPhone for $9 – and, crucially, you only need to pay once you’ve decided you like it.

So here’s some pure guesswork. Don’t use these figures in actual recipes or your cake may not rise:

Option 1 is to publish your comic in monthly installments. So you get 10,000 readers who each pay $24 for all eight issues. And because you went through retailers, after paying printing and distribution costs you’re lucky if your revenue from all those sales is $40,000 - at least half of which will go on the advertising necessary to get 10,000 paying customers. So that leaves you with a page rate of $100. Hence the expression: don’t quit your day job.

Option 2 is to put it out electronically. This is all guesswork, remember, but say you still spend $20,000 on marketing and you get 150,000 people worldwide looking at the free episodes. Of those, maybe 15,000 are hooked by the story and buy it at $9. App Stores take 30%, some others take less, but call it $6.50 as your share per customer. That’s now a page rate of $400 after deducting the advertising. This could be your day job.

Remember that we’re talking here about starting an imprint with a view to generating a wide readership via retailers and selling real, physical, printed books in bookstores at the end of it all. I need to emphasize that because option 1 can work fine if you’re just looking for direct sales. You can print up at 50 cents, sell at $3, and in that case One Thousand True Fans will give you a (just about) sustainable business. But that’s a whole other discussion.

To make a “mass market” business out of this, you’d need a start-up fund of about $500,000 (£300,000) to pay for eight to ten titles averaging 150 pages - or a quarter of that to pay for advertising, plus ten creative teams willing to work entirely on the back end. Well, I’ve got a company with 175k to invest if anybody else is interested.

The future of comics

If you want to start the comic geek equivalent of a bar fight, just try popping up in the forums to say print is dead. That’ll do it every time.

I get why it bothers them. I’ve been collecting comic books most of my life. Shelves have collapsed in this house under the combined weight of Gaiman’s and Moore’s imaginations. Lee, Kirby and Ditko have to stay on the ground floor; no ceiling would hold them. These are my greatest treasures.

Yet, all that said, print’s on its way out.
Okay, maybe not at the prestige end of the market. The same people who buy the deluxe box set of Buffy DVDs (a snip at $166 – are they insane?) after getting hooked by the TV showings will buy the trade paperback of Hellboy having read the monthly comic books. So print will survive there - for a while at least. But that’s the five percent of comic readers for whom it’s a real passion, and their wallets can’t sustain an entire industry. It’s the 95% of casual readers we need to hang onto. As pamphlet comics die, electronic publishing offers the only answer.

There are two reasons why I’m so smitten with e-publishing of comics, especially on mobiles. The first is rooted in habit. I’m used to reading comics in monthly installments. That model still just about makes sense for Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, but it’s a shrinking polar cap even for them. On smart phones and handhelds like the PSPgo, you’ve got the perfect platform for delivering regular comic episodes.
But that’s merely the reactionary argument. The real bonus is that electronic media provide a better way of reading comics. Some of the early comic reader apps have just treated the phone screen as a little window for peering through at a comic page. I say: let’s kiss goodbye to pages! My biggest headache in writing comics is getting the reveals to come at page breaks. The way forward is going to be a step beyond current features like Sony’s autoflow system, to the point that the old historical idea of the comic page might even be jettisoned entirely. Whether it is or not, the view can track across each frame rostrum-style to reveal new parts of the image. Each story will be some blend of animation, motion comics and static comics.
Here are some frames from Mirabilis to show a very simple way that an e-comic could enhance the reading experience. Each time you press Next, you get successive word balloons or sound effects. At the transitions between panels, there could be cuts, dissolves or fades depending on what works best for the story.

Welcome to the future. My ten-year-old self would’ve eaten this stuff up!

That was the year that was

Amazing to think that it was last December that Leo and I put together the Mirabilis trailer, armed only with a bunch of stills and a great score by the multitalented Frazer Payne. I’d been steeling myself for a day or two swearing at Flash, so it was a happy discovery that we could do the whole thing in Windows Movie Maker in an afternoon and then go down the pub.

The pub in question was the Globe in Appley where we spent a very enjoyable evening with Fred Hasson of Red Bedlam and his family. Beer was had, and good pies, and Fred and his brother Leary, once stalwarts of ‘70s prog rock with their band Marsupilami, joined in a few songs with the Globe’s proprietor, affable Angelino LeBurn Maddox.

I mention all this only to show that it seems like it happened just a couple of days ago. The year has gone bounding by like an eager St Bernard on its way to a cable car disaster. Okay, we’ve done about 150 pages of Mirabilis since then, but it doesn’t seem enough – especially not while the work remains squirreled away like those National Gallery paintings they shoved in a Welsh cave during the war.

Leo and Nikos have been working flat out all year. Leo is drawing, drawing every minute the day gives him, and Nikos colors Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon along with a whole lot of other work. Compared to those guys, I feel like such a slacker. Only about half my energy this year has gone into writing Mirabilis. That’s the enjoyable half. The rest was frittered away trying to get projects like the iPhone version under way.

My resolutions for 2010 are therefore: to spend at least 90% of my efforts on the actual creative work, to make sure that I retain control of everything I create, and to achieve more.

Huh, did I just tell myself, “Must try harder”? My primary school teacher would surely approve!

More thoughts on DIY

The Writers’ Digest has an interesting article on “The 3 Self-Publishing Paths You Should Understand.”

In the past, self-publishing wasn’t really viable – hence the frequent confusion with vanity publishing. Everybody talks about how a self-published copy of Shadowmancer was discovered on a jumble sale table by a little nipper whose dad happened to be a publishing bigwig. But for every G P Taylor there’s a hundred J R Hartleys, forlorn, unread, and tweedily loitering.

Electronic formats change all that. You don’t need to shell out for print costs, but that’s not the real advantage. Where e-publishing comes into its own is the opportunity to get your work out in front of a hell of a lot of eyeballs. (Or, in case the Rev Mr Taylor should be reading, a heck of a lot.)

Face it: printing up a thousand copies and selling them for $20 a pop isn’t going to do you much good. So what you get to keep all the profits? After paying the printer, that leaves you with maybe $15,000. Better than the $1500 you might have got in royalties from the same sales, sure, but it’s still a drop in the ocean compared to all the work you did creating that content in the first place.

As Tim O’Reilly has said, your biggest problem is obscurity. That’s why it was always better in the past to take the 7% royalty from a publisher - because they would get your work out to a wide market. Ten years back, you’d often hear authors griping about being whittled down to 5% of net on book club editions – but that was still a good deal (or the best deal you’d get, anyway) because it was all helping to deal with your obscurity problem. Better to have 30,000 sales at $1.5 each than 3000 at $15, even though your revenue’s the same either way.

Now we have electronic publishing and it’s a new day. You can potentially reach anybody in the world. If you’ve just written a literary novel I’d still urge you to take it first to a traditional print publisher. But if what you’re working on is, for example, a comic – well, unless Marvel are showing an interest, you could do a lot worse than going the Freakangels route and sticking it up online.

You could also go to an e-publisher like Genus Apps and aim to get an iPhone version. Or you could license (or code up) a comic reader app and do it yourself through App Store. E-tail is already ahead of retail and the gap is getting bigger. You can reach ten times as many customers through iTunes as all the major bookstores put together.

Nobody will pay to read a comic on the web, but a surprising number of people who read your web comic for free will then ask about buying a print copy. At the same time, people will pay for a comic on their iPhone because that makes it convenient; they can read it on the train or during a coffee break. The 70% of sale price that Apple gives you back makes it tempting to charge, but don’t be reluctant to give the iPhone version away free to start off. You can reach millions of people - but so can everybody else with a comic. O’Reilly’s Rule is so important that it bears repeating:

Your biggest problem is obscurity.

And where does this leave print? Truth is, the publishers benefit just as much as the authors, because they need all the help they can get swimming against the tide of consumer indifference. Take your project to a publisher when you’ve had 650,000 verifiable downloads – as Cory Doctorow has with just one of his novels – and they’ll get a contract under your nose before your backside hits the chair. And you can take that to the bank.