Is There a Way for Comics to Move Forward During COVID-19? (2 of 2) Todd Allen
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Why Digital Sales Stalled Out
Before discussing the potential stop gaps and what things might look like in the future, it’s necessary to understand what went wrong with digital comics sales. Too many retailers are shouting from the rooftops that people simply prefer paper and it seems like it might also be a case of the digital side of the industry, and Amazon in particular, dropping the ball.
15% of sales in the number you’d hear about digital comics for several years. It seemed to plateau after Amazon bought Comixology. More recently, the water cooler talk has been that digital is only 12% of sales. This means digital sales may have actually gone down.
It seems like digital comics stalled out early, and it’s even stranger to talk about a non-growth segment of the Amazon empire, but there are some pretty basic reasons for it, if you go back and look at the history of digital media. It boils down to three things: device, DRM and Amazon Payments.
Digital music took off with the iPod. eBooks took off with the Kindle. What is the device for digital comics? Originally, it was the iPad. If you’ve ever priced an iPad, you’ll find they’re not the cheapest things out there, but that’s when digital comics started to take off. With the first digital tablet.
By all accounts, sales stopped rising when Amazon bought Comixology and switched them over to their in-house payment system. They wanted to avoid Apple taking 30% of all transactions. That means you can’t actually buy inside the Comixology app on an iPad, you have to go to the Comixology/Amazon website and buy it, then download it to the app. It’s a sub-standard user experience on what had established itself as the primary consumption device at that point.
The speculation was that when Amazon fully integrated the Comixology platform into the Kindle platform, the growth would increase. After all, it was the Kindle that brought eBooks to the front. Here’s the problem: far too many Kindle’s aren’t well suited for reading comics. The beloved Kindle Paperwhite? Black and white device and physically too small. You need a Kindle Fire for color and you probably only want a 10-inch Kindle if you want to read a comic as a full page.
Digital comics would be much better off if someone branded a cheap android 10” to 12” tablet as a designated comics reader and created an inexpensive entry-level device for that purpose.
The other thing that let music really make the jump to dominant digital sales was the combination of the platform independent .mp3 format and music going DRM-free. Buy your file and play it where you want to play it.
Digital comics tend to have proprietary formats and it is very much in Amazon’s interests to keep it that way. eBooks tend to be this way, too. It keeps people in one eReader and one commerce system. Digital audio books, on the other hand are more like music. You can play them with whatever you listen to music on, so it doesn’t matter as much which ecosystem the files are purchased from.
DRM is just something that comics seem to be saddled with. All the Hollywood players still require DRM. That includes Marvel (Disney), DC (Warner/AT&T) and almost every licensed comic. And even if the comic was DRM-free, the files aren’t portable between browsers because there’s no universal, open source file format that suits everyone.
Add Marvel’s exclusive with Amazon to the file format issues and you see why Amazon has something akin to a functional monopoly, even if they don’t really have that many exclusive publishers. Marvel is a large enough player to make most of the digital consumers move to Amazon to keep all their comics in the same browser. The main question is whether Marvel will renew that exclusive deal?
A comics reading device is desirable because the standard comic book is not formatted in a way that’s compatible with a computer screen or a smart phone screen. Can comic books be formatted in ways more compatible with viewing on a monitor? Absolutely, but most publishers don’t take that approach. That’s more of a webcomics thing.
A person can absolutely read a comic book on a computer monitor, it just requires scrolling and it’s a little clunky from a UIX perspective and that contributes to the lower than expected adoption rate.
What percentage of sales should digital comics be? If you look at the book market in general, probably 20%. If you look at specific genres, perhaps a bit higher. If you compare it with the science fiction/fantasy genre, quite a bit higher perhaps 50%. You don’t want to know how heavily some of the romance estimates have favored digital. What generally happen with eBook genres like SF/F and especially romance is that the high volume readers jump in. Then again, eBook readers generally realize more savings on new releases than digital comics readers. Print and digital cover prices tend to remain the same for comics and that’s absolutely not the case elsewhere, even though publishers generally keep a higher percentage of the digital list price. (This can be chalked up as a concession to retailers and enough digital readers were willing to pay cover price that it stuck, even if growth has capped.)
Can publishers survive by ditching print comics and moving to digital? Digital alone? Absolutely not. The penetration rate of digital comics is much too small. Digital serial and then a printed collected edition? That’s been done before and warrants careful monitoring.
What Can Be Done Right Now?
Short term, this is a real mess.
If publishers release new issues digitally, the retail world risks losing customers and that whole question of how to release the issues in print crops up, as does the secondary issue of readers switching to collected edition book format if they miss 3+ issues of a title due to quarantine.
If publishers release new issues in print AND digital, they create have and have-not classes among retailers, based on where they live. They will inevitably stoke the fires of profiteering speculators to new heights. They create an increasing potential burden of how shops staying under lockdown longer will have to navigate restocking potential months worth of issues at once.
On the retailer side, it seems like it’s a great time to focus on back issues, current inventory and graphic novels that can still be restocked through the bookstore distributors while waiting to ride this out. Curate your remaining stock and recommend things that you can order. Except that you probably need a website or you’re going to be limited to hitting the emails to your subscriber list. There is no easy answer here.
At a certain point, publishers are going to need to publish something. Especially if this lasts well into the summer. They have creators who need to eat.
The simplest solution may be to start some interim digital titles.
Do not put out Batman #95 digitally. Do a few issues of Batman vs. Virus-Man digitally and then when distribution is ready to resume, Batman #95 comes out in print and digital, just like the title always did. Batman Vs. Virus-Man can eventually come out as a trade paperback or perhaps as 100 Page Giant.
This way, no one has their collection interrupted. No one feels compelled to switch to collected editions because they missed the end (or even the entire) Batman arc. Stores don’t have to try and get several issues of Batman in stock all at once and hope they sell through. It’s a better way to do things. If enough stores can hold on long enough to re-open and the unknown length of quarantine regionally is definitely the biggest problem for the entire supply chain trying to plan for this time period.
It would be the easiest thing in the world for DC and Marvel to adopt the old 1940s Justice Society format for Justice League and Avengers. Split the team off into solo missions and have a different team handle the solo chapters. That could be up and running digitally in a couple of weeks.
It also wouldn’t be a bad idea to have some more “interim” digital material built up in case there’s a secondary quarantine period in the Fall, which appears to be a genuine risk.
Is it a good idea for independent publishers to launch interim titles digitally? That’s hard to say. The retail community is taking a justifiably hard line against being cut out of the commerce chain. Short runs of new projects only is probably the closest thing to a safe option there.
Hypothetical interim digital projects aren’t likely to keep any publisher profitable, but it’s a potential way to blunt the losses during quarantine and keep the creators working in some capacity. It’s closer in nature to retailers trying to sell back stock while they’re closed to browsing customer. It’s a patch, but it also might end up being the direction things move in if the Direct Market doesn’t emerge from quarantine intact.
Todd Allen is the author of Economics of Digital Comics. He covered the comic book industry for over a decade reporting for Publishers Weekly, Chicago Tribune, The Beat and Comic Book Resources. As a contributing editor to The Beat, his work has been nominated for an Eisner and named to TIME’s Top 25 blogs of 2015. He was admitted to the Mystery Writers of America for the Division and Rush webcomic. He taught eBusiness in the Arts, Entertainment & Media Management department of Columbia College Chicago and has consulting on digital topics for organizations like American Medical Association, National PTA, McDonald’s, Sears, TransUnion and Navistar.
