Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Comics, entertainment, graphicly

How Much Does Graphicly Owe? And To Whom?

Published Tue, 27 May 2014 13:00:37 -0500

This morning we reported that digital publisher Graphicly was shutting down and staff moving to book publisher Blurb. Michah Baldwin talks about the move in emotional terms.

Today is the Graphicly team's first day at Blurb. (I'll leave talk about the transaction to other more journalistic channels. Let me just say that everyone is happier today than they were yesterday.)

Well, no, not everyone. This is the letter send out to comic publishers who use Graphicly.

Thank You.

As you may have heard today, Graphicly is winding down as an entity. Micah wrote about it here.

The Graphicly team is now at Blurb. Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the power of books, graphic novels and magazines — in both digital and print, and has some wonderful tools for creators and publishers. The team is very excited about what Blurb is building and certainly suggest you check them out here.

We have put our hearts and souls into building the best platform for independent creators and publishers and are excited to continue this work at Blurb.

We want to thank all of the publishers who have used the platform over the years to convert, distribute and promote your wonderful books. Without you, there would have been no us.

What is next?

Over the next thirty days, we will keep Graphicly up and running so you can go in and download your books. There is a handy "Download All" button to make it easy. After thirty days, we will completely delete all data, including all accounts and books.

We will be bringing down books in the various marketplaces, and have worked with the marketplaces to make the transition as simple as possible.

Once you download your books, you can make accounts at the various ebook stores and upload your books there.

Here are links to those marketplaces:

Apple: http://www.itunes.com/sellyourbooks

Amazon (depending on your needs):
* Kindle Direct Publishing – http://www.amazonkdp.com/

* Amazon Vendor Central – https://vendorcentral.amazon.com/

Barnes and Noble: https://www.nookpress.com/

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/writinglife

If you are having problems with the download of your books, please email us at support@graphicly.com. We will move quickly to fix any problems.

Please feel free to reach out to me directly at the numbers below.

Again, we cannot thank you enough.

Sincerely,

David Fox

Graphicly

What Fox doesn't address is the concern by publishers regarding owed moneys. Bleeding Cool understands that publishers have now been told, as of today, that the company is shutting down and they will join a line of creditors to be paid from whatever the assets of the company are sold for.

Expect a lot of publishers to be owed a lot of money that they will only see pennies from… and maybe they won't be that amicable to working with Blurb as a result, despite Baldwin saying he was hopeful that publishers would move with them to the new company.

Creator Dave Dellecese tells me

I had always noticed that Grahicly's sales charts each month for our book, Holidaze, always added up to more than their online 'dashboard' was stating. I inquired and was told that it wouldn't be fixed as they were working on a new site and to just go with the sales charts.

I had inquired about getting a disbursement of money we were owed back in the Fall from our sales and was asked to hold off until the new Graphicly site launched. We waited and well into 2014, the site hadn't launched. I spent the next few months making inquiries via phone and social media about it with no responses. I've found out only recently that there just hasn't been anyone at the company to respond to any of this as it's gotten smaller and smaller and closer to 'the end.'

With this announcement now public, I was finally able to get hold of some folks, via phone, who I want to say have been very nice considering how many calls they must be dealing with. They've told me that with this being a 'closing the doors' type of scenario that there are many creditors lining up owed money, so there seems no way that publishers like myself will get money that owed to us from book sales. Whether that extends to bigger fish like Walking Dead, for example, I don't know. But smaller folks in similar self-publishing situations like myself seem to be out of luck in getting anything we were owed.

While it wasn't monumental cash we're talking about, I will say it's disappointing. Graphicly's whole pitch was 'one fee' to them for conversions to various platforms and anything you sell is your profit (After fees like iTunes, Nook, etc). While it may not have been mortgage money in our case, there was money spent to do this and the money we earned in return remained in limbo.

Oh, and I also want to add that while they had to deliver the bad news, those I spoke with seemed very bad that they had to be the ones delivering it, as it was a matter out of their hands with the shutdown happening, and kept saying 'i wish i had better news. I really do.'

So, not everyone is happier today… we emailed Graphicly and Micah Baldwin today without response to date.

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