Posted in: Comics, Digital | Tagged:

Now Graphic.Ly Talks To The Publishers

Published Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:00:31 -0500

Last updated Thu, 05 Apr 2012 13:00:45 -0500

Earlier today, Bleeding Cool ran a letter from Micah Baldwin to the comics industry, regarding the move from App to eBook in terms of publishing digital comics, and other graphical works. There has been quite a reaction. But in the midst of that, Graphic.Ly have sent emails to their publishers, revealing some other aspects. That they are going to stop being a percentage-of-revenue business, but a fixed fee business instead. Image, rather than Vertigo, say.

Micah writes;

Apologies for the mass e-mail, but we've got some exciting news that affects many of you so we wanted to reach out to everyone at once.

Later today, we'll be making a very important announcement about the future of Graphicly and the direction we're taking our business. Please take the time to read this as it outlines what changes are coming and how they affect you as a publisher on Graphicly.

As you know from working with us over these past 2+ years, we've had one goal: Help all publishers and creators get their stories seen. In doing that, we've built a series of marketplaces inside other marketplaces through various apps. We began to realize that we were no longer being supportive of our goal. Instead, we have been focused on selling the books that sold the best. Why? Because as a store, that is your only function in life. To sell more. Especially when your only revenue stream was built on sharing in sales with the publishers and creators.

At the end of last year, two things began to happen. One, publishers started to ask us if we could help them get on marketplaces that were not Graphicly branded. "How do I get into iBooks," was a common question. Two, we began to ask ourselves, "Are we what we want to be?"

Here we were, managing a rapidly growing business, but a business that seemed to miss its core value. Helping publishers. And, a business that had built internal tools to make it super simple to convert books, sell them across every marketplace imaginable, and learn about the behavioral and social engagement of readers.

We had to get back to our core.

Earlier this year we launched our Digital Distribution Platform, which enables content creators and publishers to easily upload and convert their publications digitally, and then distribute to them to every marketplace imaginable, reaching tens of millions of potential customers on tablets, smart phones and laptops.

Since we've launched, we've seen an overwhelming response from many of you. Almost a 1,000 publishers are using our platform to distribute their content at scale, and it became very clear that we were onto something that could truly help content creators and publishers.

With that, we've decided that the best way to serve the publishers and creators we've set out to help is to focus on continuing to build and refine this platform, to help creators sell even more books. Now you can upload your book once, add some metadata, including characters, genre, ratings and more, define a directed reading experience, and click submit. That's it.

With that comes some changes that affect you as a Publisher:

This month we will be migrating all publishers to begin delivering their content to Graphicly via the Graphicly Digital Distribution Platform. If you have not yet checked it out, please do. You can access it at http://graphicly.com/partners – Delivering and configuring your content has never been easier and can be done with just a few short clicks.Thank you for your continued support and partnership. We look forward to assisting you in reaching an even larger audience!

As of this week, we will be retiring the previously-released Graphicly Comics marketplace applications. Our iPhone, iPad and Android applications, as well as a our Adobe AIR Desktop application will no longer be available for download. Users who have purchased comics and use these apps will still be able to read their titles via the apps, but they simply will not be able to purchase titles through them anymore.

Titles will be still be available to be purchased and read via our website at http://graphicly.com /store, embeddable widget, as well as through our Facebook Application (http://apps.facebook.com/graphicly/) on your Facebook page. It will remain free to publish to these channels and titles sold through these channels will keep the current revenue share between you and Graphicly.

Through the Graphicly Digital Distribution Platform, you will be able to publish your books to a variety of marketplaces such as Apple iBooks, Amazon Kindle, Kobo Reader and many more. For a fee of $150 per unit, we will handle the distribution to those marketplaces on your behalf, and aggregate the sales and other data points into one spot so you can effectively manage your publishing across multiple endpoints. There will be no revenue share for sales of your titles. After you pay $150 per unit, any and all revenue that comes from the sales of your books goes directly to you (after the stores take their percentage).

In addition to distributing to the various eBookstores, you have the option to work with Graphicly to create a branded, in-depth app for the various marketplaces where your content applies.

You can see a full overview of the services and pricing information for Graphicly at http://graphicly.com/partners/pricing

To say we're excited about this step forward would be an understatement. By focusing on the Graphicly Platform, the potential for publishers to reach new and wider audiences is limitless. In the short time we've been distributing content to places like Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble NOOK, Kobo and the Amazon Kindle platforms, we've seen tremendous growth.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to let us know. You can always get support from Graphicly at https://graphicly.desk.com/ and thank you for your continued partnership.