NOTE: Comixology has now been absorbed into amazon.
It is a popular topic out there, all us interdependent comics creators trying to understand where to focus and what can we do with the digital version of our comic boos and what can you expect in the experience. This article is all about Comixology.
The most popular, well known choice I think is .to publish your comics to Comixology, we think.. our comic book will be show cased to the world, with Marvel and DC ones, WOOT! The reality is that the Submit part of Comixology is amazing, yet is all about them ONLY accepting quality comic books. Because of this you may end up wasting your time or can take a long time to get approved (it took 6 months in my case). Here are a few surprises I ran into trying to meet their standards…
- There are PDF quality guidelines, requiring you to provide a high quality PDF. I always like to say “I am a Graphics Technician by trade.” (got the Collage certificates on my wall.) But even with this knowledge I still submitted a few comic frames not meeting the Comixology standards. This caused the delay of the product getting published. But they provided great detail on the issues.
- Writing and text quality, they actually check your use of grammar and text quality and care about the font used. Of course I got caught here too.
- Marketing, the are not gonna push your comic book, you have to do it! Your happiness about being in the same place as Marvel and DC could make you cry as Comixology is a sea of comics, people need to know what they are looking for, odds are they know Spiderman, The Avengers, Batman… not “Jimmy the Mighty”.
Now take a deep breath… here is a link to their submission requirements… https://support.comixology.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1302915-please-read-prior-to-submitting-your-pdf-file-
Some other things to take away that could be subjective….
- I am not a fan of their tech support. I asked some simple questions about how I get paid and it was a waste of time as I am in Canada and they seemed to say what I found on the support forum over and over, not actually answering my question. For your leaning pleasure, here is their details… https://support.comixology.com/customer/portal/articles/1021464-how-will-i-get-paid-and-how-often-
- You need to create a “Series” and “Company” profile containing Graphics and text. An example of my Forsaken Future one …
https://www.comixology.com/The-Forsaken-Future/comics-series/81718?ref=cHVibGlzaGVyL3ZpZXcvZGVza3RvcC9saXN0L3Nlcmllc0xpc3Q - You do get sales information under “Submit’ in the form an Excel file. Took me forever to figure this out. The link is top right when signed into “Submit”.
- In a year of doing NO Marketing on my side, Comixology did not sell one issue on its own.
- It was a lot of work to meet their standards but now I can create a PDF I can submit to any other place like Indy Planet.
- They offer a DMZ option, still researching this stuff, but I selected it as on as it would protect my comics from theft. Not sure if that makes readers mad ;-).
As well here is the authority on Comixology talking about “Submit” …
Comment below so I know to continue on with these types of posts!