Why Don't We Give It Away: A Serious Business Model for Comics

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North Wind #1 (screenshot)

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uploaded by Jordan Yerman

Retailers were most certainly not amused when BOOM! Studios told the world that, in conjunction with the retail release of their new comic book, they'd be releasing a free online version... shop owners across the land envisioned stacks of North Wind gathering dust as graphic novel fans perused its pages in ones and zeroes.

However, the retailers were mistaken. Not only did North Wind sell well, but it sold out. Not only did it sell out, but it's undergoing a second printing:[q
url="http://www.comicbookresources.com/news/newsitem.cgi?id=12750"]BOOM!
Studios announced today that NORTH WIND #1 will receive a second
printing. Hitting the market simultaneously in stores and online at
MySpace Comic Books , the first printing of NORTH WIND sold out in only
ten days. The second print will have a slightly altered cover to
distinguish itself from the first printing.[/q]This sort of market behavior flies in the face of expectations, but there is some precedent: sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow swears by this practice, crediting free online versions with his literary success:

[q
url="http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html"]I've
been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy
has it ever made me a bunch of money.
[...]
Most people who download the book don't end up buying it, but they
wouldn’t have bought it in any event, so I haven’t lost any sales, I’ve
just won an audience. A tiny minority of downloaders treat the free
e-book as a substitute for the printed book--those are the lost sales.
But a much larger minority treat the e-book as an enticement to buy the
printed book. They're gained sales. As long as gained sales outnumber
lost sales, I'm ahead of the game. After all, distributing nearly a
million copies of my book has cost me nothing.[/q] Cory's was not an isolated case, either:

[q
url="http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/06/free_downloads.html"]Meanwhile,
we saw a huge spike in downloads starting at the beginning of this
year, but didn't see a corresponding drop in print book sales, other
than the continued slow erosion that's typical of books in print
(especially one that's heading towards a second edition.) However, we
did see the book's first fall from grace, dropping from an average run
rate of about a thousand copies a month to about six hundred back in
March 2006 coming at about the same time that we start showing the free
downloads, but we're not sure whether or not that is just because we
don't have earlier download data -- we believe that the book was
available online sooner after publication even though Jeremy didn't
start his mirror till March. (Next time we do a book available for free
download, we'll be careful to collect accurate data from the start of
the project.)

In any case, this kind of sales drop is not completely inconsistent
with the sales pattern from many other books. And for authors who want
to reach the widest audience, it's certainly possible that even if free
downloads did shave a percentage from sales, the tradeoff is worth it
(see Piracy is Progressive Taxation).[/q] Books are expensive, and there's a tremendous amount of choice out there. Writers, meanwhile, should be seeing each work not as a one-shot deal but as an investment in a career: Doctorow's example above is an absllute gift for a budding author: three quarters of a million people knowing who you are by the time your second book is finished. The publishing industry, by and large, is reticent to approach this sort of model, but more and more agents and publishers are starting to see the advantage in street-level name recognition.