Some thoughts on comics on the web, licensing, and business models.

A few years ago I went to a panel discussion on webcomics. I asked Jeffrey Rowland what he thought about the ability for his work to be easily replicated a shared because of its digital format, and whether he thought that this helped to expand his audience. He answered by telling a story about someone who had once used his art without attribution, and how a simple cease and desist letter had set the offender straight. This didn't even remotely answer my question. I was thinking of the Creative Commons license, and encouraging people to share your comics and even respond to them in creative ways by making their own work (and not just commenting or clicking the "Like" button on Facebook.) But Rowland immediately thought about protecting his intellectual property, since it is how he makes his living. This makes perfect sense, but I think it points to the prevailing attitude about the nature of comics on the web and copyright held by independent cartoonists who are trying to make a living from their art. It's an attitude that I am increasingly questioning.

Sunday my pal Alec Longstreth posted a short article about his "business model" for his mini comics, and I think this is pretty close to what a lot of print cartoonists who self-publish are doing (although most of us are not as organized as Alec, so we don't formulate it as clearly). I'm quoting him now:

1. Initially, I print stories as minicomics, in individual issues of Phase 7. My print runs at this point are 500 copies, which usually takes 1-2 years to sell out (and/or give away). I'm considering bumping this up to 750 for the next issue of Phase 7.
2. When the first printing sells out, I reprint individual issues as needed, until there is enough material to compile a new Lulu.com collection.
3. Once there is a Lulu.com collection of Phase 7 material, the mini-comics go "out of print." (though I usually still have a few floating around, and I can print more if people want to fill a hole in their collection)
4. After a Lulu.com collection has been "new" at every convention (SPX, MoCCA, Stumptown, Heroes Con, etc.) then I place the entire comic online, for anyone to read for free.

Alec hits the convention circuit pretty hard during the year, and so he gives new readers a lot more opportunities than I do to pick up his print mini-comics. But this model is based on a certain amount of control over any new content, and most of that has to do with revenue: Alec needs to sell these mini comics to cover the costs he incurs in doing the convention (table rent, travel expenses, hotel, food, etc.) and so he wants to make sure that the most salable items--namely his newest work--are only available through him, at a price.

But this at least partly assumes that people don't see a difference between a comic printed in a book and a comic printed on the web, that our readers only want "access" to the work we create.¹ "If we let them read the work for free, then they won't pay us for it." But anyone will tell you that there are a lot of differences between reading a comic in a book and reading one on the web. Alec agrees with his. In his article he says,

But online, you have to click through each page, and the .JPG files aren't the highest resolution, and you have to sit at your computer, etc. It's still nicer to hold a book.

Of course, there are always people who will only read comics for free online, just like there are people who will only read comics in print form. But even though these two groups are often the loudest in any discussion, they are a tiny minority. Most people are interested in reading good stories, and are willing to pay to read them if they are sufficiently motivated.

Part of the reason that I stopped posting my comics online was because I felt that the medium doesn't work well for long stories (I still don't). Since I was no longer working on a daily strip, I didn't see the point of putting my pages up because I thought it would take away from the experience of reading the story straight through. My decision had nothing to do with money, but it had everything to do with control. I wanted to control the way my work was presented to my readers, and that meant that I didn't want digital copies floating around that could be presented in ways I hadn't intended.

This turned out to be a big mistake.

Here is what that I have learned, even though I had already heard it repeated a thousand times since Tim O'Reilly first wrote it: the problem for any creative type isn't piracy, it is obscurity. When I stopped posting comics online, my mini comic sales dropped about 60%. Let me repeat that: When I stopped giving away my comics for free online, 60% of the people who had previously given me money to read those same comics on paper stopped giving me money to read them on paper.

By allowing people to freely read and distribute my art, I grew my sales. My work became my best advertisement.

When Cory Doctorow published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, he simultaneously published it with Tor Publishing while releasing it for free on the web, under a Creative Commons license. I read it that first week on my Apple Newton, for free, and later passed along that copy to several friends. Over half of the people I distributed it to bought a hard copy of the book because we enjoyed it so much. If I hadn't read it first, for free, would I have taken a chance and spent $20 on a science fiction book about Disney Land by a new author? Not a chance. (Cory has since done this with all of his novels.)

Doctorow wanted his work to spread far and wide, to harness the internet to do the job marketing the book that the publisher used to do, and that all of us self-publishers are forced to do. He writes of the Creative Commons license,

CC turns my books from nouns into verbs. My books *do stuff*, get passed around and recut and remade to suit the needs of each reader, turned to their hand the way that humans always have adapted their tools and stories to fit their circumstances. As Tim O’Reilly says, my problem is not piracy, it’s obscurity, and CC licenses turn my books into dandelion seeds, able to blow in the wind and find every crack in every sidewalk, sprouting up in unexpected places. Each seed is a possibility, an opportunity for someone out there to buy a physical copy of the book, to commission work from me, to bring me in for a speech.

I don't want to tell cartoonists and artists that they should give up all of their rights to their work. That's not at all what I am saying. Creative Commons allows you to make clear, informed decisions about how you want your work to be used. You can still tell people that they can't print your comic up and sell it and keep the money. That they can't put their name on your work and say they drew it. Those things are wrong, and the people who use these arguments against things Creative Commons are just looking for straw men. And Doctorow clarifies this even more. He writes,

CC lets me be financially successful, but it also lets me attain artistic and ethical success. Ethical in the sense that CC licenses give my readers a legal framework to do what readers have always done in meatspace: pass the works they love back and forth, telling each other stories the way humans do. Artistic because we live in the era of copying, the era when restricting copying is a fool’s errand, and by CC gives me an artistic framework to embrace copying rather than damning it.

I'm starting to think of spreading out digital versions of my comics as akin to the time a new reader spends flipping through your books at a convention. I've had plenty of people read entire issues of my comic while standing at the table, and more often than not, they buy the issue. If they are only after the content, then why did they buy a copy? They had already read it, they had "consumed" the content, and so they must have been after something else. And that something is found in a print comics, and comes about in a transaction between creator and reader.

My point is: what if we, as cartoonists, started thinking differently about the digital versions of our work? What if we encouraged people to share our strips, to spread our drawings, to email our comics, to respond to them, to post them on their own websites? I know that some of this is already in place. Joey Manley's "Tooncasting" feature through Modern Tales and Webcomics Nation (and distributed for free for others to use and modify) is a good example of letting people put your comic on their website, and the wonderful webcomic xkcd uses a Creative Commons License and encourages people to link to and share and use his drawings (noncommercially, of course).² Digital media is unique in that it is easily replicated and distributed. Isn't it time we stopped trying to control it like it was print media?

Thoughts?

Footnotes

1. Now, I consider myself a print cartoonist, even though for the first few years of my comics career I ran new strips on the web every day, long before they ever saw print. In my mind, a comic on the web is not necessarily the same thing as a webcomic, just as a webcomic that has been collected in print is not necessarily the same thing as a comic that was meant for print the whole time.
2. I've released every comic I've ever drawn under Creative Commons. It certainly hasn't hurt.