Comicstrips for creators

Comics only stand to gain from the digital format. Going digital can drastically lower production costs and will enable a new generation of creators with to emerge and innovate.

Digital comics are "easier" to produce, they cost less to make and are more easily shared. Already, webcomics are enabling a new breed of creators to rise.

Be it that digital comics help drive print sales or offer a new way to make business, digital comics presents itself as a huge growth vector. It is an exciting age for comics!

Comicstrips was conceived with creators in mind. It is designed to help creators who have comics designed for print to get distributed digitally, starting on the iPhone.

What we'd like to see is the democratization of comics distribution and we want to be an enabler, creating opportunities for creators big or small. What we see is a new way of reading, discovering and sharing comics.

Currently, Comicstrips allows creators to distribute comics to all users of Comicstrips. We currently carry a few featured publications that are displayed prominently on our website.

Furthermore, some of these featured publications are "bundled" with the application; i.e. they get downloaded upon the user synchronizing their iPhones with our web application.

More can be read on our Comicstrips end-user description page, including which comics are bundled.

How it works

For now, we will only take works that are to be given away for free. It can be anything you think will make users want more, be it the first issue of your comic or the first 20 pages of a graphic novel.

Your comic may be bundled as well. To provide a good user experience, we will however limit the number of bundled comics.

We currently use a more personalized approach at the moment to dealing with people who wish to distribute via Comicstrips. Until we have built the infrastructure, we will keep on handling requests on a per-person basis. Our goal is to have an almost completely automated process for creators to distribute their content.

Here are steps to put your comics on getcomicstrips.com for now:

1. Contact us, and we will create an account for you
2. Using the account, you will be able to upload comics
3. Contact us again, and let us know which files you'd like to make public, providing us with information about the comic

Note that uploads are limited to 300MB for now. If you wish to upload a bigger file, contact us and we will arrange an alternative means of obtaining the files.

Uploads

Creators should upload images of at least 300DPI resolution and dimensions of about 2000x2000 pixels.

The images will be displayed in a full-page format, therefore no cutting up is required.

The uploads can be in PDF format (one file), in CBZ, CBR or in ZIP, RAR or TAR archives containing the major image formats: PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, etc...

One comic should be uploaded as one file.

Removing your work

If you wish to remove your work from getcomicstrips.com, you can simply delete the comic. This will remove the comic from our servers and users will no longer be able to re-download them. However, any comics that are on the users' iPhones will remain there unless deleted.

Note that this is subject to change once users pay for comics. We will discuss this further when the time comes.

Intellectual property

Creators are required to own the rights for all files uploaded.

The rights remain the property of the creator, Zompf Media only acts as a facilitator in distributing the comics. Our users are bound to the rules described in our terms of service, protecting creators' work.

We are currently working on an iPhone comics store. The next iteration of the iPhone platform enables in-application transactions. That will also co-incide with us providing the ability for creators to sell their wares.

Sales?

What we have in mind at the moment is to profit-share with creators on a per-sale basis. Apple takes a cut of 30% upon each transaction, and after deducting operational costs, a certain percentage of the net-profit would be given back to creators.

The timeline for this major milestone is around July '09

We make no promises on these, but there are multiple things we may explore after putting up the store. Here are some ideas.

• Comic reader for the web
• Other platforms
• Subscriptions
• Reader enhancements: vignette detection, OCR
• Recommendation Engine

We do not know how the digital format will change comics, or if it will. Comicstrips, in its current incarnation, is a transitory product; it does not break new ground in how creators make comics.

This has a couple of advantages, one of which is that current comic creators can easily put their work in Comistrips. As for the future, Scott McCloud is someone we look up to and seek for inspiration.

We shall see what will happen and we are excited to participate in making this a reality.