So what does a serious ad-festooned book–not the marketing dreck that pollutes vast stretches of the Web–look like online? Can you actually find readers and advertisers this way?
Well, Todd Allen, an Internet consultant and satirist behind E-mail from Nigeria and Beware the Club Girls, will be learning the answer. He’s written Online Comics Vs. Printed Comics: A Study in E-Commerce and the Comparative Economics of Content. I’d prefer to read it without the ads from Expedia.com and whatnot, but who can complain about the cost? View the study via his Indignant Online site, and if you like it, send a little money Todd’s way. You can also read it in print if you get tired of clicking away. Price is $14.95 and shipping, and an e-book will be coming, most likely in Adobe, Microsoft Reader and eReader. Remember, the lessons from the comics apply to other areas such as regular books. Among the comic-related conclusions in an earlier white paper:
…I see a lot of untapped potential. Assuming you could cover costs with advertising, until you could show me the online audience strongly mapped to the current retail audience, I would advocate print publishers showcasing their titles online, a few months behind the most recent issue and pushing the reader towards either a trade paperback compilation or a subscription. The hobbyists will seek out the specialty retailers on their own. As a bonus, if the advertising revenue was to pan out, at a certain level of traffic your online ad revenue is capable of exceeding the revenue of today’s depressed print circulation. More quickly if online subscriptions work.
It is sad that many retailers see added product exposure online as a threat. It is also a disservice to potential readers and consumers who do not happen to reside near a specialty store.
Talk about practicing and preaching! Good luck, Todd. Needless to say, as shown by Baen Books, Cory Doctorow and others, novels and serious nonfiction can often benefit in similar ways. For midlist writers, at least, those correctly said to be harmed less by piracy than obscurity, “free” can be very good.
Speaking of free: Accelerando, a well-reviewed sci-fi novel by Charles Stross, is also free. Learn why he’s put it up on the Web.
“Small World” and “Great Minds Think Alike” Departments: I was curious what else existed about the economics of online comics–and Googled up Will the Web Save Comics?, a well-done little piece from the MIT’s Technology Review. I casually mentioned this in an email to Todd. Well, it turns out that the article’s author is none other than an old advisor of his–Henry Jenkins, now director of the Program in Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Todd himself holds a masters in Media Convergence and Internet Business from New York University. Flash! I just remembered that my friend Curtis Priest also knows Henry Jenkins.
Update, 9:47 p.m., EDT: I asked Todd for his numbers so far, and below is the lowdown. I say this is a experiment in progress and that the revenue will go up significantly when word spreads around in the right places.
Indignant Online has been up since early ’99 (April?). It was originally a sort of live beta to just put an epublication out while I
was in the process of converting the American Medical Association’s
medical journals to online editions (I was the originating producer for the full-text, online editions).The paper has been up since about the 1st of the month. I’m guessing
about 7,000 hits on the book’s homepage by now. I haven’t done a log
download in a week and need to configure an emulator to run AW Stats on my computer since what I used to use doesn’t really like that CMS I’m using and lumps all the non-forwarded pageviews (from when it was a static HTML site) into file queries.Sold 8 books direct off the site, and one has gone out from the Ingram
distribution system. Approximately $35 in ad revenue coming in, so
far. Mind you, I launched this with a few links in the online press
for comics, since that’s my exploration vehicle. Biggest link was a
blind link from Rich Johnston’s Lying in the Gutters.I want to say that was over 3000 people coming in. ‘Course Rich didn’t really say what the link was, so that wasn’t necessarily as highly targeted as you might think. Slashdot, surprisingly, had less than 1000 links in. I want to say in the neighborhood of 850, which struck me as extremely low. Mind you, it was a 11:30 Sunday morning post, but I didn’t see the usual Slashdot effect. This really hasn’t gotten a ton of play in the comics press.
On the other hand, I’ve found it’s leaked out to a handful of
biz/publishing/marketing sites, who’ve been saying extremely nice
things about it. This was the plan. Basically, I wanted to see what
I could get for direct sales out of the comics sphere before amazon
had it in stock, and see what kind of buzz I could generate for the
press release accompanying the mainstream biz and academics market launch.I’m planning on porting the book and some of the other content
business-related material over to the businessofcontent.com URL I’ve
been sitting on for a while and having that be the mainstream
touchpoint. I’ll have that pointing to my consultancy site, webespionage.com, which I need to pull out of the mothballs.
Depending on how busy I get this week, I’m hoping to have that done in a week and a half, and hopefully Amazon will acknowledge that the book is available by then…Incidentally, with the magic of print-on-demand publishing,
I grossed a little under $140 off those 8 books + S&H. Gross reciepts
for sales + ads are around $180 with nothing spent on advertising and,
for the most part, only hitting a small niche market.I’m hitting over a .1% conversion rate. I’m thinking I’m probably
closer to .3% for the more targetted traffic. Obviously, I’d like it
to get up closer to 1%, but I don’t really know what the conversion
rate really ought to be for a print replica. It’s not quite the same
thing as a compendium of a comic strip that’s been released over the
course of a year. I figure I’m my conversion rate is similar to an
ad-clickthrough, it’s not all bad.You also want to ask me how the experiment is going in two months, and make no mistake about it, this is an experiment.
