Ginger Mayerson interviews William Lidwell, the founder of WOWIO, for the Journal of the Lincoln Heights Literary Society, and he talks real dollars and cents:
In terms of compensation, I believe we are leading the digital world. In the fourth quarter of 2007 alone, we paid out more than $500,000 in royalties. We regularly hear from our content partners that they make more through WOWIO than through any of their other digital channels of distribution—in some cases, more than all of their digital channels combined. The 2008 royalty rates are fifty-cents per download for books, and 25-cents per download for comics. These rates will be adjusted downward as the number of users grows, but the net effect will continue to be a significant opportunity for creators and publishers to receive incredible exposure and compensation for their work.
People unclear on the concept: If you haven’t heard of manga publisher Infinity Studios, don’t feel bad; it’s been a while since they last published anything, and their books were hard to find to begin with. That’s why it seemed to make a lot of sense when they announced that they would be selling their books as ebooks. The initial press release led manga-watchers to believe that the books would be available as downloads, but it turns out that Infinity in fact means to burn the manga on a CD that could be ordered online and would be mailed to the customer. Yes, it’s in PDF format, but it’s not downloadable. Which, given how slow their server is, is not an entirely bad thing. There is a tab on their website that says “Read books online,” which makes me think that maybe the original plan was to sell them as downloads; Japanese creators are notoriously difficult about digital rights, so it could be that some earlier deal fell through.
In cell phone comic news, three more comics are coming to a cell phone near you. Comics provider UClick is located in Kansas City, and proximity seems to be a plus; all three creators, Chris Harding, Travis Fox and Daniel Spottswood, are local talent.
Some interviews you may have missed: Jonathan Callan interviews Kristofer Straub, creator of Starslip Crisis, and Sequential Tart’s Donielle Ficca talks to Scott Christian Sava about his Dreamland Chronicles.
New comic watch: Because there aren’t enough webcomics about pirates, Komikwerks launches Pieces of Eight. In case something isn’t clear, here’s the press release.
Byron Kerman reviews the print version of Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter for PLAYBACK:stl.
Hey Brigid,
I got a little info in regard to the following point you noted:
Infinity’s site launched with that feature. It was used to link to a preview page that they once updated. At one point they were updating those previews like ICE Kunion used to (a chapter or so a month for a few months). Sadly they haven’t used that feature since early 2006.