Archive for ‘Blog’
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Big Announcement time!! Mark your calenders, Sixteeners: We relaunch on January 18th!!
It’s been a great long break for us, and collectively, the team is feeling really refreshed and excited to bring you a butt-whompin’ 2012!
Speaking of Collectives, we’ve also joined up with The Collective of Heroes, a group of fellow super webcomic’ers– Check out the list on the side scroll– you’re bound to see a few familiar faces amongst the titles.
We’re early into the collective (at least our participation in it), but I’m really excited at the prospect of sharing our relaunch with them & the friends we’ve made amongst ‘em!
In the new year, I’ll try to spotlight a few collective titles in the blog as well– keep an eye out, there’s some big things in store for 2012!
In really cool 2012 news: If you hadn’t heard, our own Brant Fowler has been named COO and partner of Comic Related! A big congrats to Brant and the CR crew! It’s a really great site and we’re all excited to see it grow even bigger in the new year!
Lastly, just a quick note to let you guys know that Issue 2 is (finally!) available in print!
Just click on the image and head to Indyplanet to pick up your own copy!
In addition to the issue itself, our “bonus feature” for the print edition is an “Anatomy of a Cover”– which I think is kinda cool.
DJ has already popped up the cover to Issue 3, so I promise THAT wait won’t be quite as long!
That’s it for now, gang! We’ll see you guys back on the 18th for the kickoff of Issue 4! The pages coming in look AMAZING! We can’t wait!
Ok, I may have missed “Talk like a Pirate Day”– but we’re talking about a whole other thing here.
On this week’s page, I mentioned that I wanted to try a little experiment out– so, here’s the grand unveiling:
I pirated our comic.
(Which begs the question, is it really pirating if you own it? Or is it distributing?)
Whatever your thoughts on Digital Comic distribution or Piracy are, there’s one thing you can’t dispute: it’s here and it’s here to stay. There are arguments on both ends of the issue– Ron Marz has a great reputation as a creator who stands up against piracy. On the other hand, there are those who argue that piracy actually helps sales. (at least with Anime in the study)
At the end of the day though, we aren’t pirating here– we own Spy6teen, so we can do whatever we want with it. Including distributing it on torrent sites.
I chose to package and upload our Spy6teen torrent on Demonoid.me, which rides the #2 position in terms of popularity– just shy of the world’s most famous torrent site: The Pirate Bay.
Doing my research, Demonoid seemed to be a good choice- It’s community driven and polices against viruses. Plus it is porn free. All of which were important to me in releasing our comic via a torrent site.
We released it a few hours ago and are already sitting somewhere around 87 downloads (that I can track, at least)– Yes, it was totally by design that I chose to release it today, Wednesday = New Comic Day– so what better day to pop ‘er up than on 0-day.
Timing-wise, it was also kind of interesting to release this week– as a flood of new DC #1s hit the scan sites, why not introduce them to another first issue?
As the day/week goes on, we’ll see how effective this method of distribution is going to be– will folks swing over to the site after reading our first issue? I’d hope so, since most of them are reading other comics on their computers. Will they pick up a digital issue? (I assume not)– will they drop us a donation? (Don’t know)
All that said, as a distribution method, I think if you’re a small independent publisher/author/team, this is something you should really look into. As is, I can’t really afford to do a massive print run of our comic– and the simple fact is, I REALLY can’t afford to print 2,500 copies of the book– which is what Diamond (the Comic Book Distributor) requires to even get our book INTO shops– and that’s if they decide they want to carry it.
Basically, if you aren’t in Diamond, you aren’t in comic book stores.
But, releasing via torrent:
we’re basically on the same shelf space as every other major title releasing this week.
Morality of piracy aside, as a tiny, tiny, tiny, publisher– this is an opportunity we need to be looking at.
So that’s that– it’s up an available, and if you’re interested in helping us out, download and seed Spy6teen #1 here:
http://www.demonoid.me/files/details/2734979/72031788/
So, raise those sails and avast…and…well…I….I don’t really speak pirate…Johnny Depp or something.
Be back next week with a look at how Operation Torrent went!
