Son of Howell

I was turned onto this article and this article over at Boing Boing today.  While I’ve been aware of interactive concepts in entertainment, the term “Transmedia” was new to me, and so I continued to follow link after link until I found NoMimeMedia (and most notable their very educational blog) and Haikulu, which I’ll come back to in just a mo’.

Transmedia - Basically where all this digital hullabaloo is heading

In the past year, co-running Robot Comics, our goal has been to operate as a publisher for original (unique) mobile content, as well as developing new and consistently evolving interactive features for the digital reading experience.  The technology, believe it or not, isn’t advancing as rapidly as we’d like (you wouldn’t know it with how many new gadgets are released every week, but the actual technological abilities of all these devices don’t vary by much, especially not in the operational sense – same limitations, same basic features supported, usually just slicker and faster and better default graphics).

Still, there’s a lot that we can already do.  Integration with social media accounts, unlockables, “extras”, a visually customizable reading experience, choose your own adventure style interaction (which can, in turn, be blended with RPG-esque game rules like used in this Lone Wolf DS engine).  Even these features take an inordinate amount of work and cooperation with the publishers involved to bring their work digital with all these bells and whistles attached.  A lot of work.  I can only imagine what it must take to tackle something like a Transmedia project, but in a way, everything companies like Robot Comics, Graphic.ly, Longbox, and ComiXology are doing will eventually need to evolve into Transmedia waters.  We’re trying to move traditional modes of delivering narrative entertainment into increasingly digital and interactive zones.   It’ll behoove us all to consider this ultimate realm of Transmedia when considering our individual road maps for the future.

Interestingly, the Transmedia experts at NoMimesMedia, digital publishers like Robot Comics, and distributors like Graphic.ly – if this letter to publishers their CEO posted the other week is any indication – all agree on what the biggest hurdle is: the content controllers.  Traditional publishers.  Corporations that have to appease an incredible number of shareholders with little to no interest in risk taking.  Technology will continue to evolve, faster and faster.  There’s no one denying that fact.  What every digital entertainment media entrepreneur overestimated, however, was how obvious the need to adapt to Transmedia-style approaches would be to the content holders of the major media franchises.

It’s up to the independent guys to lead the way, as always, although none of these new-fangled practices will be accepted by the majority until the major properties come with.  Or until a few runaway sleeper successes manage it first.  The waiting is frustrating though.  Exciting, and fun, and nothing would ever make me stop, but mother of pearl, comPLETEly frustrating.

Already sites like KICKSTARTER and now HUKILAU are getting things started for the independent folk out there, however.  Hukilau is in its Beta phase, but go sign up and check it out.  It actually looks like a massive step up from the Kickstarter model for creative types, as it’s about much more than funding, but about production and finding an audience for the creative project to boot.  You can act as a creator, a producer, or just a fan.  Frankly, I’m in LOVE.

Reported by Publisher’s Weekly, virtually every major manga publisher in the U.S. and Japan have united to combat “piracy”, by which they mean scanlations.  Specifically scanlation “aggregators” like MangaFox and OneManga who profit from paid advertisement on the website (though the manga is free).

Apparently some genius, or likely a group of them, found an inverse relationship between the rise of traffic on these scanlation sites and the decline in U.S. manga sales.

Many manga publishers and retailers who used to believe that scanlations actually attracted new readers, now blame the sales decline on the rise of giant for-profit scanlation sites that have allowed a new generation of fans to grow up reading manga for free online.

Once again, traditional publishers have missed the fucking point.  “Free” is not the point.  Location!, location!, location!, is.  These scanlation sites offer manga readily available for PC reading with the ability to convert into multiple other formats for virtually any device.  They have Beta versions for mobile reading, and the openness of the technology allows for scanlated manga to be plugged into and read with fan-favorite readers like ComicRack.  Most importantly, these mega-scanlation sites offer a COMMUNITY.  Comments and forums and chat rooms: it’s an entire culture that’s flourished under the traditional publishers’ collective thumbs (oh, sorry, I meant “noses”).

And why have these sites flourished?  Because traditional publishers haven’t done any of this themselves.  Period.  How much official non-scanlated manga can I read online?  Virtually none.  On mobiles?  None.  What little there is to be had doesn’t give me any personal control over how I get to read it or use it.  There’s no large online community, free and open and active, connected with these publishers that remotely approaches the kind of social interaction I can expect from a major scanlation site.  These things DO NOT EXIST except via online scanlation sites.  Scanlation sites STILL offer what isn’t available anywhere else, even though manga is vastly more popular in the States now than it was 10 years ago.

I still buy my manga when it’s available.  I recently hunted down the whole MONSTER series and am now slowly working my way through BASARA.  In doing this I’ve discovered:

• Manga series are rarely available in complete sets in any given bookstore or comic shop.  In many cases, if the series isn’t new or one of the 10 all-time best-sellers, they aren’t in the stores period.
• I can buy them on Amazon or Alibris, but only from independent sellers in most cases, which means I have to pay $4-5 shipping PER VOLUME even if from the same seller, which makes the price of the books much higher than normal.
• Manga series in the U.S. that aren’t BLEACH or NARUTO are notorious for remaining unfinished due to low sales.

Why.  The.  FUCK.  Would I want to continue getting manga in this way?  Why would anyone?  I long ago lost faith in U.S. manga publishers to finish what they start, to release volumes at a reasonable pace, and stores can’t stock one-fiftieth of what’s available which means finding physical manga is a pain in the posterior.  This is 2010.  The age of the iPad, tablets, mobile phones with 8GB memory cards.  No one should be forced to put up with this shit.

Manga Publishers: zip it.  You’re idiots.  Get your material online for reasonable prices.  Get them mobile.  Get your shit digital and figure out how to join the modern world, because yes, your “sales” (meaning brick and mortar sales) will continue to decline, scanlation sites be damned.  People will stop reading so much manga if there are no scanlation sites.  They STILL won’t give a rat’s ass about hunting down material you refuse to make readily available for regular prices.  The world has moved on, and you need to catch up.  This is why sales have declined, steadily, and continue to do so.  It’s called a trend.  The MARKET is responsible for any trend.  Not two or three websites.  Straws can be grasped at, killers, but that isn’t going to be productive.

Why is there an inverse relationship between your sales and the popularity of scanlation sites, manga publishers?  Because THEY are giving what everyone expects: a digital/social/modern reading experience.  If you offer that in a way that can compete, then we’ll do it through you.  Nothing has to be free, just don’t dick us around with a $15 price tag per volume.  In fact, do a subscription service and open up your whole warehouse for viewing just like a scanlation site.  The old publishing model isn’t very efficient these days.

The digital-savvy folks are doing great while you’re doing poor, yup.  That should tell you something, and not that the digital-savvy folks are your enemy.  They’re your Beta testers, you dipsticks!

A while back I decided to stop imagining how awesome digital publishing might possibly be and crunch the numbers to find out for once and for all just how “awesome” selling eBooks actually is.

eBook Sales Projections - What are the Real Numbers?

It was a tricky proposition, because Amazon shares bupkiss insofar as Kindle download stats are concerned and the iBookstore is too much in its infancy to garner useful information as of yet.  However, weeks of steadfast internet browsing and a little creative thinking and I managed to derive what I think is the first projected sales figures for a theoretical “exclusively digital major publishing house”.  The first to be publicly shared online, at any rate.

The following data is not technically for small publishers or self-publishers, as it assumes the publisher has:

• Brand name authors (Stephen King and authors who manage at least 10% of Stephen King sales being the main examples below).
• The clout to establish cooperative relations with the market authorities  - we assume Amazon or Apple or Kobo or whoever will spotlight your books and handle most of the promotion for you, at least initially.  If this theoretical publisher was indeed an exclusively digital one, releasing digital works by brand name authors with no print counterpart, this isn’t an unreasonable assumption to make.

So if you, as a publisher, do not have either of the above, you’ll need to translate the below figures into much (much) more reasonable numbers for your purposes.  My main purpose here was not to bolster smaller and more flexible publishers to dive into the digital side of things – though if it has this effect, all the better – but rather to prove to myself, if nobody else, that major publishers are bloody idiots for not taking this more seriously and moving in vastly more significant ways to capitalize on the supposed potential.

So without further ado, click the below:

It’s a Brand New Blog.

Since I last regularly blogged (I ran a blog titled “Gillian’s Heart” which went kaput about a year back), I’ve started up more projects than my brain can handle.  At first, these projects took up all my time, more than allowed for blogging, definitely.  But now, I’m actually feeling stressed NOT to wax diarrheal on the internet about everything I’m working on.  Most notably because they all entail reaching out and realistically reaching an audience, or a consumer group, or something like that.

Check out my About page for the basic gist, but I’m now the Deputy Director and co-founder of my own small start-up – Robot Comics – which has the inauspicious pleasure of being the world’s first all-mobile comic book publisher.  Not a self-publisher, and not a terribly small publisher, either (we release two-three books per week), and definitely not a distributor though we have skirted that line due to circumstances.  By which I refer to there not being any comics material available save for the adaptable kind.  Though that’s changing.

Which brings me to one of the topmost things on my mind of late: publishing comics in the digital era.  Sure, publishers are taking the hint and getting on board with digital distributors and content partners.  They’re also doing what publishers normally do and resolutely refusing to be experimental, daring, quick-thinking, or risk-taking.  But there’s no doubt that comics are making the transition.

Digital Comics: Merely a novelty, like "Graphic Books" once were?

Yet if there’s one niggling (or is it major?) concern I have with this, it’s that the print publishing industry is simply sidling over, at their own sweet pace, to asphyxiate the digital industry with all the same inbred, self-destructive practices that have made such a cock-up of the print world in the first place.  A closed environment with no obvious submission process or venue for new talent?  Check.  Technology customized for print material rather than digital material which cheapens the digital environment to a glorified novelty?  Check.  Content partners that already have a stranglehold on the marketplaces and practice willy-nilly censorship and Orwellian strongarm tactics?  Are we really this desperate?

(Continued)