iphone.mitchallen.com

Like a lot of geeks, I’ve often thought about self-publishing my own comic book miniseries or graphic novel.  I’ve also thought about the alternative option of putting my work online, using either an ad-based or subscription model.   Thanks to the iPhone, I’ve discovered an even better model that some people and companies are already using:  sell your comic books through iTunes as an iPhone app.

If you want to see examples, search the App Store for keywords such as “comics” or “manga.”  If you want specific examples, search on “iverse media” and download some of their free comics (see http://www.iversecomics.com ).  If you search on “dark horse comics” ( http://www.darkhorse.com ) you will find a free Terminator issue and some Star Wars issues that cost 99 cents.  See the press release they just sent out this week.  You might also want to check out Transformers: Alliance #1 (of 4) for 99 cents from IDW Publishing ( http://www.idwpublishing.com ).

Once you have the content, building a comic book app can be very simple.   Most are constructed as a “Utility Application.”  To quote from Apple: ”An application that implements a main view and lets the user access a flipside view to perform simple customizations. The Stocks application is an example of a utility application.”   The standard is that the main screen is the title page and the user can flip back and forth between pages, just as they can in the default iPhone Weather (Utility) App.  To make changes, the user can tap the screen to cause a utility button to appear (sometimes the classic (i) or sometimes a custom icon) which when clicked flips to the customization page.  There is a default template for Utility Applications in Xcode if you’ve never built one.

One standard feature is that the customization page also includes a way to navigate to different pages.  Some comics use a picker control – which is a bit of a hassle when the book has over 80 pages.  I prefer the slider used by iVerse.  Though I also like the “See All” feature used by IDW in the Transformers issue.  It presents you with a thumbnail view of all the pages. You can click on a thumbnail to jump to that particular page.

Another common feature is a last page with links to buy other books in the series.

The business model that appeals to me is this:  create a miniseries containing 4 or more books.  Give the first book away for free.  If readers like the story, they can buy the remaining issues for 99 cents each.

Once you have a standard app worked out, you could turn it into a template that simply requires swapping out the images and critical data such as number of pages, text, and links to other titles in the series.  You could create a business around it in one of several ways: 

• publish your own content
• offer a service to package other peoples content into an app
• solicit submissions and publish by compensating artists with a royalty

Other Media Models

In the past I’ve also thought about doing something similar for musicians.  Search the App Store for “Pink” and download “P!nk’s Funhouse” for free.  You can see how you could take something like that and build a template around it (discography, pics, bio, links to buy music, etc.).  This would be something musicians would give away for free (at least that would be my recommendation).  The only business model that I would recommend in this case is offering a service to bundle the app and post it.  Companies such as iLike are already doing that (http://www.ilike.com/manage?r=iPhone).  But it doesn’t mean you couldn’t innovate and create your own template and compete on features or cost. (I can see one improvement already – offer to do an app without ads!).

Tags: Dark Horse Comics, graphic novel, iVerse, manga, miniseries, utility application