"The Hive" is a collaborative brainstorming project, open to everyone, with the ultimate goal of creating a new market for comics instead of simply poaching fans from the existing one. Each column will present a specific idea, which we will then work on to make better as a group. I advise all those new here to read the FAQ before posting -- there are rules, and posts that break them will be deleted.

I’m not going to stand here and be the ten-thousandth person to publicly state how important digital distribution of comics is. I first realized how important it was last year. We’d just received word that ELK’S RUN got an “A” in Entertainment Weekly. We were ecstatic, to say the least. A magazine that sells more copies of a single issue than most comics sell during an entire 12-month run is giving us the highest grade they’d give. The ELK’S RUN team sat back and waited for the money to come in; we were on our way.

I think our orders for issue two went up by about a hundred copies.

And, in retrospect, I know what happened – no one knew how to get our book. They would have had to have gone to our Web site, get the Previews order code, gone to a comic shop, ordered the book, come back a month later and hoped the sixteen-year-old kid behind the counter remembered to hold the book for them.

Repeat for eight issues.

We can’t even get most comic fans to do that, there’s no way in hell a curious non-comic fan will go through all that trouble. Even allowing the potential customer to purchase the floppy online isn’t cost effective; you’re going to lose customers if you charge for shipping and substantial cut of the profits if you don’t. We’re just talking one comic book here, three-dollar cover price.

You need to be able to supply a cheap digital copy for those impulse buyers. A buck, something they’d hardly think about; however you decide to do it. Whether you hook up with a digital distributor, charge people directly from your site, or do something like Amazon Shorts if they can handle comic books.

I’m thinking of going a little further for POSTCARDS, honestly. 168-page anthology, 16 stories. The hardcover will retail for $25 in bookstores. For the electronic version, I’m thinking of giving people the option to buy individual stories for 50-cents a pop, or the entire electronic book for seven dollars (and there will be two free stories always available on the site, obviously). Not only that, but I’m considering making four stories only available online, so there will be 20 stories total on the Web site. The people who buy the electronic copy get those four extra stories and the ones who don’t can purchase them individually if they’d like. Additionally, as mentioned in a previous column, anyone who buys the hardcover direct from the site will have access to the full electronic version of the book.

This way, you have something set up for the impulse buyers and it gives them the opportunity to pick and choose what they want. If they just want to sample a couple of stories before they buy, they have the freebies. If they really want the story from one of the creators in particular, they can just purchase that story. And there are bonuses involved for buying the entire book, whether it’s the electronic or the hardcover version that they’ve purchased.

And, of course, five years down the line you can publish the deluxe edition of the book along with the four, previously unprinted stories and some additional bonus material. Additionally, as far as POSTCARDS goes, if some creator decides to pass on renewing their contract, you have backup stories tied to this volume that can make it into the next printing instead of lowering the page count.

A few things to talk about here:

1) PDF vs. Page Turner? If you’re worried about your book getting passed around illegally, password-protected Page Turning programs are probably a good call. What about eReaders; anyone know how those work?

2) Extra content. Would people who buy the book in comic shops, only to find out there’s more content on the Web site, feel cheated? From a profit margin standpoint, the person buying direct from your Web site is paying you, personally, a lot more money; you’d want to reward them.

3) Speaking of extra content…what about setting up partnerships with a major online retailer like Amazon to make it available on their site as well? Being that Amazon likely won’t even want to speak directly to us, at first, who else could we team with?

So, let’s get to talking…