My Evil Comic Book
Via our friend Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing. It’s a model that won’t last forever but clearly has potential for now — at least until one of those twice-yearly rumours about e-ink come true!
SF author Jim Munroehas just released a new comic book as a free webcomic — and made a print-on-demand edition available from Lulu.
‘As an experiment,’ writes Munroehad, ‘I’ve made The Bold Explorers available for sale through lulu.com, a print-on-demand service. I uploaded it last week and have a copy in my hands today. It was free for us to upload, and the comic is sharply printed on nice quality paper.’
This is an interesting model, with visitors able to enjoy the entire offering without paying. It remains to be seen how many people will actually buy the print version — especially given the expense involved and poor returns for the artists. With Lulu’s current pricing, a copy comes out at $9 US, with only a dollar left over for feeding that hungry family.
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I did this with my recent jazz album. Offered the whole thing as a free download, with the higher audio quality CD available for purchase, and a donate if you like button. No one has donated, and few have bought the CD, but the free download has been popular.
Do you think it would make any difference if you just offered CD-quality (>192k, say) for free? With a group I’m involved with, Antifamily (www.antifamily.org) the producer basically makes all the tracks available at decent quality — and people buy the CDs anyway. I think this might be because they’re all limited edition, with special hand printed covers and so on. Another thing worth thinking about is vinyl. Whatever quality you’ve offered online, people always want vinyl. You have to organise yourself to put it out, but we’ve sold every copy we’ve made, I believe, so far.
What we’re getting to here is the question of the relation between virtual/free economies and physical/pay. Whether the online economy can generate enough excitement to drive sales to the physical channel. I even wonder that putting the highest possible quality files up would generate more, not less sales in this respect. Worth experimenting with.
I guess I have to agree with Jamie on this one – the relationship between quality and cost is not correlated as you might think, or seem to suggest. People donate for a good cause, but donating for your living because you made some songs in low quality available online seems a poor incentive.
Give more and you will get more attention, which is the currency that will help you getting more people to come to your concerts etc etc….