ComicSpace Merger Status Update for January 29, 2009
by Joey Manley
We’ve got a lot of stuff going on here at comicspace LLC — it’s not bubbling to the surface as quickly as we’d planned, but it’s bubbling.
The ComicSpace.com website, and its merger with the Webcomics Nation website, is only one project of several. It’s also one of the more technically difficult projects we’ve undertaken, in part because of the ambition of the spec, and in part because of Josh’s and my inexperience as “team programmers” (as opposed to lone wolf hobbyists). We’re moving toward the goal one yard at a time.
In addition to ComicSpace.com, we’re also building out a suite of tools and services for professional creators that aren’t as flashy or as, well, branded as the ComicSpace hosting/social networking portal, but which do match our mission statement: to empower webcomics creators and readers. For example, we helped Colleen Doran get going with her recent online launch of A Distant Soil, using good old WordPress + ComicPress (we’re happy to do the same for other professional creators).
We’re also selling advertising for Colleen, and a bunch of other creators. As of this month, our ad network reaches about one million unique humans around the world (see http://www.quantcast.com/p-ec3JSofSplmEs) — we’d likewise be happy to work with any other creators who want to hire us to sell their ads. Our first big ad campaign, for the Halo Wars videogame, launches next week, a $30K deal that individually none of the creators we work with would have been able to land on their own. Sign up and more information here.
We’re also gearing up to launch our beta t-shirt store next week — the shirts are in the house, from James Kochalka, Spike, Shaenon Garrity, KC Green, and a number of other webcomics luminaries. Our merchandise efforts will expand beyond t-shirts to a few obvious categories (posters, prints) and a few non-obvious ones (jigsaw puzzles, board games) in the coming months. We’re actively looking for pros who are interested in working with us to create cool merchandise, under a licensing model (creator owns intellectual property, grants us a license to print, promote, sell & fulfill orders for x number of items, and then we pay for production, and do all those things, and split revenues). Anyone who wants to find out more about our merchandise program should get in touch with me directly: joeymanley@gmail.com.
And yeah. Lots of stuff. Lots of stuff nobody expected us to be doing, but which we knew we were going to be doing all along. Unfortunately, the one thing everybody expected us to be doing, merging ComicSpace & WCN and improving the codebase, is the one thing that we’re taking longer to do than we’d hoped. It’ll still happen, though, and it’ll still be awesome.
I’ll try to do these updates every week as things begin to roll out.
