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Links Toward a Business Plan

by Joey Manley

Here are the links I have collected in the course of researching the webcomics marketplace, preparatory to writing my business plan for WebcomicsNation 2.0 and seeking venture capital.

Each of these items has some nugget of useful information (or, at least I thought so when I compiled the list). Some of them may seem arbitrary. Even I have forgotten why I added a few of them. I have yet to digest this information enough to actually write my business plan.

If you find these links useful for the purpose of, say, writing your own business plan — well, go to it. The more the merrier. But know that you owe me. And there’s an easy way to pay me back. If you have found other links that may be worth adding to this list, submit them in the comments. You don’t have to provide your “take” on them if you don’t want to — I can see how you’d perceive that as proprietary. But if you wanna, that’s cool, too. Even if you’re not writing a business plan, any links with interesting information about the outlook for webcomics-related businesses would be appreciated in the comments.

Paul Levitz

DC head honcho Paul Levitz has had a lot to say about the multimedia future of webcomics. His thoughts are interesting in and of themselves, just as thoughts, but they also point to DC’s probable entry into this world and the moves they are likely to make.

  • Levitz participated in a panel on "The Future of Entertainment" at the MIT Convergence Culture Consortium, moderated by MIT talking head and comics fan Henry Jenkins. The major topic of conversation was "transmedia" –defined as monetizing a property across multiple mediums and channels.
  • Paul Levitz on cellphone comics (he’s not into them) and the reality that graphic novel sales in bookstores probably reach more people than comic book sales in comic book shops: http://www.icv2.com/articles/home/9190.html
  • From T Campbell’s blog (at one point I knew which interview T was referencing, and read it myself, but I can’t find it now):

    "The idea that comics’ "old media" had to wake up to the Web sooner or later isn’t all that groundbreaking: what’s new is that it seems to be happening sooner. Both Marvel and DC have embraced podcasting (Joe Quesada on a personal basis). And in a recent interview, Paul Levitz had this to say about smaller, primarily online publishers, as well as bookstore-focused publishers:"You’re avoiding a lot of the bricks and mortar and overhead and legacy systems… one of the challenges of being the oldest company in a business, like DC is, is that you build things according to the logic of their time, and they survive past that logic…

ICV2
ICV2.com is the online trade magazine for comic book retailers. Information gleaned from here provides insight into how the currently-dominant channel for "mainstream" superhero product views the coming digital comics revolution (hint: they’re not always enthusiastic).

Publisher’s Weekly

Wired

New York Times

Advertising Age

The Comics Journal

Robert Khoo
Robert Khoo is the business manager for Penny-Arcade.com, the most successful of the solo webcomics blockbuster sites.

Keenspot

Misc.

Not Directly Related to Comics

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 11:38 am and is filed under Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Links Toward a Business Plan”

  1. Cross Hatch Dispatch 4/16/2007 « The Daily Cross Hatch Says:
    April 16th, 2007 at 8:02 am

    [...] Every few weeks or so there is a passionate comic book industry discussion du jour (du week? any Canadians who could help me out here?) that completely goes over my head, but the recent discussion on the bacon bringing potential of web/digital comics has been keeping me on the edge of my seat. In terms of linkage, Joey Manley at Talk About Comics has everyone beat, so you should definitely start there. Stuart Immonen comes up with one of the brighter and more interesting ideas. It might also be a good time to guide people to this “comics and the environment” article from the Comics Foundry. I’m also a little surprised that people have not mentioned the role of e-readers like the Sony Librie, and how it might possibly boost the marketability of digital comics as long as someone manages to figure out the copyright and distribution issues. [...]

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