While we wait to see what that is, and how it will look without a lot of Diamond's familiar faces (see "Comic Executives, Others Laid off At Diamond"), it’s time to think about alternatives for publishers not big enough to catch on with PRH or Lunar, but who still need scale and access to the direct market. Here's my pie-in-the-sky idea for how we can cobble together a workable solution based on existing models and technologies.
Connecting the dots from crowdfunding to distribution. Crowdfunding via Kickstarter, Zoop, BackerKit and others has already become a tried-and-true path to market for independent creators and smaller presses. Comic-based campaigns have historically been among the most successful on Kickstarter, and everyone from hardcore indie companies like Spike Trotman's Iron Circus Comics to mid-sized publishers have figured out how to use it to get both (literal) buy-in from fans and market visibility. For years these companies have been promising, and occasionally delivering, tools to help scale from one-off campaigns to retail distribution. Now might be a good time to lean hard into that.
Parallel to crowdfunding are the platforms that enable direct subscriptions and memberships, such as Patreon and Substack or their more indie-friendly, lower cost alternatives like Ko-Fi and Ghost. How would these work in terms of physical products and distribution? Ko-Fi has a built-in shop that enables simple listing of products and fulfillment options; the others would require a third-party add-on like Shopify.
The problem with this model is that there are hundreds of active campaigns and offerings all clamoring for time and attention. Retailers have to keep track of what's out there and typically order on a campaign-by-campaign basis, even if there are retailer tiers available. Considering all the additional overhead the fragmentation of distribution has already added to the workload of stressed-out comic shops, having to deal with that for books with a smaller, more specialized readership seems like a bridge too far.
One site to rule them all? The missing piece in terms of retail distribution is to have an aggregator of various ongoing projects and campaigns through one site, where shops could place weekly orders all at once. BackerKit and Zoop offer partial solutions from the platform side, but obviously restrict retailer ordering to campaigns active only on their own sites. Publishers that rely heavily on crowdfunding also sometimes provide consolidated links on their website, but again, limited to books published under their imprint.
But imagine a future "Indie Direct" platform exclusively for retailers that includes:
- A curated catalog of active comic crowdfunding and subscription-based campaigns with physical deliverables across multiple platforms, possibly with a rating or leaderboard function so retailers could quickly sort wheat from chaff.
- Links to DTC and wholesale offerings from publisher sites.
- Retailer logins with consolidated invoicing and automatic access to retail-tier pricing offered by any campaign or publisher.
- Tiered pricing for shops and chains that aggregates and distributes discounts by quantity and region.
- Integrated fulfillment via partners (e.g., White Squirrel or Blackbox)
- Creator portal to place orders for conventions and in-person appearances, with option to drop-ship to the event location.
- Possible options for print-on-demand.
- Marketing and direct mail add-in like those being developed by Kenny Meyers's Sweet Software for Comic Folks, integrated and available to creators and publishers.
- Private discussion channels for indie retailers and distributor collectives.
Yes but. Like many things that sound too good to be true, the possibility for this kind of site depends on a bunch of moving parts. First, from a technical point of view, Kickstarter and Zoop don't currently offer public APIs and scraping the sites may violate their terms of service. It's also possible that some creators wouldn't want their work distributed in this way, or have the creative assets, which they own, used in campaigns without their consent.
If the platforms want to keep their campaigns behind the garden wall, the only real solution is a directory model where creators would submit listings voluntarily. But one imagines that if the concept proves out as a genuine opportunity to scale, crowdfunding and subscriber platforms would see the benefits in the enhanced revenue and visibility for creators.
There's also the matter of payment handling. If you really want to achieve the dream of volume discounts based on aggregated orders which is what would make this whole thing take off, then the aggregator would need to figure out how to achieve economies of scale across multiple individual campaigns, while also keeping some margin for itself to sustain its own business. Easy for me to sit here and pontificate about it in a column, but if this were to become a real thing, it would require some real accounting ju-jitsu.
Where that surplus income would come from is another question. A site like this could monetize using some combination of listing fees (for creators and publishers), commission cut on retailer transactions, retailer membership, sponsored ads or fulfillment partnerships.
The other big issue is that an aggregator would assume all the risk associated with non-fulfillment, lateness and other issues, even if the fine print in the terms of service might say otherwise. Add in potential problems with payment handling, refunds and other matters, and it could become a black hole of customer service costs. It won't help to have a site that simplifies ordering but leaves both buyers and sellers on their own in case of problems.
If they build it, will anyone come? In short, while an indie-direct portal would solve a lot of problems, there are two main risks: failure and success. The downside risk is obvious: there just may not be enough money in the indie comics ecosystem, or the retailer channel, to sustain this level of service, even if it were built quick-and-dirty. Even if it simplified certain aspects of ordering for stores, it would still be one more thing for staff to do, one more channel to monitor, one more set of orders to track.
Success might pose an even bigger threat. If key partners like the crowdfunding platforms decided the pie is too sweet to share, or enough bad actors flooded the channel with bogus campaigns to take advantage of the increased access to the market, the provider could be stuck in the middle.
Still, desperate times call for desperate measures. If we want to keep this part of the market alive, it's worth thinking creatively, even if not everything we throw at the wall will stick. Would love to have industry folks jump in to continue this conversation.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Rob Salkowitz (Bluesky @robsalk) is the author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, a two-time Eisner Award nominee, and a proud longtime contributor to Eisner-nominated ICv2.
