Myriad Issues talks to Chip Mosher

As part of my research for my recent Publishers Weekly feature on digital comics, I had the opportunity to speak with an interesting cross-section of people in the comics industry about their takes on digital comics distribution. Over the next couple days I'll be posting interviews with Rantz Hoseley of Comic Book Tattoo and the Longbox Project, and Leigh Walton of Top Shelf 2.0, but today we have Boom! Comics marketing and sales director Chip Mosher on deck:

Myriad Issues: Boom! has been more aggressive than a lot of publishers when it comes to digital comics distribution. What is your approach to digital comics, and how does it differ from other publishers?

Chip Mosher: What I’m most interested in is just trying to reach a wider audience. I think expanding the number of people reading comics on a regular basis is incredibly important. We as an industry are horribly guilty of not trying to expand our audience… and marketing by singing to the choir. Knowing that, that’s one of the things I wanted to not do.

There are a lot of things that point to this business model working… People have had a lot of success putting stuff up page a day on the internet, collecting that into trade paperbacks and then going out to the direct market and the mass market. What we did with North Wind was a little different, because it was a day and date release of a comic [online] with its release in the comic book store. So if you read it online and liked it and wanted to get a physical copy, you had to go to a comics specialty store.

MI: What was the retailer response to North Wind?

CM: We had a lot of people excited about the promotion; bigger comic book retailers were excited about it, but there as a small, very vocal minority that wasn’t very excited about it. I think that was our fault for not educating the retailers, and not seeding that out beforehand. We put the deal together only a couple weeks before it happened; we’re a pretty nimble small publisher, but the downside of that is you may not have the time to do the legwork.

The first issue sold out within a week of the issue hitting the store shelves, and the second print sold very, very well. Comic book stores aren’t ordering the fourth issue until the first issue hits the stands. Usually on the fourth issue, you’re seeing a 10-20% sales decrease, but we saw a 20-30% increase. It was a tremendous success for us.

Basically our next phase was doing the page a day webcomics, so before San Diego [Comic-Con], we announced our webcomics initiative. We have six trade paperbacks going right now, Two Gun, which just got sold to Universal, Cthulu Tales, Hero Squared, Ninja Tales, Schmobots, Zombie Tales. When we launched the webcomics initiative a week before San Diego, the big thing that drove traffic was that Cory Doctorow listed it on Boing Boing. The traffic has been great, and it’s just increasing exponentially every day.

MI: Why do you think there’s been so much resistance from publishers to the web model of distribution?

CM: I think there are a lot of people who are comfortable with how things work, and it’s the same in every industry; business in general is risk averse. I think change is difficult for a lot of people, and there are always risks involved.

MI: Is the day and date release something you plan to do with more Boom! comics in the future?

CM: It really depends. North Wind was the right project to do the right type of promotion. And we made a big splash with North Wind, but I’m not the type of guy who likes to repeat himself. I think promotions work better when they’re targeted. I think if we put up everything that we had online for free, I think that would be counterproductive.

You certainly don’t want to cannibalize your marketplace, so you have to be careful to do it in a way where you’re making sure that you’re not hurting your direct market retail partners. You don’t want to give away the farm. You have to make sure it’s driving sales. [Web] accessibility is a great thing for people who aren’t coming into the comic book store every Wednesday, but how do you hook them on serialized content? I don’t think that’s been answered as well.

MI: Do you have any concern that digital comics could kill the monthly single?

CM: I think that’s a knee-jerk reaction – that change is going to affect the monthly output of monthly comics. Everyone was talking about that ten years ago when graphic novels came to the fore, that single issues were going to die, and they haven’t.