Comic Co-op
So you want to make a webcomic and get paid. How audacious.
The Problem: Most hosting platforms do not provide the tools necessary to earn anything, let alone a living, off your work. They rely on you bringing new viewers to their platform to increase their shareholder value and profit (usually from ads that do not feature or benefit you.) You cannot sell merchandise, print copies or memberships. They do not advertise you directly, and do not pay you per view. At most, you'll be able to sell .pdf downloads of your work, and we all know how secure that is when you want to protect your IP. Those few platforms that do offer the above pocket most of your profit and throw you a few scraps. We would know. We've published through plenty of them. 70% is the minimum they'll be skimming off the top.Our Solution: We've developed a cheap decentralized system that lets you sell:â—‡ Merchandise
â—‡ Print-on-demand copies
â—‡ Ad space
â—‡ Memberships
â—‡ And accept donations.Normally, if you're doing this yourself, doing all of the above securely has a minimum upfront cost of $560 USD. If you partner with Comic Co-op, that cost becomes the cost to purchase your domain name, which is typically around $12/year.Benefits of Joining Comic Co-op: You get to use our software and licenses at no cost to you. Our main developer will walk you through every step of the process. When you join Comic Co-op, you can either receive a lifetime .comiccoop domain for $12 or you can configure your own domain with a top level domain of your choice.Note: if you choose another TLD, you may not get the name you want and it will cost around $12/year vs a lifetime. Comic Co-op only allows Comic Co-op Members to register domains on it's TLD, so your site name is pretty much guaranteed to be available.You will have full control over your page once it is created for you and can stylize it as you see fit. All profit will go to you directly or pass through our accounts if you need us to act as an intermediary for whatever reason.All advertising any Comic Co-op member does, be it paid or social, benefits all others in the Comic Co-op network as each Comic Co-op Creator is required to have backlinks to the Comic Co-op platform, where readers can browse all Comic Co-op content by genre category.On the Comic Co-op platform, when a reader clicks on your book or series title to read it, they are taken directly to your website where you can get paid per view by Google Adsense, paywall your content behind a membership or digital access key, sell print copies or merch or if none of that is your speed, simply collect donations.You can also reach out to other creators in the Comic Co-op network and ask them directly to advertise your work in their comic as an ad page.All that is required in return is that you agree to our very reasonable content policy and fill out a submission form:
Comic Co-op Content Policy
Works or the creator of said works may not commit, sexualize or promote the sexualization of: Children, sexual assault or bestiality.Definition of Children
Anyone who is or appears to be under the age of 18 or who hasn't or appears to have not completed all 5 Tanner stages of puberty.Definition of Bestiality
Any depiction of a romantic or sexual act between a human and a non-human that is not self-aware, sapient or capable of informed consent.Work Must be of High Quality
Your work must be professional and publishable. That means all pages must be:â—‡ Consistently sized.
â—‡ Scanned cleanly if done traditionally.
â—‡ Have a minimum DPI of 300.
â—‡ Demonstrate clear artistic intent and sense of style.
â—‡ Demonstrate clear understanding of visual organization (whether it follows or intentionally subverts compositional principles is up to you, just do it competently and deliberately.)
â—‡ Be free of unintentional marks, smudges or damage.
â—‡ Demonstrate thoughtful engagement with materials, concepts and techniques.
â—‡ Submission must have at least one printable issue complete.
â—‡ Each issue must either contain a minimum of 24 pages (with no more than 4 ad-pages per issue) or tell a complete story.
â—‡ Text must be free of spelling errors or typos.
â—‡ Font must be easily legible.Location
While we will accept submissions from literally anywhere, if you're from somewhere like North Korea, getting you paid might take a bit of creativity (you will have to open an Monero account.)Copyright and Attribution
All work submitted belongs solely to the original creator. Comic Co-op may use said content solely for the purposes of advertising the creator's work and Comic Co-ops network, of which said creative work will become a part of should it be accepted by our editorial staff.
For our proof-of-concept, see: Universe 26Once we have 5 creators from each of the following genre categories onboarded, this site will be transformed into the official Comic Co-op landing page, complete with forum integration and search functionality.â—‡ Science Fiction
â—‡ Romance
â—‡ Action Adventure
â—‡ Fantasy
â—‡ MysteryWe are also open to all other genre categories and combinations, though our editor will use their better judgment to select the single most predominant category your work belongs to, with additional genres being applied as searchable content tags and filters.How is Comic Co-op Funded?
Comic Co-op is funded through our independent product sales, see: Universe 26 , Siluma and Jester's Privilege. As it grows, most of it's funding will come from Google AdSense on the Comic Co-op forums and domain sales. We will never take a cut of the pay from your comic or merchandise nor sell your data.See a Demo of Our Platform:
Vertical Scroll Demo
You can enable this on mobile-only if you enjoy formatting hell or you can just use it or the flip book style as your default.
For the demo I'll be using The Drake Problem by Universe 26: You can change literally anything about the page style to match your work. You can see the style Universe 26 uses here. They don't use vertical scroll normally (they use a lot of funky panel shapes which don't translate well) this is just for demonstration purposes.
The Drake Problem (Prologue)
Now if this were Webtoon, you'd have a comment section and that would be the end of it. At Comic Co-op, this is where the Comic Co-op Forum will plug in (once we have enough members to justify the expense) and it's where you can make that sweet sweet mullah. Here's your options:
This is done via Mixam Print On-Demand Links. It's not as cheap per issue as bulk ordering, but it costs you nothing to set up and readers will still buy your content. Also: printing with higher quality materials and at a larger size (the above link is for an 8.3 x 11.5 Trade Paperback) is roughly the same cost per issue as printing smaller and on lower quality paper so since the print-on-demand cost is high, we recommend using the better materials so your customers feel justified in paying the premium rate. Also we highly recommend ordering test prints to ensure your prints are of good quality. If there are any errors, Mixam will fix them and send you a replacement at no charge. The cost to the customer is the same as it would be with Amazon KDP but you don't have Amazon's hand in your back pocket.
For this to work you need to integrate either memberstack, stripe memberships (and then set up a second paid site with a login requirement) or host the entire thing on Fourth Wall from the jump instead of Carrd. We can build everything here in Fourthwall just the same, but do let the developer know ahead of time if and how you want your membership configured. Eventually, we would like to move to a unified blockchain-based credential system to ensure the user experience is uniform across sites, but for now we're doing it in a way that is modular, free and already fully developed. (Also because a lot of people are understandably wary of blockchain, crypto and NFTs, this will be entirely optional. Our goal is to use the tech stack intelligently and ethically, which is not what the first wave of developers have done at all.) When we have that element of the network fully developed and exploit free, we'll post a full detailed explanation of how it works and how to integrate it into your existing site if you want it. For the purposes of this demo, the password is Dr0wss@p and the user name is John.
Speaking of Fourth Wall, the above links to one of our Fourth Wall sites. If you have never set one up before, we can do it for you and then hand over the controls once it's fully built out, minus your payment details. We recommend not launching a merch line until you have at least 10 products. We can also get you a Canva Pro login if you need it to design your merch. Though, if you're making comics, you probably already have the software required.
Flip Book Demo
For this version, you need either your own Flip PDF Plus Pro licence or as part of your membership to Comic Co-op, we will email you a Dropbox link for your uncompressed PDF and set this up for you. The look of the reader is entirely customizable and if you have us do it for you we will ensure it matches your book's aesthetic and get your feedback on it before going live. You'll note that the front page contains the Print Link. These flip books can also be paywalled if you'd rather monetize your work that way, though issues must be purchased individually.
The print link is done via Mixam Print On-Demand Links. It's not as cheap per issue as bulk ordering, but it costs you nothing to set up and readers will still buy your content. Also: printing with higher quality materials and at a larger size (the above link is for an 8.3 x 11.5 Trade Paperback) is roughly the same cost per issue as printing smaller and on lower quality paper so since the print-on-demand cost is high, we recommend using the better materials so your customers feel justified in paying the premium rate. Also we highly recommend ordering test prints to ensure your prints are of good quality. If there are any errors, Mixam will fix them and send you a replacement at no charge. The cost to the customer is the same as it would be with Amazon KDP but you don't have Amazon's hand in your back pocket.
For this to work you need to integrate either memberstack, stripe memberships (and then set up a second paid site with a login requirement) or host the entire thing on Fourth Wall from the jump instead of Carrd. We can build everything here in Fourthwall just the same, but do let the developer know ahead of time if and how you want your membership configured. Eventually, we would like to move to a unified blockchain-based credential system to ensure the user experience is uniform across sites, but for now we're doing it in a way that is modular, free and already fully developed. (Also because a lot of people are understandably wary of blockchain, crypto and NFTs, this will be entirely optional. Our goal is to use the tech stack intelligently and ethically, which is not what the first wave of developers have done at all.) When we have that element of the network fully developed and exploit free, we'll post a full detailed explanation of how it works and how to integrate it into your existing site if you want it. For the purposes of this demo, there is not actual login functionality. That would be added after you decide your preferred monetization method.
Speaking of Fourth Wall, the above links to one of our Fourth Wall sites. If you have never set one up before, we can do it for you and then hand over the controls once it's fully built out, minus your payment details. We recommend not launching a merch line until you have at least 10 products. We can also get you a Canva Pro login if you need it to design your merch. Though, if you're making comics, you probably already have the software required.
Login
You would then place a button that leads to either Memberstack (they set their own user name and password) or Stripe payment portal that emails them a username and password to login with if you're doing it 100% in carrd. If this is a Fourth wall site, the backend is completely different but the end result looks the same. If this were using the Blockchain tech stack, when they first accessed the site it would check their MetaMask credentials (browser plug-in) and see if there was a key to your content in their library of NFTs and if so, serve them the pages they purchased automatically or, if they hadn't yet purchased access, it would prompt them to buy. Essentially, instead of using NFTs to sell ugly, procedurally generated slop, we'd be using it for inventory management across a decentralized network of sites. This would normally be impossible without massive security holes. It also avoids the problem of "dont copy and paste muh meme" by selling the key to access content on your website rather than the content itself.
Unlocked Zone
You can build this out however you want. Here's another way you can format your content:(note: this is not a full issue. We don't personally recommend hosting your content locally on carrd as it can slow the initial loading speed substantially. It also removes an additional layer of protection. If you want to keep reading this you can do so here )