Empowering Creators with Comics on Facebook

As many of you may have noticed this week, Facebook has been in the news a lot.  The monster social network rolled out some changes to the site earlier this week and held its annual developers conference yesterday where they showcased the future products that will be rolling out soon, most notably the Timeline, which aggregates your social profile into a chronological format.  Also announced earlier this week, Graphicly (iFanboy’s parent company) announced the rollout of Graphicly on Facebook, an application that would allow any comic available on Graphicly to be previewed, bought and read from within Facebook on Facebook Pages, which got some attention from within the comics industry, as well as outside of it.

In the year and a half since iFanboy joined Graphicly, we’ve done our best to keep doing what we do well here in terms of covering the comics space without shoving Graphicly and digital comics down your throat, and our corporate overlords at Graphicly have been supportive of keeping that promise. But you may not know that in addition to producing iFanboy, Josh, Conor and I work very hard with the Graphicly team to help keep building Graphicly towards being one of the best options for digital comics. While we don’t want to schill too much, every now and then we do something that I’m actually pretty psyched for and would like to brag about, and the recent Graphicly Facebook Application is just one such thing. It’s no coincidence that we rolled it out this week and I had the opportunity to work very closely with our team at Graphicly on the development and rollout and announcement of the application. (If you’d like to see it in action, check it out on the iFanboy Facebook Page.)  So if you’ll indulge me for a moment…

Often people ask me what makes Graphicly different than the other digital comics options out there? As we’ve seen over the past 2 years or so, with the emergence of digital comics, we’ve seen the creation of several platforms all pretty much doing the same thing: providing a marketplace for you, the reader, to buy your digital comics.  We’ve seen applications for the iPhone and iPad and Android emerge, we’ve seen comics move to the web and we’ve seen many different offerings by a multitude of publishers.  But my answer to what sets Graphicly apart from the others is that while of course our goal is to sell comics and make money, the approach we’re taking is much more focused on the creators and publishers other than Marvel and DC Comics.  We all know that Marvel and DC make up approximately 75+% of the marketplace and they have some very good digital offerings (note: Graphicly does offer Marvel comics on its platform).  But we also know that there are hundreds of other publishers and thousands of creators who are making comics every day.  And many of them are really good comics that more people should be reading! As we’ve worked to develop our applications at Graphicly, we’ve realized that the mass marketplace approach for offering comics digitally has some flaws.  Mainly in discovery of new material.  In a marketplace flooded with the hundreds of titles from Marvel and DC, how do you find that gem of an indie book? That’s a question we’re working to solve at Graphicly.

So how does Facebook play into it? Well, whether you like Facebook or not and whether you like the recent changes announced by Facebook, you cannot deny 2 things:

1. There are millions of people on Facebook from around the world.
2. Facebook provides a platform for creators, be it artists or writers, or musicians, or comedians, or filmmakers – whomever, to set up a presence online and interact with their potential audience and fans

We’ve already seen comics creators and publishers embrace Facebook with Fan Pages that allow them to interact with their fans, they even buy real Facebook comments to grow their accounts, while keeping their personal profiles separate.  It has become a valuable tool for anyone looking to do business of any kind online, as important as having a website or a Twitter account. So given that so many comics publishers and creators are on Facebook already, and the potential to reach millions of people, many of whom may not be among the approximate 300,000 comics readers already engaged with comics through the direct market, why not make it easy for them to bring the comics to the community that already exists? It’s a natural extension of Graphicly’s original mandate, which is to celebrate stories within an energetic community.

Now, with Graphicly on Facebook, we can bring these wonderful stories to the largest online community on the planet.  Publishers such as Archaia, Aspen, Top Cow and Red5 Comics see this value and were early partners with us in this endeavor and we’re excited to see more publishers and creators bringing comics to Facebook.  Since we launched earlier this week, we’ve already seen a 4x growth in the number of people using Graphicly on Facebook and we’re excited to see that number grow.

As Facebook rolls out the new Timeline and their added features, readers, creators and publishers can expect to see even deeper integration of Graphicly within Facebook.  With the evolution of the “Like” button to be opened up to other verbs, like “Read”, it will become a perfect place for comics to be enjoyed and celebrated by readers and their friends.  Readers will be able to share the comics they like with their network of friends and discover new comics from creators and publishers even easier.

Personally for me, as someone who has worked in the online space for his entire career and has seen the growth of social networking and digital comics run side by side, this convergence has got me very excited for the future.  To be able to empower creators, both big and small, to get the word about the books is why we joined Graphicly in the first place, so it’s super cool to see it all unfolding so quickly and I hope you agree and if you’re a Facebook user, give it a try and share  your comics enjoyment with your personal connections as well.

If you have a Facebook Fan Page and would like to install the Graphicly on Facebook app, it’s available for free at http://apps.facebook.com/graphicly/