tl;dr: Webcomics as iBooks files look very promising. Readers are excited about the idea, I want to produce more work this way if I can afford it.

Everything below refers to this post.

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It’s been a few days since I put my iBooks comic experiment up and it’s been a lot more popular than expected. I’m honestly not sure how many times it’s been downloaded. My own server is reporting almost 8,000 downloads but that doesn’t take into account the first burst which I had hosted on my Dropbox. (It was enough to get the public folder shut off… not sure I was supposed to use it that way. Sorry, Dropbox!)

I think it would be safe to say at least 10,000 people grabbed the file. Not bad for a file created by software which has only been out for a week on a single platform!

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The responses so far have been overwhelmingly positive. Since getting covered by a lot of Apple news sites, I’ve gotten a lot of email and comments from people who’d either never heard of me or had forgotten I existed. That’s awesome. What’s also great is the general sentiment of regular readers towards this format: My theory that there is a class of webcomics reader who would prefer to read in large chunks and, even better, would be willing to spend a little money on it seems to be true.

The negatives are mostly logistical. Time and money.

One downside has been bandwidth. I am really spoiled when it comes to bandwidth. My comics are generally 8-10k each. That’s easily about 10% the size of a normal webcomic. (Geek fact: It’s all about how PNG compresses straight horizontal bands of color.) This first monthly collection experiment wound up being about 2.7 megs. Once you factor in the HTML and other graphics that come with each page view on my site, it probably winds up being about the same bandwidth- except I haven’t served any ads or showed a reader any of my merchandise.

The bandwidth downside could be mitigated by selling the monthly books and/or accepting donations for free downloads, but selling via the iBookstore would require me to purchase ISBNs for every issue and submitting the books for review. I don’t like the idea of readers being geographically or economically restricted from downloading my comics, so

The other issue I have is with how iBooks Author formats PDF files. They seem perfectly readable and complete, but are muddled by branding that is not present in the iBooks file. I completely understand why Apple would do this with a free tool, but it’s not acceptable to me as publisher. (What’s funny is you COULD argue that this branding layer is present in the iBooks version… it’s just physical in nature and called an iPad.) I’d most likely wind up laying out my books a second time in Indesign to generate PDFs in order to get the degree of control I require. That’s not a complaint, says the guy who hand-kerns pixel text.

However I progress with this, please know that there will always be DRM-free, easily swappable versions of all Diesel Sweeties electronic books as long as I can do so. While I can understand being a bit more draconian with work meant to be sold as a graphic novel, I feel that to lock down a free-to-air webcomic would go against all the good vibes we try to generate in our field.

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It’s safe to say that this experiment is going to continue, somehow. I’d like the next monthly book to be a little more technically sophisticated and will probably try a combination free/paid model to help pay for it. Is this something a small company would sponsor?

I’d also like to seriously investigate using a combination iBooks/PDF strategy to put out a comprehensive, edited, story-sorted, premium version of all my work to date once I hit comic #3,000 next month. I just need to figure out a way to finance a couple hundred hours of work to produce the big book. Three thousand comics is not only a three thousand page book- it’s potentially four to five times that much once you factor in commentary, collected storylines, character arcs and other features. That would freak me out, but I guess I have been doing this almost every day for more than ten years.

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Wanna talk about it? Let’s move over to my Google+ page.

I had a few insomniac hours this weekend and did a little experiment:

Waking Up With the Diesel Sweeties is a tiny little free ebook for the iPad. It contains all my comics from last month with a few tweaks, formatted in iBooks Author. This version only works on the iPad. It’s not in the iBookstore, so you’ll need to download the file and sync it to your iPad.

Three easy ways to do that:

+ Download to your desktop machine and email it to yourself to open in iBooks.
+ Toss it in your Dropbox and open it in iBooks from there.
+ Add it to your iTunes library and sync the book to your iPad.

I’ve wanted to put a comic book on the iPad since they first came out, but wasn’t super jazzed by the existing tools. Would you read more or find it easier to keep caught up if there were monthly editions available? (If this became a regular thing, of course there would also be PDF versions.)

As I home in on comic number three thousand, I’ve been doing a lot of looking back and thinking about allllll the material I’ve made in nearly twelve years. I’ve also been thinking about just how awesome it would be to get a full collection into your hands somehow— something searchable, sortable by character and with the major storylines plucked out for easy absorption. Now, I have no idea how I’m going to fund the hundreds of hours it would take to do all this … but we’ll figure that out later.

Download Waking Up With the Diesel Sweeties here.

I’ve also posted this to Google+ if you’d like to comment or discuss.

I don’t self-insert into comics much, but this is a big deal. Believe it or not, I was in my local Apple reseller (Yes!) today replacing my trusty Macbook Air (a 2010 11″ looking for a home soon) when Steve Jobs announced his retirement. What a weird coincidence.

When I was a kid, I thought all movies started with the 20th Century Fox fanfare because I never watched anything but Star Wars over and over. As an adult, all my computers have started with another fanfare. They both still give me chills. (MP3 link)

Thanks for all the good stuff, Steve. You’re living proof that having vision and working hard can make up for being a dick. I’m still working on the first part.

PS: Yes, this is a t-shirt in my store which you can wear. I certainly do.

I’ll have some more cool surprises later this week and next week, but let’s get started!

First off, I’ve got some GONK shirts for the holidays. It’s the most-requested reprint ever. I’ve got a small stock ready to rock this week:

Second! I’m wiping out my stock of hoodies to reclaim a ton of office space. They’re all only $25 and will be gone forever on Friday! If I oversell on any sizes, I’ll get one last run printed.

Third-a-mungo! I’ve got fifty pair of limited edition grey D20 socks up in the store while they last. These were done as a little custom job. Knee socks only, sorry!

Fourth, but not least: I want to show my Carbon-14 shirt some love, so it’s only $14 until the end of November.

I’ll see you Wednesday with some cool gift wrap options and a few other things.

A slightly more wee story this week. The tale of Minty is four pages in length.

He’s meant to be a more “normal” person set up against the ultra-dense pundroids of the rest of my cast. I probably wrote this in a fit of self-consciousness from meeting someone who did not enjoy my non-stop joke combat style of conversation. The original version begins in the archive here if you’d like to compare.

Minty is not a real person, though I spent my freshman year of college referring to a green-haired kid I never spoke to by the same name. He was a very irritable engineer.

I’m hitting the road this week to join Meredith’s Octopus Pie book tour. I’ll be in Brooklyn tomorrow, July 6th at Bergen Street Comics.

Next stop is Austin at Dragon’s Lair for Indie Comics Expo on Sunday, July 11. (the site says Saturday, but it is indeed Sunday)

We hope to have Los Angeles and San Francisco shops coming right afterwards. I’ll let you know as soon as they’re 100%. I’ll also be at San Diego Comicon with Team Dumbrella- same spot as always!

Last year I took the train to San Diego, this year is another road trip. You can follow along at home on Twitter or my venerable Tumblr blog, the Joe Biden Fan Club. No train this year because we will be bringing a tiny dog with us.

Just a quick note! I am down to my last ten or so mens Red Robot socks. They will be reprinted in the future, but it’s gonna be a while. Also, the Saddest Soldier shirts are closing out for the THX-mazing price of $11.38. Grab what you want while you can!

In convention news, I’m going to be in three cities in the next few weeks. (Thank Batman Dr. Melville will be covering for me in the office!) You can always follow me on Twitter to get the “scoop” “as it happens.”

ROBOGAMES
April 23-25, San Mateo CA

Basically, I have always wanted to hang out with insane engineers and meet people who do competitive robotics. I’m exhibiting with a bunch of my robot stuff: I Screw Robots & Crush All Humans shirts, plush Red Robots, as well as a medley of socks and stickers. This is my “treat” for the year, AKA a non-comics event I’ve never been to.

ROFLcon 2
April 30-May 1, Cambridge MA

ROFLcon is a nerd hootenanny and I was lucky enough to get to draw their official con shirt this year. Don’t think I’ll be selling anything here, just mingling and attending lectures to try and learn a bit.

Toronto Comics Art Festival
May 8-9 Toronto, ON

Basically, the best comic show that has ever happened in real life. I’ll be there with Granulac and a whole table of neat stuff, especially pixel skull shirts seeing as it is National Year of Scott Pilgrim and Toronto is his home town.

TCAF has the distinction of being the only comic show I don’t try to come up with excuses to skip. It’s that good and totally drivable from New York and New England. The Beguiling is easily a top ten comic shop for Planet Earth and they put on a show worth braving the Canadian border for.

Did you watch Big Bang theory tonight? Maybe you noticed some Diesel Sweeties out of the corner of your eye? I am the luckiest blockhead in Americatown tonight!

Evil Wil Wheaton guest-starred and CRUSH ALL HUMANS! shirts, Electric Sheep shirts, Pac-Math shirts and Invisible Giraffe shirts got cameos. So rad.

The Scott Pilgrim movie trailer is up and I got goosebumps before even SEEING this screencap.

Edgar Wright, you completely understand how violence works in my imagination. So happy for Mal. This may be the first movie I see in a theater in 2010. I still remember the train ride where I read volume 1 cover to cover without stopping.

Pixel Skull shirts are here as always! Should I do a ringer for filmic authenticity?

Two limited-run shirts which could not be more different from each other are up in the DS store! We’re printing both to order next week, so grab one now and we’ll have yours made special.

And for completists, here are the comics they came from: Red Robot throws a Tea Party / Gonk Gonk!