my friend and i are looking at the graphicly service, and the submissions page has stopped us in our tracks.
this page -->https://graphicly.wufoo.com/forms/graphicly-submissions/

i'm not convinced that the price is good for anyone. except graphicly.
it really seems like they're taking advantage of people by providing a conversion service fee that i'm not sure is necessary.
i started looking into a lot of the services they are converting for and so far most of it is stuff i can do on my own.
for cheap or free if i have a bank account.
i'm not convinced it works out for the artist financially.

it feels more like someone taking advantage of a popular situation or movement and that part of contemporary society that is always looking for convenience.
my friend likened it to "selling $150 maps to hot spots in the Gold Rush, whether they may or may not yeild anything"
and it seems very true.
it's quite a gamble if you have a fairly large number of books, and no assurance that you will make back the money you spend (whether it's all up front or a lot over the course of a year)

we are so quick to give our power and control away to save a few minutes.

ultimately i'm curious about if this is a necessary middle man service that to my experience so far anyone can do for themselves.
am i wrong for being offended by this?
sorry about the text wall. C:

I have a comic on Graphicly, and there was no conversion charge. Looking at that page, it looks like the conversion is only if you want your comic(s) to appear in the Kindle store, iBooks, etc. If you don't have it converted, it still appears on their website and app. They take a cut of each sale, 20%, I believe.

Also $150 for conversion for the listed services is about what everyone charges, from what research I did into the subject.

ah i see... so just having it listed isn't a part of this fee.
hm. hitting the submission button this is what i was met with so i felt under attack.
at least my parched wallet did. C:

the only thing in the realm of $150 for conversion of any of the formats they offer is for PDFs
and that is the cost of buying acrobat so you can make them. things like are at no charge unless i'm mistaken.

what is the advantage of graphicly?
what originally brought me there was the idea of it being like a virtual comic shop
so that my books would be in a place with other books as well.
maybe have better traffic in a related environment. you know?
that fee scared me, especially when i calculated my books over the course of the series so far.
madness. XD

They want you to send your book to them in PDF format, but if you can't do that, I guess that fee would cover it. If you send it to them as a PDF, they still do a conversion of it so that customers can use the guided view option while reading it; but there's no charge for that.

For you book to appear in iBooks, et. al., it has to be converted to a specific format (epub, mobi, etc.), which is a good bit more involved than creating a PDF from image files. Everywhere I looked charged between $100 & $175 for this service, which includes listing in the desired ebook stores. The other additional fee is getting an ISBN for your book, which is like $30 (I think) and required by pretty much all the ebook stores.

The advantages of Graphicly, Comixology, Drive-Thru Comics, The Illustrated Section, etc., is the same as selling your book in a real bookstore. Huge potential audience without having to worry about maintenance and processing payments and such. Obviously a little different in that Barnes & Noble or Wal-Mart won't sell your book for a piece of the selling price, but still. These places are an ideal starting point for indie creators, because the cost & effort is negligible.

The pros of it seem to be several:
**The convenience of dealing with multiple sites from one site, which saves time not only upfront with converting, but also later on with checking on each site and dealing with payments. You can hit: Nook, Kindle,Kobo, iBookstore, google, android market, Kobo, plus the regular graphicly apps on FB, phones, tablets, etc. There’s still: Comixology, MyDigitalComics, DriveThruComics, and Illustrated Section. So if you did pay the $150 Graphicly fee and did these others as well, you’re dealing with 5 outlets, but that’s less than dealing with 10 of them. How much time would this accounting, etc, take? The graphicly interface apparently has all the analytics, sales numbers, etc from the various sources. It maybe worth it to forgo some of the other sites (like MDC, DTC, IS) and just push all your sales through graphicly. Comixology would be worth it if you get it probably. I lean toward less is more - that is forgo MDC, DTC, IS and just pay for this Graphicly multi-sites option and add Comixology.
**It may save you money in the future. Just converting to Apple’s interface, as JMacFarlane mentioned is pricey. Also, they drop the 30% fee they take and you get 100% of your sales through Graphicly and they don’t charge % for sales from other distributors. If you just sold 150 issues at .99 through graphicly, you’ve paid for your cost and that doesn’t even include sales from the other sites. It also suggest that they can buy from all these platforms from a single storefront they provide for you so that your buyers wouldn’t have to go to Kindle to get the comic - they get it for their Kindle directly from your site.

The questions/concerns:
**How much control do you have over formatting for these other sites? NikiSmith has mentioned before the challenges of formatting for Nook and Kindle (even has a good ebook on it). Assuming you don’t want to pay the extra $100 to Graphicly for doing the full conversion process, this is an important issue. You want your lettering, etc, to be right for each device.
**What if you want to do have specific offers for different platforms? For example, if you want to bundle early issues on Kindle and Nook, which gives more share of the sales to you than individual issues (60-70% vs 30-40%), is this something you could do on your own through those distributors, or would you have to pay $150 again? Perhaps its not worth the bundling if that’s the case- just wait until you publish the graphic novel.
Perhaps Graphicly won’t highlight your work as much if they’re not making future sales on it. Still, promotion is in the creators court anyway, but this might be something lost.
**If you don't pay the $150, are you still on their graphicly apps? It doesn't appear so - it looks like just their web and FB interface is free with 30% commission.
**Sounds great, but how does it work in practice? Does anyone know of a comic using this one storefront/graphicly platform?

benefits as they explain them and pricing

Yes, they're looking to make money - they mention the 300,000 comics that will be self-published, but I personally think this option looks great. Since most of us have other jobs and personal lives, this seems like a great deal.

Graphicly has just announced another major change: They are ending the Graphicly app and their comic sales through it. Instead, they are making the new digital distribution platform the center of what they do. While folks will miss the app, its good news for creators as they become front and center. They are also reaching out to Comixology in hopes of adding them to their network. That seems necessary now that the Graphicly app is no more. More developments are likely it seems.

News from Graphicly

Interview from Comics Alliance