Giving Comic Book Away For Free Helped Boost Sales

from the leave-it-to-the-smaller-publishers-to-figure-this-out dept

Paddy Dwyer writes "The comic book publisher Boom Studios announced about 2 weeks back that they were going to release the full first issue of a new comic called North Wind online free the exact same day as it was released in shops. They also plan to do this with the remaining 4 issues in the mini series. There was some retailer outcry when this was announced but it didn't last long. As the book quickly sold out with Diamond Comics Distributors. Then even though the book is still available online for free they are planning on doing a second printing to fulfill remaining back orders for the book. Also the book was released in CBZ format which is to comics what the mp3 is to music. There is no DRM and it is of very high quality."

This comes just a couple months after Tim Lee pointed out why comic book publishers should free up their content. He also discussed how the big comic book publisher, Marvel and DC have, instead, chosen to lock up their content and threaten people for sharing their books online. Yet, here we are, once again, with an example where the companies who embrace the ability to use free content as a promotion are finding that it actually helps them sell more.

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