I was just invited to join WOWIO (http://www.wowio.com ), an online web publisher (basically you just download the comics on the net, as usual, except it's a PDF file). I noticed a lot of people have been using this, as while the downloads are free for everyone...the author gets money for every download!

Does anyone use this? How is it? Because I'm considering replacing my main site archives with it...while perhaps keeping a regular mirror and old stuff on Drunkduck.

OPINIONS!
(Hopefully this hasn't been discussed already.)

Someone posted about this a while ago in the Community Projects Forum.

I thought about it, but I changed my mind in the end. I already post this comic on two websites and that wastes enough of my own time.

I haven't used it yet but I can give you some second-hand feedback. (I was invited by a guy already signed up with them but - because my pages need some work to make them suitable - I haven't been able to take him up on it. Yet!)

I have heard from several people who claim to have made significant cash from putting their comics on Wowio (low thousands, USD) and one who estimated that - by not going with them earlier than he did - he'd lost something close to maybe ten thousand USD.

Not being involved myself, I can't vouch for the truth of any of that but, as far as I know, the people concerned were not people who would have had any reason to lie. If your pages are readily uploadable, I'd say it certainly is something you should at least look at very seriously. (And then report back to the rest of us!)

There's a similar thread over at Digital Webbing (can't find it this second) but the consensus was that you get 50 cents a download. Presumably, you'd split that if someone were pimping you to WOWIO and in general.

The SuperFogeys has a contract with Wowio through my publisher, Th3rd World Studios. It's true what you've heard; you get 50 cents for every download. Cost to load up your comic to Wowio: $0.

SuperFogeys has only been on Wowio for a couple of months, but already I've been pleased with the results. If you're interested, you can download the first collection for free here ).

If you can get people to pay attention and have enough books on there, yeah, you could make a ton of money on Wowio. Sky's the limit, really.

Don't think of it as another site to host your webcomic on though. It's not like that. It's website for FREE BOOK DOWNLOADS. It was easy to stick SuperFogeys on there because we had just done all the work to ready it for print. If you're going to submit to Wowio, better have a cover and credits and copyright info and all that. I don't think you'll get a contract without that.

Look around at all the comics on Wowio. You'll see how it's done. I would encourage anyone to give it a shot though, it's a lot of fun having it out there.

In fact, we're so excited by the possibilities that for the second SuperFogeys book we're readying a Wowio-only version that will have an exclusive story (The Secret Origin of the Space Pig) that won't be in the print version.

Hope to see you all over there. Doesn't hurt to make a few bucks off of all this, right?

Thanks guys!

About the only thing I'm worried about is some sort of hidden thing where they say "we now own your comic for life and can do whatever we want with it" or something. XP Though obviously I don't think that's the case.

Though to get into more specifics I was invited to be published on Wowio by "Dakuwaka" who has published these:
http://www.wowio.com/users/searchresults.asp?nPublisherId=101

I don't know which would be better, having someone else publish my stuff on there and perhaps give me some extra promotion or me just doing it myself. Hmm....

No matter what, there's a contract involved where you'd see any fine print and there isn't any. So I wouldn't worry about it Sarah, m'dear. If you got the issues ready, I'd say go for it.

They need to be 150dpi at least with a height of (I think) 10inches.

if everything can be downloaded for free then how do they make enough money to pay the authors?

They sell advertising...Verizion, other publishers. Generally the first few and last pages are ads, but they're easy enough to skip and aren't obtrusive.

Did anyone see that they have the Velveteen Rabbit for download? Man, it almost made me cry again...

Sorry for reviving this thread and continuing to yammer about this....but I was trying to look to see on Wowio how you would go about uploading a comic...and I am damn confused on what to do.

I'm thinking I'd rather upload issues of my comic independently rather than have Dakuwaka upload it and make deals with them (see previous post). So I guess I'm just supposed to contact Wowio about getting my comic uploaded?

I probably won't do this until later though when VP X chapter 1 is finished...because I only have the old jpegs of the old VP comic which I don't think are big enough to use. Bummer. =/

Yeah, just contact them yourselves but be prepared, just in case, for a lengthy and persistent inquiry by yourself. I would guess they they're getting those kind of inquiries frequently, but I definitely think it's worth doing the legwork for. Why pay someone else when you can easily do it yourself and keep that extra coin?