Minicomics, Any Way You Want 'Em

Scott McCloud (whom, despite my earlier screed, I love like a blood relative -- this is how we treat each other in my family) challenged us to give BitPass a try almost two years ago. Never content to let an opportunity for mischief pass us by, we agreed to give it a try if Scott's own micropayment project The Right Number showed promise. Scott allowed me to set the terms of the bet, which were that we would use the system if his second foray into offering comics via micropayments met with more than half the success of the first. The idea was that it would show if his intial success was more than just good press and curious folks checking it out; it would show that this was a sustainable business model.

Scott, of course, won the bet. We are now paying up (albeit about a year and a half late, but at least I'll be able to face him without massive guilt at Comic-Con). He got slightly over 50% with his second installment of the comic, and as such, we are offering the following two comics electronically:

These are online-only, super-cool scroll-o-matic, 17-or-18-page electronic versions of our paper minicomics, also available for purchase. We've just made the second story available on the site for the first time, so please go ahead and purchase it if you so desire.

We're interested in seeing what the relative income is from a product available electronically versus the same content available on paper. They're priced differently (the electronic version is a mere $0.25, the same price Scott charges for his BitPass comics, while the paper versions are $4 a pop), of course, since micropayments are designed to make it easy for people to pay only a little bit for content, and paper can't compete on price.

To further muddy the waters, we're offering the paper version of the comic for a buck off when you first purchase the BitPass version. Think of it as a try-before-you-buy type of situation. I'll see how things go over the next few weeks and let you know how the experiment fares.