WOWIO woes continue
ComicList is reporting that Q2 payments are late, and our email inbox is filling up with reports from publishers who have not been paid.
Oh well.
UPDATE: We just received this from T Campbell and are running it as received:
My name is T Campbell, and I’ve been doing comics, in partnership with various artists, for nearly a decade. My most popular work is the teen comedy Penny & Aggie, with Gisele Lagace.
I learned about Wowio from Mike S. Miller, who had published Penny & Aggie in color in the direct market in 2005. His decision to do so made me wary of his overall business acumen– even Archie can barely survive in the direct market– but he had always been good to Giz and me, and we heard reports of others earning significant amounts. And in the end, being involved with them carried few opportunity costs… we weren’t making money off e-books any other way. So we cautiously became involved with the company. I was surprised and pleased to find myself making thousands of dollars each quarter, and being paid on schedule! As a result, I increased my output, to take advantage of Wowio’s system in the years to come. Finally, I could write as many comics as I wanted to with an eye toward profit on them!
There was only one big warning sign that Wowio would be, in the end, another small publishing company whose reach exceeded its grasp. Though the company’s first two sponsors, Verizon and Electronic Arts, were impressive enough names to quell my fears, other names didn’t seem to be following. I began to hear rumors that Wowio was burning through investment capital in order to pay publishers. We changed our plans to assume that Wowio would only pay out for up to Q3, 2008.
But that wasn’t enough. For Q1, we got our first significantly late payout. The money only arrived in the nick of time to help us meet some important expenses. Now, for Q2, the payout will be even later, if indeed it comes at all. If I hadn’t made another business arrangement in the interim, I’d be in real trouble. It’s my understanding that as of this writing, almost none of the publishers have been paid.
Q3’s payout is hardly relevant, because thanks to the changes made to the site in the last two months, our earnings have dropped 97.3%. I’m not going to fight over less than a hundred dollars. So all Wowio had to do was pay me for Q2 and I’d be out of their hair. Sadly, they couldn’t even manage that.
I agree with others that the communication has been terrible, though I seem to have an easier time than most in provoking a response from management or editorial. The fact that I have to provoke a response, though, some days after things go wrong, is bad enough.
I have sympathy for some of Wowio’s employees, especially the editorial director, Kristin Ellison, because two years ago, I was in her shoes: stuck between a crowd of hungry, wronged freelancers and a failing, red-ink-soaked company. The next time I actually speak to her instead of just e-mailing her, my message is going to be simple: Get out now. In fact, that’s probably good advice for anyone involved with Platinum Studios properties in any capacity.
08/28/08 at 2:17 pm
“ComicList”.
Thanks for the mention and the link, and thanks for the further information on this situation!
08/28/08 at 2:59 pm
[…] Update: Wowio publisher T Campbell goes into detail and recommends people get out now. […]
08/28/08 at 3:29 pm
[…] Thanks to ComicList for the initial report of this story. and TheBeat for following up with a letter from an individual publisher that adds insight and context. […]
08/28/08 at 6:40 pm
That’s too bad, I liked T’s and Gisele’s comic book work.
08/28/08 at 7:59 pm
A Suggestion that I would offer is to work with drivethrusomics.com. They sell pdf files of comics and you can set your own price and you can advertise it yourself. Look with direct marketting being hard enough as it is, don’t rely on companies that don’t know how to run their business. Drivethrucomics is affiliated with RPGNow.com and they’ve been in business for quite a while. And trust me Gaming Geeks are extremely people. Click on that link and e-mail them about submitting content to sell.
08/28/08 at 8:01 pm
Meant to say Extremely Picky people
08/29/08 at 5:03 am
[…] [Top Story] Heidi MacDonald and Newsarama have testimony from what I believe to be the first creators to come forward and publicly discuss Wowio’s late Q2 royalty payments. […]
08/29/08 at 10:54 am
Dumok…
The problem isn’t finding another place to SELL the PDFs. There are tons of them out there.
What Wowio did was offer them for FREE.
That was the genius of it. It was free to readers and we got paid $.50/download.
Now if someone…ANYONE came up with a working FREE and SPONSORED download system like Wowio…I’m there.
But paying for content online…especially webcomics is just silly.
08/29/08 at 11:03 am
[…] Mr T in the pages of The Beat on waiting for WOWIO to cough up monies owed. For the record, have any WOWIO creators gotten paid for Q2 yet? I ask because we’re 2/3 of the way through Q3 and I haven’t heard of anybody getting paid since Platinum took over the checkbook. […]
08/29/08 at 3:28 pm
[…] Wowioes, not your father’s breakfast cereal. Here’s what T Campbell is saying and Comics Worth Reading as well. Platinum and Wowio as yet have not responded to my inquiry. […]
08/29/08 at 6:34 pm
[…] Random Comics News Story Round-Up * although I’m not certain why this hasn’t occurred to me before, you know, the way the Kindle works does seem pretty perfect as a way to do New Comics Day on-line. * there needs to be more people doing interviews with Chester Brown. He feels under-interviewed to me in a way most cartoonists do not. * I’m having a hard time seeing Apple taking a pass on a slightly bawdy comic as part of its offerings for some service as censorship, or, really, much of a story. * <a href=”http://pwbeat.publishersweekly.com/blog/2008/08/28/wowio-woes-continues/” title=”in a letter to The Beat”>in a letter to The Beat, Wowio client T Campbell notes that one of the reasons he would like to see his 2Q earnings is that his 3Q earnings have fallen 97 percent under the new ownership plan. * I visited the Art Institute of Chicago yesterday: they have a couple of Crumbs up, a huge Jim Nutt painting in I guess the modern art section, a Lyonel Feininger to look at if you can’t get a good place to stand and gaze upon their famous Suerat, and a small, under-glass thing on the Hairy Who in the library. Me, I was there for some alone time with the Winslow Homers. * also, Chicago Comics’ Eric Kirsammer says they’re still selling a couple of Watchmen every day. * did I ever post a link to this lecture by Rian Hughes? I think I did, but maybe I didn’t. * two papers in Texas have apparently shrunk their comics pages from two pages to one. I can see a lot of this happening over the next year. * the writer Steven Grant has been on a really nice run recently, and I enjoyed this piece on Steve Ditko. I would suggest, however, that Dan Nadel’s <a href=”http://www.amazon.com/Art-Out-Time-Visionaries-1900-1969/dp/0810958384″ title=”Art of Time”>Art of Time provides us with the names of any number of artists that were using the comic book medium for personal expression in the way I think Grant means it long before Steve Ditko was doing so. By the way — Sean T. Collins noted to me in conversation that Art Out of Time has led to something like a half-dozen books or future book projects, which will likely add to its reputation over the years as an important book. […]
08/29/08 at 6:45 pm
God, I wish I had put Cathedral Child on Wowio when it was still bleeding money, especially since it got Boing Boinged. I would have made about $50,000. at least.
Looks like, once again, Platinum has the Magic touch of Making Things S(t)ink. Rosenberg is delightfully consistent.
08/30/08 at 12:01 pm
[…] You can learn more about the situation from the sites below: The Beat The Comics Reporter Newsrama The Comics List […]
08/31/08 at 10:02 pm
[…] “I have sympathy for some of Wowio’s employees, especially the editorial director, Kristin Ellison, because two years ago, I was in her shoes: stuck between a crowd of hungry, wronged freelancers and a failing, red-ink-soaked company. The next time I actually speak to her instead of just e-mailing her, my message is going to be simple: Get out now. In fact, that’s probably good advice for anyone involved with Platinum Studios properties in any capacity.” -T Campbell adding his voice to the chorus of concerns about the state of Wowio. […]
09/1/08 at 10:06 pm
[…] Heidi MacDonald and The Beat are becoming a pretty great hub of information regarding the non-payment woes of webcomic publisher WOWIO. Noted webcomic guy T. Campbell has provided his own assessment of the situation with regard to the projects he’s not getting paid for, while ComicList provided the initial spark of info (gleaned via random twitterings) that ignited the blaze this time around. […]
09/7/08 at 10:59 am
[…] Not that most authors are necessarily owed very much anymore. T. Campbell, writer for webcomics "Penny and Aggie" and "Fans," stated that his revenue has dropped by 97.3% since the new contract terms went into effect; other creators are reporting similar fall-offs, and many are jumping ship. For authors whose only source of income is advertising and other revenues from their work, this delay in payment can come as a heavy financial blow. […]