Graphicly

» see graphicly.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Graphicly was digitizing a habit I never had. American single issue comics reached where I was as translated albums or not at all, and the Wednesday trip to a shop that the whole direct market is built around was not part of anybody's week in Ankara. Moving that ritual onto a screen is a product aimed at people who already had the ritual, so what follows is reconstructed from the trade press rather than from a reading habit.

Micah Baldwin founded it in Boulder, Colorado in 2009, and the phrase everybody used was iTunes for comics. It raised about seven million dollars, with Chris Sacca and Mercury Fund among the names on the round. For a couple of years it was said in the same breath as comiXology, which is the position that gets a company funded and then kills it.

It lost. comiXology had the publisher relationships and the reading technology people actually preferred, and by 2012 Graphicly had stopped trying to run a store. It became infrastructure instead. An author handed it a file and it produced the versions Kindle and the other retailers wanted, then pushed them out.

The second business worked better than the first one ever had. By 2014 there were ten thousand publishers on the platform with something like twenty thousand titles between them. Roughly two million dollars a year was coming through.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

Two million a year against seven million raised is not a failing business. It is a business that cannot become the thing its investors were promised. Nobody writes a check for iTunes for comics hoping to own a well-run file conversion service, and once the company had accepted that its real product was plumbing, the arithmetic on the cap table stopped working no matter how well the plumbing ran.

~ what it became ~

The final identity was the useful one and almost nobody noticed it. Self publishing in 2013 meant knowing about EPUB and MOBI and about store requirements that openly contradicted each other. Graphicly took all of that away for a percentage.

Comics people used it especially, because image heavy files are exactly where every ebook pipeline breaks. Creators like Mike Garley and Marc Ellerby ran books through it. That detail matters later, because when the company went, it went owing them.

~ what really happened ~

On 27 May 2014 the print on demand company Blurb announced it had hired the six people who made up Graphicly. It bought nothing else. No platform came over and no obligations did either. Publishers were given thirty days to log into their dashboards and take their own files out before the lights went off.

The obligations part is where it turns ugly. Creators owed money for sales through the platform were not paid. Mike Garley said publicly that he doubted any creator would ever see money from Graphicly now that it had shut. Marc Ellerby described the contact he received from the company as zero. Nobody sued, because individually the amounts were small enough that pursuing them would have cost more than the debt.

In June 2014 the Image Comics Kindle editions that Graphicly had distributed began vanishing from Amazon. That is the shape an infrastructure death takes. The company that disappears is never the one whose name is on the cover.

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