Creating a Digital Collectible Comic is Easy

A walk-through of the dPublisher App

Most of you know that I have been advocating for ethically and responsibly produced digital collectible comics (that's code for NFTs 😉) for quite a while now—so much so that I even wrote a book¹. I see digital collectibles as another low-barrier product creators can sell to feed their creative team. It is another revenue source derived from the work you already have, which is especially important for writer-financiers of independent comics.

However, somewhat ironically, I had not dropped my own comic - that is, until yesterday! As I type this, 149 copies (~$6 US each) have sold on the dReader app in just over 24 hours. By way of comparison, my digital deluxe tier in the original The Lump Sum Saga Kickstarter campaign sold 64 copies at $5 CAD each over a 30 day campaign. Even after paying for two new comic covers for this drop², I am well on my way to eclipsing the PDF sales revenue. I can’t emphasize enough that this is not an “either-or” but rather a “Yes-and.” I will continue to offer PDF copies in my Kickstarter campaigns. Digital collectible comics generate new revenue from new customers, mostly from existing assets!

You might think, “It must be really complicated and expensive to do that, though, right?” The short answer is no. Tedious, maybe, but I am confident that everyone reading this already has the required skills. If you can resize images and enter information into fields on a web page, you are golden. In addition, if you run into issues, the dReader team is more than willing to help. Onboarding is currently free and will be for the foreseeable future. Frankly, gathering your assets and writing promo copy is the most time-consuming and taxing part.

I recorded a walkthrough of the dPublisher app while I created the digital collectible version of The Lump Sum Saga. If you start falling asleep while you watch, I get it. It is boring because it is easy and my voice was trained to pacify over-rambunctious middle school students.

I have also attached the Scrivener file I used to collect the data for the fields. Click here to download it: dPublisherDataToCollect.zip

It has never been easier to create a Comic NFT from your existing comic assets.

And for Solana-compatible readers, there are still copies of The Lump Sum Saga available. This is a random, blind drop, but it is early enough that you may still be able to luck into one of the eight legendary Jeffrey Veregge covers. I have only signed four so far. Did I mention I spent yesterday morning “signing” digital comics in the dReader Discord? The “how” of that is a story for another post.

1. Comic NFTs - An Ethical Approach

2. In the video, you may notice that two of the covers I originally uploaded versus the ones in the segment “after approval” are different. We decided to incorporate work from a couple of WEB3 artists to help the drop appeal to more buyers in the space.