Hoopla Digital, the digital public library platform, has announced they will be partnering with the newly created distribution service, Aggregate Ink, to bring indie comics to library patrons. This announcement comes amid the heat of the Digital Comics Arms Race (a term coined by ICv2), where multiple platforms are vying for digital readership. Aggregate Ink is a new way for indie comics creators to find public library distribution and grow their audience.
Eric Gladstone, whose resume includes a stint at Stan Lee’s POW! Entertainment and writing comics for various small publishers, launched Aggregate Ink after he became frustrated with his own attempts to get his books into libraries. After initial attempts to get distribution through Hoopla fell through, Gladstone’s solution was to partner with other indie comics creators who might not meet the minimum thresholds for distribution and pool them together under one umbrella, Aggregate Ink. Gladstone, and Hoopla’s VP of Digital Acquisitions Cat Zappa, sat down with Comics Beat to share more about the program.
Gladstone says that piracy and longevity were growing concerns for indie comics creators. “I, as a publisher, have been victim to large pirate sites taking my stuff,” he says. “And some of them have been read over 30,000 times. If a small percentage of that was done legally or through libraries, then the books would have been profitable.”
Gladstone sees Aggregate Ink as part of the post-Kickstarter ecosystem for indie comics – many libraries don’t have a system for collecting independently crowdfunded comics. “[We want to] be an option for kind of that post-Kickstarter ecosystem that creators tend to neglect. Once a Kickstarter is done, once it’s fulfilled, what do you do with it? And so I think it’s very helpful for a creator to get that aspect of it.”
According to a deck shared with The Beat, Aggregate Ink already represents 100 titles hosted on lending library platforms like Hoopla and The Palace Project, and they hope to expand to Comics Plus and Libby. The deal is non exclusive and titles can be added to other sites or removed at a creator’s discretion. They’ve already partnered with Stacked Deck Press, a queer press with multiple Eisner nominations.
Gladstone says a the Aggregate Ink system includes many benefits for indie comics creators such as human-powered discoverability and royalties. Increased discoverability is a priority for the Hoopla team, as they have a dedicated comics marketing team, according to Zappa.
“We’ve determined that our comic patron is a unique patron at the end of the day” Zappa told The Beat. “We want to message them from a very special perspective that we feel like they will understand and they want to engage with us from. We’re here for all the formats that we have an offer, but we do have a team that specifically says we are here for comics and we want to make sure that we’re talking to you and reaching out to you, communicating with you in a way that the comic book reader is eager to respond to.”
Pricing for digital lending copies remains a complex matter – according to the deck, some platforms charge 5-10% of the retail price per borrow, while others charge 2x retail price per library purchase. When submitting to Aggregate Ink, creators set the MSRP and and receive 75% of all royalties after Hoopla and Aggregate Ink take their cuts.
Indie creators can request an invite for distribution through the Aggregate Ink website now.
Gladstone even made a comic with Kali Fontecchio to explain their goals:
