A few months the Beat broke the news that Comixology has been impacted by the latest round of Amazon layoffs, and that remaining employees would be leaving by the end of April.
It appears that that is the indeed the case, an an email to former GM and CTO Jeff DiBartolomeo received the following response:
Hello:
I am no longer at Comixology. Please reach out to one of the following teams for any Comixology-related topics:
Comics Publishers
- comics-pub@xxxxxxxx – General support with your titles, tech support, etc.
- cmx-subscription@XXXXXXX – Updates to CU and KU enrollment
- comics-promotional-sales-support@XXXXXXXX– Discount sales and merchandising requests
Comixology Originals Business
- pamela.mullinhorvath@XXXXXXX – General CO business
- cmx-originals@XXXXXXX – Comixology Originals Operations
Please do not spam these teams! Legitimate business only, please!
Regards,
Jeff
Digital comics sales have basically been on autopilot at the Comixology-branded landing page – which is really a subset of Amazon Kindle Books/Unlimited for some time. That operations have been farmed out to bunch of email drops is a very sad thing.
In slightly better news, we are hearing that Comixology Originals is continuing on – although under the slightly unexpected purview of Pamela Horvath of Superfan Productions. Superfan is the Pr agency headed up by David Hyde which has handled ComiXology PR for years; Horvath was the account exec for the brand. Now she is handling creator inquiries. As far as we can tell, Amazon is aware of the program and it will honor all its existing commitments.
Before his OOO message, DiBartolomeo sent out an email to affected parties which the Beat has obtained but we were told by several people that it probably contained artefacts that would reveal who leaked it, so we’re not running it. There wasn’t much more than what I wrote above, except to say that the company is still committed to the Comixology Originals program, and “The Team” (whoever that is) would continue to support and promote the titles, in conjunction with Superfan Promotions and 1021 Creative, the latter being a social media agency.
I’ve probably said this before but the story of ComiXology – build something awesome, sell it for a lot of money to a mega corp and watch it get destroyed – is basically the American Dream these days, and they’s why you woke up this morning feeling uneasy and stressed out.
Luckily, David Steinberger and Chip Mosher, the co-founder of Comixology and editor of Comixology Origianls, respectively, are actively working on a new digital comics sales platform, Neon Ichiban, and several other platforms are out there including GlobalComix, and Sweet Shop. There will probably never be another “Tech Giant buys Digital Comics Platform!’ headline….and we’re probably all better off for it.
