immediacy. It can be a balancing act. It’s certainly trickier if you’re trying to move a suite of
journals with separate identities and fit them
all under the same umbrella.
SP!: YOU’VE DONE QUITE A BIT OF DIGITAL
CONSULTING WORK. WHAT DOES THAT
INVOLVE? FOR WHAT SORTS OF PROJECTS
WOULD CLIENTS TYPICALLY INVOLVE YOU?
TA: I’m a generalist and troubleshooter, so it
varies quite a bit. I think the most unusual consulting I’ve ever done was managing the production of interactive exhibits for trade shows.
Some of it was making games related to the
product that people could play in the booths. I
spent a good week trying to find a way to cater
In ‘n’ Out Burger to the San Diego Convention
Center and interviewed magicians for a booth
promotion.
For the most part, I drop into the middle of a
project, figure out what’s gone wrong, fix the
product design if there’s something amiss, and
then get it built. A lot of the time it’s marketing.
Sometimes it’s strategy. I spent most of 2013
working on a digital comics product and prototyping a color Print On Demand solution.
move very far into the field. It turns out that
the print market and the digital market were
growing at the same time, so that’s turned out
not to be the case. Largely because the print
market had already lost the newsstand and
was primarily a collector’s market. We’re still
seeing digital comics priced identically to print
because of retail fears. In fairness, if discounts
SP!: HAVE YOU FOUND ANY CHALLENGES did move another 20 percent of the business
THAT SEEM TO BE UNIQUE (OR AT LEAST, to digital, that could cause some hiccups in
MORE COMMON) TO DIGITAL COMICS, the print system, but there’s not much by way
VERSUS OTHER ONLINE PUBLICATIONS?
of experimenting with that, past back issue
discounts.
TA: I used digital comics to teach channel
conflict when I was an eBusiness professor. It SP!: ANY PARTICULARLY MEMORABLE
should be the textbook example. While things INCIDENTS OR ANECDOTES?
have calmed down a bit, for years, the comic
book store direct market retailers were con- TA: Marvel actually shut down their original
vinced that digital comics would destroy their dotComics program, from whence the techbusiness and the publishers were afraid to nical co-founder of Comixology came. My
understanding is that this was over internal
concerns about cannibalizing the print market.
Even if that wasn’t the real reason, Marvel
could’ve owned digital comics, but they ran
off the technical backbone of Comixology and
Amazon recently bought him. Oops.
SP!: WHAT INSPIRED YOU TO WRITE THE
ECONOMICS OF DIGITAL COMICS (LATER
RE-TITLED THE ECONOMICS OF WEB
COMICS)?
TA: This all spun out of my Master’s Thesis at
NYU. I was in the Gallatin school, which is all
individually-designed programs. I was studying Internet Business & Media Convergence.
(Henry Jenkins hadn’t coined the phrase
“transmedia” when I started the program.)
Essentially, I was assembling a more relevant
version of an MBA— a little out of Stern’s actual
MBA program, a Media Ecology course here,
a couple Interactive Telecommunications
courses there, a big scoop of the Publishing
program, and so forth. When it came time to
write a thesis, my topic was content monetization and I’ve always been more interested in
actual figures than widgets. I had enough