In a move that pushed the company away from the monthly, serialized comics market and closer to the bookstore market where they’ve been thriving in the past year or so, digital publisher Graphicly announced today that they would be discontinuing their comics marketplace app.On their blog, the company reflects that they made the decision because the business model they had been pursuing in the recent past had reduced their mission statement from helping creators get their content seen to merely operating stores inside of existing marketplaces.”We no longer cared about helping publishers and creators get their story seen; we only cared about selling the books that sold the best,” wrote CEO Micah Baldwin. “Why? Because as a store, that is your only function in life. To sell more. Especially when your only revenue stream was built on sharing in sales with the publishers and creators.”As ComiXology has begun to dominate the monthly comics market, Graphicly claims that they’re broadening their content base–that they publish children’s book, art books and more or less anything else that integrates graphics with storytelling, and that every day it’s getting less comics-centric.Baldwin points out that earlier this year, the company rolled out plans to make eBook publishing easier for authors and small publishers, effectively opening up the Graphicly marketplaces to anyone who can generate content and agree to their terms of use. The program published not just to the graphicLy apps and iBooks, but also to the Nook, Kindle and Kobo eReaders.Baldwin describes the initiative as a huge success: “Since we’ve launched, we’ve seen an overwhelming response. Growth in our business has hyper-accelerated, and we have become a major pipeline of content, and some of the publishers that have used the platform are selling sales that far outstripped anything sold through a random marketplace app.”Customers who already own the apps will be able to use them to view their purchased Graphicly content, both old and new, but will not be able to buy anything new through the app. Items bought directly through Graphicly’s website will continue to be loaded into your app. Graphicly’s much-touted Facebook app will remain in use.
