How to Give When Buying Your Comics

‘Tis the season! That phrase applies to a lot of things. It’s the season for gathering with family and loved ones. It’s the season for warm sweaters and hot coffee. It’s the season for lights and good cheer.

But most importantly of all, it’s the season for giving.

As we come together to celebrate another year (hopefully) well spent, it is important to remember there are many who cannot approach the holidays with as much joy. Whatever the reason, whether it be hunger, homelessness, persecution, or a hundred other things, there are a lot of people in need of help right now. Part of the joy of the holidays is taking the opportunity to give to those in need as well as those in our own households. It can be difficult to find time and ways to do that, especially in the midst of the holiday rush with travel and last second gifts to buy.

Luckily, there’s a very easy way to donate to the charity of your choice while buying your digital comics each week.

Comixology, the number one site for purchasing and storing digital comics, was purchased by Amazon in 2014. Since then their parent company has continually integrated the platform into their own interfaces and features. If you weren’t already aware, you can now merge your Amazon and Comixology accounts and login into the latter with either one. This also means you can take advantage of all of the features on the Amazon website when purchasing your digital comics.

This includes the AmazonSmile program. When you purchase items from the AmazonSmile site, 0.5% of the purchase price of eligible products is donated to the charity of your choice. All of the pricing, features, and other services remain the exact same. The only difference between shopping at Amazon and AmazonSmile for you, is that when you use the latter the URL is changed slightly from “amazon.com” to “smile.amazon.com”.

This means that if you purchase your digital comics through AmazonSmile, a small amount will always go to a charity of your choosing. It also applies to all of the other items you might get from Amazon throughout the year, whether they’re presents to share over the holidays or some discounted textbooks for the spring semester. All it takes is altering what you enter in your web browser by five letters in order to help make a donation wherever you most want it to go.

Now 0.5% may not seem like a lot, but it certainly adds up quickly when spread across the comics community. Let’s assume the average comic costs $3.99 (we’re being realistic) and the average comics buyer purchases 5 comics each week. That means over the course of the year they’ll spend just over $1,000 per year, which means a $5 donation. But then multiply that by the thousands of comics fans buying this many (or more) comics each week. Those numbers start to add up, and soon tens of thousands of dollars are being donated without any changing their weekly routine.

So when this Wednesday rolls around, please make a small change to where you pick up your digital comics and add “smile” to the front of your Amazon site. If we all make this small change, it will certainly help bring about some additional smiles in the year to come.