HeavyInk.com - a mashup of Amazon.com-for-comic-books

UPDATE: You should read this before doing business with HeavyInk. I can no longer recommend this service.

Travis Corcoran, the founder of the very useful SmartFlix service, which rents instructional DVDs of all kinds, has started a "mashup of Amazon.com-for-comic-books." It's a great idea, and will have:

Facebook-style social networking (we'll likely support the OpenSocial API at some point), and a few other things. We've got tons of things that no other comic book sites have: personalized RSS feeds, free shipping on every order (no matter how small), reviews on authors, artists and titles (not just issues), a recommendation engine, profile pages, "friends" lists, blurbs, mini-blogs, etc. We're going to have tons more features in the near future.

Shown here: Giant Teen Titans Annual 1967, which will be republished in December.

HeavyInk.com is now in public beta.

Link

• [Anonymous]

  You might want to reconsider your recomendation of this site.

  The owner Trevor the business is a radical anarchist. he runs this blog at http://www.tjic.com after the shooting in arizona he posted a blog that is titled “1 down 534 to go”. link is below.

  http://tjic.com/?p=19638

  but the scary part is that he also espouses this on the forum on the website in his “um … travis forum”

  if you don’t believe that this is the same person. please google it or go to one of the many news websites reporting the story

  http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/43857/comic-retailer-celebrates-giffords-shooting/

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Yeah, we know. Somebody submitterated this yesterday:
    http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/01/10/heavy-ink-arizona-shooting-corcoran/

    He’s also a former commenter here.

• [Ape Lad]

  The closest shop to me doesn’t even carry Madman, so this is welcome news indeed.

• [Brian Carnell]

  Hmm…I still don’t get how this is any different than the other of dozens of online comic retail shops. I guess you can say Facebook+XYZ these days and its a uber cool mashup. W00t.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  This is a great idea. Comics have lost a catastrophic amount of wire-rack distribution. They used to be sold in every drugstore and 7-11, where readers could be exposed to them and pick up the habit. Good comic shops are a joy, but if you don’t already read comics, you aren’t going to go there.

  One of the things comics have always needed is the kind of enveloping noosphere of reviews, explanations, recommendations, etc. that books have had for decades. Again, once you get started it isn’t hard to pick that stuff up. It’s getting started that’s the problem. If sites like HeavyInk can do that for general readers, more power to them.

• [TJIC]

  License Farm,

  Carrying Indies is really important to me.

  Right now, we just carry the Indies that are big enough to be carried by Diamond (the more-or-less monopoly middleman retailer in the comic book field).

  …but we’ve got plans to go much deeper than that: we want to carry Indie stuff that’s got press runs of 500, or 300, or just 75 copies. We’ve got a page ( http://heavyink.com/publishers_authors_artists ) asking small press publishers and independent authors and artists to get in touch with us…and this morning, we’ve already struck deals with two self-published artists to carry their work.

  This is only the beginning – my goal is to go carry the most complete selection of deep-deep-indie work anywhere.

• [TJIC]

  TNH,

  Apropos of nothing, I love the word “noosphere”, even if I couldn’t get through more than five pages of anything written by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin!

• [mattymatt]

  The site’s fantastic — and definitely would benefit from more folks diving in and writing reviews.

  I’m friends with a comic book shop owner, and initially I worried that Heavyink might make him obsolete. But even with the advantages of Heavyink (great RSS, social networks, a big library), I don’t think any website can replicate the experience of having a giddy, wild-eyed comic shop manager guiding you from discovery to discovery in the nooks and crannies of a meatspace comic store. Heavyink’s data-friendliness and the interactiveness of real life seem compatible, not redundant; fulfilling two different comic-booking needs.

• [TJIC]

  Don’t forget that the front page advertises “20% off everything”. Also, there’s a Tripl Your Money guarantee (details here http://heavyink.com/help/triple_your_money).

• [jonplante]

  If you’re interested in similar functionality but want to continue supporting your local comic book shop, there’s always comicscout.com

• [JBARNIER]

  No world-wide shipping available (yet)… *SIGH*

• [TJIC]

  Jbarnier,

  We do have plans to roll out worldwide shipping. It likely will be 3+ months out.

  Jon Plante,

  Comicscout is really well done – we learned of it about three weeks ago, and saw that it had a lot of the features that we had already developed. I think that HeavyInk wins on features, though:
  * integrated comic book sales
  * subscriptions to issues
  * subscriptions to graphic novels (NOONE else has this, that I can find)
  * recommendations engine
  * reviews and ratings of authors and artists
  * personalized / customizable RSS feeds (add an author to your personal feed to get alerts on new items by him or her; add a person to your RSS feed to get alerts on new reviews and blog posts by him or her; etc.)

  So: comicscout is pretty nice, as far as it goes, but I think it’s just one facet of what many comic book fans are looking for.

• [License Farm]

  @ Teresa: I’ve been saying much the same thing for years now. Comics used to be an impulse buy thing, but at least they were placed somewhere where they’d be subject to impulse. Now, they don’t tend to find you; you have to be inclined to look for comics in the first place to find them, ergo there are fewer new comic readers all the time. (There’s a side discussion to be had about the accessibility and age-appropriateness of the contents of more popular books, but that’s a secondary concern, moot if nobody new is coming in.) Direct distribution killed that; now the Diamond (nigh-)monopoly has gutted competition and is imposing measures meant to alienate and make life more difficult for the small potatos publishers and retailers, who they don’t much care about to begin with.

  @ TJIC: Thanks for the info, and for being such a big supporter of the indyist of the indies. I’m still flabbergasted by retailers who don’t seem to understand that there’s where what’s left and growing about consumer interest is shifting ever more quickly. I’ll be in touch when my minicomic comes out.

  @ Ape Lad: Your retailer sounds like the one I’ve been using by default; they actually consider Image and Dark Horse indies. I say, if you’ve had more than one movie made about a property you publish, you’re no longer an indie.

• [Scoutmaster]

  I’m already a member of HeavyInk.com, but call me retarded because I spent at least a minute trying to decipher this post. The whole “mashup of Amazon.com-for-comic-books” confused me to no end. What’s a mashup? Is this on Amazon.com? And what does HeavyInk have to do with Facebook? Guh!

• [jonplante]

  TJIC,
  I’m just concerned about the sustainability of the industry when its retailers, who have circled the drain for more than a decade, face such harsh competition from online ventures. So perhaps ComicScout is a compromise between what comic fans are looking for and what comic retailers are looking for.

  I won’t belittle the business plan behind HeavyInk. It’s just that the comic book industry, historically, hasn’t been very adaptable in the face of market forces.

  Now, there are those comic fans who have to travel 50 miles to the closest comic book store. If HeavyInk can put books into their hands, more power to you.

• [hijinx comics]

  Looks like a really nice site. I run Hijinx Comics (a brick and mortar comic shop) as well as http://www.comicbookshelf.com an online graphic novel store that has some similar features to your site. We have automatic recommendations, RSS review feeds, author and collaboration search features and other neat stuff like that. I wish I had a big team like yours to develop my site, but I had to do it all by myself!

  We don’t discount and we only sell graphic novels, but our shipping is also always free and 10% of every purchase goes to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund and the Hero Initiative.

  I think your site will be useful to many people who don’t have a good full service comic shop (Like Hijinx Comics!) in their area.

  The only thing I found that I don’t like at all is the following statement on your “about us” page:

  *

  The local comic book stores are not much help – they’ve got a limited selection, and while the staff is friendly, they know more about Spiderman and The Hulk than they do about good writers, interesting plots, and obscure titles.

  Which really does a disservice to the many, many great comic shops that provide service, selection and carry and know about a lot more than just superhero comics. Hijinx Comics carries comics for everyone, including art comics, comic strips, children’s books and much much more.

  We carry a LOT more than just what’s available
  through Diamond (whom you refer to as the largest distributor). We buy direct from many publishers not carried by Diamond and books you wouldn’t find in an average comic shop.

  Otherwise I think you’ve got a lot of really neat features and a nice looking site. Keep up the good work!

• [TJIC]

  Hijinx,

  Your services (storefront and website) sound great…especially since you were the sole developer! We had a bit more engineering staff (2.5 engineers, with about 0.5 of that going to support SmartFlix at any given moment, so 2.0 engineers overall). Anyway, I know how much work it was for us, so if you did it with half the manpower or less, then you’re a true stud!

  Your comments about our comments about local comic book shops are well taken…but I will point out that they are based, in large part, on the survey responses of 400 people that we quizzed about their comic book shopping experiences. We asked them what – if anything – they wanted improved from their current options, and most folks didn’t just click a radio buttom: most of them left impassioned pleas in the free-form text boxes.

  Also, and I think this is the key bit: most folks who are already big comic book fans either don’t perceive the issues as problems, or don’t perceive them at all… the loudest feedback came from folks who had a tentative interest in comics, but found it really hard to take that first step into the culture. I love my local comic book store, and the staff knows me by name…but not everyone feels this way. I’ve taken friends along from time to time, and they often feel put off, and out of sorts in there.

  I’m sure that there are stores that do a great job of outreach, and make everyone feel welcome…but the sad truth is that not all stores are like that.

  Finally: congrats on supporting the CLDF. I want to do something similar once we get out of the red – I’m a big fan of CLDF’s work.

• [TJIC]

  Scoutmaster,

  The post is a bit oddly worded. Here’s what I wrote in my original email to Mark F:

  “… HeavyInk.com is a mashup of Amazon.com-for-comic-books,
  Facebook-style social networking, and a few other things…”

  The description was meant to merely describe the fact that HeavyInk is a bit of a hybrid: half ecommerce website, half social networking website.

  Hope that clears it up!

• [TJIC]

  Jon,

  I think we’re more or less on the same page. I like having a local comic book store…and the kids who gather there to play HeroClix, and M:TG, and such do too. I think that brick-and-mortar stores will always have a purpose, and I think that they will always survive.

  Some local bookstores have faced hard times since Amazon launched a decade or more ago…but tons of others have thrived, using the competition to sharpen their skills, to the benefit of the communities they serve.

  I think that there are some disappointing brick and mortar comic book stores, and some of these have likely already been hurt by the rise of online comic book retailers (we’re far from the first!). …and there are also top notch brick-and-mortar comic book stores…and I don’t think that HeavyInk is going to hurt them in the least.

  My dream result, actually, is that HeavyInk succeeds not just in “preaching to the choir”, but because of recommendation tools, an approachable design that doesn’t scream “superhero ghetto”, and other features, we end up broadening, to some small extent, the appeal of comic books, and create even more comic book fans…some of whom decide to wander into their local neighborhood store for in-person experiences, and face-to-face community.

• [hijinx comics]

  TJIC,

  I don’t claim that Hijinx is a typical store, but customer service and outreach is our number 1 goal. We have the largest all ages section I’ve ever seen in a comic shop and we have a ton of happy female customers from age 3 to age 90. That’s one of the reasons we were recently named the best comic shop in silicon valley.

  I not only developed my online store and website but a whole suite of open source software for managing comic shop inventory, customers and more. It’s all available at http://www.hijinxcomics.com and is licensed under the GPL. I have a lot of experience interfacing directly with my distributor’s website and may have some useful tidbits for your developers that I’d be happy to share.

  400 people is not really a lot to have surveyed, and I’m curious what geographical area those 400 were from. There are world class comic shops all over the country that have a lot to offer comic fans that they will never find on an online store.

  Unfortunately there are too many areas without such shops and your website may be a real boon to these folks, and I wish you the best of luck!

  If you’re lucky enough to live in the SF Bay Area you’ve got lots of terrific stores to choose from. If you’re ever in the area, I hope you’ll take a moment to visit us in sunny San Jose!

  Sincerely,

  Dan Shahin
  Hijinx Comics
  ComicBookShelf.com

• [License Farm]

  Well, there goes my paycheck.

  Very nice representation for indies, too, which is the standard by which I judge any comic retailer. I can walk into any “Hey Kids, Comics!” hole in the wall and get fifteen different Spider-Man titles; it’s the places who give equal billing to some book you’ve never heard of that I like to support with my business, especially as I intend to be on the opposite side of that equation before long.