Amazon Abandons, Leaves Indie Creators in the Dust
Thousands of Books Will No Longer Be On Sale
On Thursday, Amazon notified thousands of indie creators they’d have to republish their books if they still want them available for sale after September 15th, as it abandons its ComiXology Submit Indie program while it folds ComiXology into Kindle. Instead of migrating the books of independent publishers and self-publishers over and helping indie creators to benefit from this change, Amazon has chosen to remove these books from the marketplace.
ComiXology Submit was ComiXology’s Indie Comic publishing program. It vetted comics for quality, chose which books to run, and then put those books through the comiXology Guided View process, so comiXology readers could use the comiXology App to read on tablets and phones more easily. The Guided View takes readers through a comic book panel by panel, sometimes word balloon by word balloon, zooming in on detail to enhance the reading experience on phones. It’s likely the best thing comiXology came up with.
In this sense, ComiXology Submit was a gatekeeper — your work had to be at a certain level to get picked up and published on the site and its App. The announcement of ComiXology Submit in 2012 had been made — and met — with great fanfare.
