Comic formats & pricing

[Naj]

What's your typical experience with Merrick, Steve? Do you work in close collaboration or is it more "here are some words, make pictures"?

[ROBERTS]

Hi Naj...happy to meet you. So it's YOU writing those descriptive texts for the sales previews eh? don't be so down on it, you "get it" and find appropriately exciting ways to describe the comic, it's not so easy. I think you're quite good at copy writing.

As for the whole scene here in general...

I'm not sure what people think of Dofantasy overall, but I must begin by saying this: The days of the 15 story office building with a company logo on the roof and 200 people reporting to work each day at 8am, employee parking pass in hand...dead and buried.
GONE. Especially in the porn world, comics or real. (the Japanese would of course be the shining exception to this).
Playboy used to be that. Penthouse. Hustler still has it's building, but it's mostly rented out or empty. The New Model is here and in gear, and it's people with computers all over the world who have never met working together totally online on a single company product. DoFantasy is this.
There is no board room, there are no meetings. it's as free as it could get. Some would call it utter chaos, and in many ways, yes, it is. a Big Plan? Doesn't exist. This whole thing grew up out of a tiny little B&W half sized paper pulp porno BDSM comic from Spain called "Fansadox" in the late '90s, early 2000's..hardly known, not huge sales..
What you see here in DoFantasy is not the result of some grand design by a devious mastermind..it's almost certainly 80% accident and luck. It is purely ORGANIC, real, and took it's own course. It created itself, but the FANS did it, not the Artists..the Fans steer the ship.
This appeals to me, simply for the freedom it offers. We can pretty much try whatever we want, with no Marketing Department telling us how their sales charts say it's a bad idea. It is more responsive and reactive to the FANS in a more immediate way than ANY adult porn BDSM outlet EVER has been..I mean really guys...do you think those "reader letters" in the front of all the porn mags are written by...READERS? Oh f@ck no, please. You do realize that it's vastly different here at DoF, right? Can you just Email Hugh Hefner any time? You think he would actually TALK to you?
I have been part of big Corporate ships a few times in my career, and I would like to NEVER EVER go back to that model. It's always driven by clueless managers, and steered by a Boss with His own Agenda, with NO freedom of expression or room for outside ideas.
So Naj.....WRITE YOUR SCRIPT. You can. Nobody says you CAN'T. Do you think ideas like "War Slaves" would have been embraced by any "big" publisher, in the middle of the Iraq/Afghan occupations? Do you think taking the risk of "StarFuckers" would have been viewed as a good idea? Or "DragonSabre"?? Who would have bought into THAT? (I wrote that story in 1977..took DoFantasy to Green Light it). You have freedom here, USE IT.
One of us pencil-pushing artists will gladly illustrate it...that is actually the normal process. The script comes first.

[Cossack]

Are those published somewhere else? I'm asking because I like Geoff's writing, and, well .. it's not exactly raining such comics here...

Geoff has opened up a website of his own - http://www.whiteslaver.com/

Go there, support him! Buy his remastered novels! Read his awesome stories!

[STeve]

Naj. Bego generally sends me a script and I will illustrate it.

Geoff and I occasionally talk, but he rarely asks me to change things, mostly he will say he likes something or in the past that he wanted a certain character to look more "innocent", but day to day, it's just me and his scripts.

[Naj]

EGADS I'VE BEEN DISCOVERED. Actually I only write the sales blurbs for the comics that I also do textwork for, but Bego does send me comics to create sales copy for, Indefinite Detention being one example, from time to time. I've been meaning to say I definitely appreciated your kind words Roberts, especially those Bego relayed to me, but wasn't sure how to contact you directly. It always feels nice to have one's work appreciated.

Honestly I'm surprised that there was ever a point in time where it was the 15 story office building, but I guess I'm a youngin who never knew that kind of world (Mad Men has been showing me that kind of world, and though I'm unsure how true to form it is, it's definitely steered me away from the big-ship corporate model). I've always been a fan of history though, especially the untold stories, and hearing your perspective regarding the changes in the industry and Dofantasy in particular is great to hear. I'm still trying to adjust to how accessible the creators are here; it's a strange sensation. Heck, if you'd told me when I first stumbled across Dofantasy that I'd be working for them, I wouldn't have believed you. Living the dream I guess.

Roberts/Steve: Makes sense. I asked Bego to send me some examples of how the process is done here, and I think I have a decent enough grasp to try it out. She's assigned me with Lesbi K Leih once he's finished with his current workload which is fine because I'm still finishing up textwork for Slasher's upcoming, but I'm looking forward to it.

Been nice to talk to "co-workers" too, rather than just plugging away with the hum of the CPU fan in the background. This job can get kind of lonely sometimes, as I'm sure we all know.

[ROBERTS]

I'm old. Well, 59 actually...but I am old ENOUGH to have been part of that old school magazine world Naj...and yes, 15 story office buildings full of hard working stressed out people on impossible production schedules? Absolutely. A country of 350 million (go even back to the days of 200 million) can very rapidly put you on millionaires' row if your product is well liked. If it were not for the panic the online porn and dot-com era brought to Wall Street, we would likely be sipping exotic cocktails on the fantail off the coast of St. Maarten having this conversation buried in a small ship's worth of topless hotties..instead, beginning in 2002-03, online came under full attack to reel it back in and crush it's out of control income. If the Western governments and their Owners, the Global Mega Banks, would go back to 2001 policies and leave online commerce to simply do business, I would be dining with Richard Branson and discussing the interior design for his space base.
Instead, we see mysterious anomalies in our income controlled by credit card billing banks that place limits on how much we are ALLOWED to make, and wonder how in hell I could have thousands of members on a tiny obscure website 10 years ago, but now only a few hundred, with 10 times MORE people online...
Ah well, I'm ranting aren't I?
Yes Naj, I think Playboy once occupied a huge skyscraper in Chicago..all paid for by millions and millions of readers of one magazine at $3.95 each monthly. Playmate of the Year made the girl a $100,000 payday. Not any more.
The world of Adult/Porn is in massive flux...and we in the Online Porn part would be screaming along at warp 10 as bona fide starship billionaires were it not for Governments and Banks sitting on our heads beating us with hammers.

[Naj]

I think "billionaires" is perhaps a bit too optimistic. Even without government and banking regulations (of which I have no opinion as I have no experience regarding what you've said), there is a LOT of competition now, especially as BDSM is a niche market by its nature. Thousandaire, maybe.

[ROBERTS]

You can't get what you want, until you believe you can.

[fernandofan]

Wow. Great discussion. It is so cool to hear about the business side of DoFantasy and the online porn business. It sounds like there's a lot of bullshit going on with credit card companies that is limiting artists' revenue. That is unfortunate. It's hard enough for any artist to make money nowadays, but especially a pornography artist; it must be even harder due to the saturation of online pornography. Also, people are so full of shit in their squeamishness about porn, and I bet the ones who scream the loudest in opposition are secretly the biggest closeted fans of it---only they probably scarf it all for free from torrent sites and whatnot.

Glad that I can help support the artists I believe in. In that sense, there is great freedom in what the internet can offer, and fans can purchase comics from DoFantasy or become members of artists' personal pay websites. Whatever business model the artists here decide on---shorter comics, longer comics, other related products or websites---dedicated fans will do what they can to make the artists' efforts worth their while.

[ROBERTS]

Naj: The BDSM "niche" market has already created several internet millionaires. At one time, before the banks became Censors, I was mere chump change away from millionaire.