Censorship at Wowio?
I’m a small time comic book publisher. Brain Scan Studios doesn’t really have a particular genre, we just love publishing what we think are great comics. Recently Brain Scan Studios moved towards e-book publishing, it’s a business decision that I think many small publishers will move to and as the distribution options open up more ways to monetize the content will be available to publishers and the creators they publish.
Wowio caught our eye sometime last year, they had an interesting business model and there wasn’t a major barrier of entry for publishers (large and small) to get Wowio to “distribute” books to their audience. The only major negative was the requirement that folks had to be from the US. But being a small publisher we understood that getting any audience is better than none, so we signed up with Wowio. We had decent success.
All was well until several months ago, when Wowio mysteriously was shuttered and it was discovered that they were being purchased by Platinum Studios. A wave of nervousness ran through the ranks of publishers with books currently being distributed by the service, with questions on rights/ownership and payment changes.
Wowio relaunched resembling a web comics outfit with a store attached. The current site offers the ability to “sell” your product through them, either by traditional means with Wowio taking a cut of the income or offering the end user a free advertiser “sponsored” download of the publishers content. After combing through the contract additions with a fine toothed comb, we signed up to the “new” Wowio, because as we all know your content might be great but you need folks to distribute it to get it into the hands of the awaiting public.
So after all this exposition on the hows-and-whys of Wowio, here’s the crux of this blog post. Brain Scan Studios released a new comic anthology called “Serial“, by the talented team of David Hayes, Kurt Belcher, Kevin Moyers and others. The series is about real serial killers, it’s history, completely non-fiction about how twisted the mind of man can really be.
We submitted the book to Wowio and received this message several days later:
Thank you for submitting the book for review. We cannot post the book to the Web site due to the nature of the content.
Very odd I thought. I didn’t recall any content restrictions on Wowio, I assumed all the major taboos are rejected on the service but Serial doesn’t even have nudity. It’s violent but this is history. Men did what is being talked about it in this, it isn’t Jason or Leatherface, real people existed on our planet that did these things. On top of it all there’s an option during the book submission process that indicated whether or not the book was “mature readers”, which was selected for Serial. We resubmitted the book with the following comment:
Can I get some more details on why this was rejected? It’s a mature readers book.
We received the following a few days later.
The quality of the book is very good. However, the combination of serial killer content that is based actual events and comic book imagery is especially dark. We feel the instructional guide on how to strangle a victim and achieve sexual gratification in the Gacy story is too edgy. Also, the first person description of attacking, dismembering and consuming a victim in the Fish story, along with the thought process of deciding whether to sexually assault the victim, is not a good match for our comic book readership.
Whenever your book is rejected by Wowio you receive the administrators comments via email. So I responded back with the following:
Is there official documentation on what we can and cannot submit? I don’t recall content restrictions in the contract we signed. What also defines the term “Mature” during the submission process of a book?
This email bounced back. Wonderful. So I’ll resubmit Serial with my comments and see what I get back.
The question I have to ask, what is Wowio? Is Wowio a local store offering books and comics with a “Mature” section that it hides from public eye? If they follow that model then sure, they have the right to stock whatever they want. But I thought their tagline is “Free Books + Free Minds”? Which to me would indicate a very diverse set of content for a range of people.
I think that Wowio is nothing but a magazine. They have a ton of content that’s ad funded and they have to keep those advertisers happy. I’m wondering how much content has been “pruned” out of the new Wowio because of “mature content”. Because you know that Wowio’s advertisers don’t want their logos next to a book that they might be considered pornographic or extremely violent. (We could go into the delicious irony that a major sponsor of Wowio is EA video games, but that topic should be for another blog post.) What also got me in the prior comments by Wowio’s submissions department was this “…is not a good match for our comic book readership”, OUR comic readership? What do you mean OUR? That term is rather odd, isn’t the readership people looking for new content, whatever their tastes might be? Is Wowio claiming they only cater to certain people/demographics?
This won’t stop me from submitting content to Wowio, I’ll just have to be sure the content caters to their mysterious demographic. Another irony is that on Wowio our most popular books so far are Fiendish Fables and Humpday both falling into the “horror” genre. So there must be an audience for it on Wowio.
On a side note Serial is available in DRM free PDF format on Cruxy and Lulu.
Update: Serial is now also available in DRM free CBR format at Cruxy.
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Comments
Where exactly in the Wowio contract does it state that they will hold the exclusive rights to release content “sold” through their website in PDF format?
Well, good for us. Censored in the land of free speech. You would think that a book based on factual and historical events would make it through. Hell, the Albert Fish story was a letter written by Fish himself. Good times. In the words of Anthrax, “America the beautiful, land of the free. Don’t change the words to land of hypocrisy.”
Guys,
That’s crazy! I checked out the pages you posted to Flickr and the book look amazing! Having created “Jesus Hates Zombies”, I’m no stranger to controversial material, but as you’ve stated, this book is based on HISTORICAL FACT. It’s ludicrous that Wowio won’t distribute it.
Anyway, whatever means you end up choosing to distribute it, count me in.
And if you’re ever looking for another writer to work with, keep me in your thoughts! 
~ Stephen Lindsay
http://www.captionsandballoons.com
When we started ROK Comics (wwww.rokcomics.com), our comics to mobile project last year we included “safe content” filters so it would be possible for creators to post material that was more ‘adult’.
It’s self-certifying in that the the creator is expected to “R-Rate” their strip, but as this is the default setting when people create strips it’s not exactly hard to do and we’ve had no abuse of this so far 9and we can make strips “R-rated” if we think that’s required at an admin level. Off the top of my head, Chris Reynolds, who publishes “Moon Queen” and John Maybury, who publishes “Space Babe”, are two creators who have made use of this facility.
Isn’t distributing a PDF via Cruxy and Lulu a violation of the Wowio contract? If you signed the same contract I did, you signed away online PDF distribution rights… Right?