Each $2 e-book offers 100 Foxtrot comic strips

Syndicated Foxtrot comic strip creator Bill Amend, who two weeks ago took his "first steps into the worlds of e-books and self-publishing," has reported that his "Pad Pack" collection (three volumes of 100 strips each selling for $2 on the App Store) have made in two weeks about 25 percent of what his traditionally-published strip collections make in two years. The artist, who created the books entirely in iBooks Author, called the results "amazing."

Amend revealed the statistics in a Twitter post to followers, and said at the time he announced them that he was "really, really happy with how well they turned out," and plans to release additional volumes every few months. The iPad-oriented collections (which are offered at Retina Display resolution) mix black-and-white daily strips with Sunday color ones, and are loose collections not in chronological order but rather samplers across the years with some story lines and some stand-alone strips.

So far, Amend has offered three collections (volumes one, two and 3.14, the "extra geeky" edition), which he calls "mini-books that take maybe 20-30 minutes to read, and aren't bogged down with a ton of outdated references," a problem he said occurs more often in "my older, chronologically-arranged print books." The newspaper strip ran as a daily from 1988 until 2006, and now appears on Sundays only in hundreds of newspapers around the US.

Amend has been one of the few traditional strip cartoonists willing to experiment with digital publishing, and has forged relationships with several of the more notable webcomic cartoonists such as Scott Kurtz from PVP and PAX creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. Amend even did a "crossover" strip filling in for Kurtz in which characters from both comics meet, and has also done guest strips for Penny Arcade.

by MacNN Staff