Koshk Comics, A New Approach to Reading Comics

By: Xiao Yu 

Apps have become an integral part of our everyday life and going digital seems to be an inevitable trend for many industries. In the past. when people talked about comics, they would usually imagine a “comic geek” burying his head into a thick comic book. However, Koshk Comics has challenged this traditional reading habit by providing digital comics for comic lovers with easy access.

Koshk Comics is a mobile app for digital comics available on smart mobiles and tablets. Through the Koshk Comics website, authors and artists can self-publish and distribute their artwork in digital markets, creating a platform for readers to read and purchase digital comics. The application devotes to building a community to integrate comic readers and artists.

Background

It all started in 2014, Amr Hussein and his team decided to do a consumer entertainment product. As the founder and CEO of Colors Company, Hussein wanted to create a flagship product that met the demand of the regional market. So they first started  running several pilots on Facebook. In June 2014, they released a 30-day digital comics series as a simple Facebook app, targeted for a general audience. The series contained different entertainment tracks such as Digital Comics, Mini games, Riddles, and Trivia challenges. Launching the pilot in the month of Ramadan as daily episodes reached 40,000 Facebook page fans and 10,000 app users (4,000 daily users).

Among all series of game tracks, the Digital Comics track was the hit with the most clicks by users. People have shown a great appetite for digital comics, but there was no mature and specialized product to meet their need in the market. That inspired Amr and his team to fill the gap. “The experiment has confirmed the willingness of “non-comics geeks” audience to read comics. Their problem was just that they could not find it.  Amr pointed out that for Comics readers: 1) they have limited places that sell printed comics. 2) In existing digital comics offerings, Arabic market is not served by comics-specialized products. 3) Reading comics on A4 paper size on the textbook apps is rather inconvenient.

Development

While analyzing the comics industry, they spotted the need at the other end  which was artists who are involved in creating comics. They include illustrators, colorists, inkers, and writers. As Amr noted, “They are unable to find each other easily without a comics-industry customized online community. They need a place to meet, collaborate, and create new comic books, they also need to save the huge upfront costs required to print, market and distribute printed comics. I think that’s the service we can deliver with Koshk,” he added.

After analyzing both supply and demand sides in the industry, Koshk Comics was created as an open platform for both readers and artists. Koshk is consumer centric, by designing the app the easiest way to enjoy visual works in any time: page size that fits the screen instead of traditional A4, safe publishing by using Panel Forms instead of PDF, friendly and elegant interface, and regularly updated story episodes with professional and independent art workers. On top of that, it helps artists to publish their creative artworks and visual stories online, which brings more exposure to them. It supports the creation of long comic books and graphic novels in episodes to facilitate the gradual authoring of content and provides independent artists with cost-cutting methods.

Now Koshk has ten early adopter artists and seven community partners in six different countries. The BETA version launched the application on Android and iPhone and as more than 1,000 users. The social media audience exceeds 50,000 fans on official accounts with increasing popularity. The marketing campaign for comic readers will be starting in the first quarter of 2016. “We are adopting a gradual launch strategy of the content and communities spreading across the first half of 2016, in order to secure the sustainability of new content promotions for app users”, said Hussein.

The next step Koshk wants to do is to furnish this online community to link artists, publishers, and readers together. Artists can get easy access to comic lovers, then those popular stories will have the attention from publishers who would be willing to get them published. Since those works already have broad audience base online, once they get published as physical books, they are highly likely to be considered as best sellers. It aligns with Koshk’s vision, “Our vision is to promote the regional comics industry throughout 2016, and create cross-culture integrations supporting worldwide comics artists” said Hussein.

Koshk has started building its community by organizing the international CairoComix festival in October 2015, in cooperation with the French Institute in Egypt, and the AUC Venture lab. It attracted more than two thousand visitors and more than five hundred artists from the Arab region, France, the United States and Spain. During the event, it launched the self-publishing website and connected with early adopter artists.

“Our focus during the first 18 months of operations is to promote the awareness of digital comics in both artists and fans communities, which is very challenging but the results we get every day add more odds of success to achieve the target expansion,” said Hussein. Koshk team points that though the current digital comics market in Arabic is relatively small, a huge potential is awaiting. Compared to other local competitors, Koshk excels by delivering the unique value to users.

Joining the AUC V-Lab was a boost to Koshk’s development in late 2015. “Throughout the V-Lab pool of mentors and advisers we were able to revisit and tweak our market strategy sharpening our product focus," Hussein concluded,  “We are working with many interns from both Arts and Business schools, and during next semester we are launching projects that provide practical and live experiences to students and fasten up the development of the product.”

As a startup company, Koshk is clear about what is ahead in the future. “We acknowledge the challenges we face in the comics business in terms of promoting content creation and building the local comics community, and we are executing a plan for that,” Hussein said. "It takes time for a promising product to grow mature from scratch and people can all look forward to its future development."

This article was previously published on AUC Vlab