This is a pretty special deal – Madefire and deviantART could be a special relationship, with deviantART’s ready made community available to Madefire.
Exclusive partnership represents the next chapter of storytelling
San Francisco, CA – April 2nd, 2013 – Announced today, Madefire and deviantART
have formed a strategic partnership to provide unprecedented access through
deviantART’s creators and audience to the making and distribution of digital Motion
Books ™ published with Madefire’s highly respected publishing platform. The new
partnership formed between deviantART and Madefire, will turbocharge a next
generation of dynamic storytelling.
The alliance between the 5-star App Store-rated sensation Madefire and the massive
creative community of deviantART brings together the toolset and delivery system to
reach a global audience. The walls of the traditional comic book world, limiting artistic
access to the tools of production and distribution, have now fallen. Madefire and
deviantART have seized the power of the digital space to introduce the next generation’s shared cultural mythos with stories and characters that will move across the screen of imagination with incredible sound and fury.
“DeviantART and Madefire will provide the ultimate story engine, by bringing creators
and readers together,” said Ben Wolstenholme, co-founder of Madefire. “The Madefire app for iOS has had a storming response, and now we are moving to the web with deviantART and enabling a new generation of storytellers.”
The deal consists of a creative partnership where the entire deviantART creator community is given unlimited access to Madefire’s revolutionary, browser-based publishing platform to create and distribute content while individually controlling the price point. Using deviantART’s Premium Content Platform, the content will reach an
enormous worldwide audience while taking advantage of the Platform’s built-in payment
and royalty systems fuelled by deviantART’s virtual currency. The content will also then
be available on mobile through the Madefire App.
“Madefire and deviantART share in the creator-first mission of empowering artists,
writers and visionaries to liberate their narratives,” said Angelo Sotira, CEO and Co-
Founder of deviantART. “It just looks so fantastic, exploding cells off the ‘page’ with the
pop vibrancy that the comics style had always suggested, but never achieved until now.”
As a special introduction, the first flight of Madefire books will be made available on the
Web through deviantART for 10 cents a piece – – the same price at which the world first
thrilled to Batman and Superman in black and white ink-soaked pages.
The Motion Books™ are available at http://browse.deviantart.com/motionbooks. The books will remain free on the Madefire App for iOS devices for a limited time.
As part of the agreement, Madefire will be the very first native motion-book reader on the deviantART platform. Madefire’s previously iOS app-only experience will now be available for web reading through madefire.com and deviantart.com. Top line publishers now will be able to distribute through to deviantART’s huge community with Madefire.
Enjoy Motion Books™ on your desktop by some of the top creators in the world working
with Madefire, like Dave Gibbons, Liam Sharp, Bill Sienkiewicz, and keep an eye out for
radical content by some of deviantART’s amazing community of storytellers from every
corner of the art world.
About Madefire
Founded in 2011 by Ben Wolstenholme, Liam Sharp and Eugene Walden, Madefire
provides artists and writers a publishing solution for iOS and the web, allowing creators to build their stories in an exciting new format called Motion Books. Madefire is backed by Toni Schneider, Partner at True Ventures and CEO of Automattic, the makers of the wildy popular blogging platform WordPress, with angel investors including Sina Tamaddon, former Senior Vice President of Applications for Apple Inc. The Advisory Board also includes industry leaders Mike McCue, CEO and Founder of Flipboard, Dave Gibbons, cocreator of Watchmen, the bestselling graphic novel of all time, and Bill Sienkiewicz, widely recognized as one of the greatest innovators of sequential art. For more information go to madefire.com.
About DeviantART
DeviantART was created to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist and art lover in all
of us. Founded in August 2000, deviantART is home to over 26 million registered
members worldwide and features an extensive platform used to exhibit, promote and
discover works and other members within a peer community. As the largest aggregator of creative talent on the Internet fuelled by over 150,000 daily submissions and an audience reaching 76 million monthly unique visitors, deviantART is one of the world’s largest websites enabling participation in the arts at a scale never imagined in the traditional art world.
