The lesson for all content creators in the Amazon/Comixology debacle

Diversify your content distrubution.

I realize we’re not all nerds out there (too bad for you, non-nerds!), so let’s start with a quick primer on the Comixology situation.

Comixology has quickly become the defacto platform for distributing comic books in digital form. It works great, and the big publishers (DC and Marvel) and smaller publishers use the platform to sell both new comics and back issues.

Comixology offered a particularly great user experience through its iPhone and iPad apps. Comics can be read using this cool guided view feature that leads the reader panel by panel through a book.

Perhaps best of all for publishers, it was really easy to impulse-buy comics using the iTunes in-app buying feature. Click the buy button, get the comic, bill hits your iTunes account.

Frictionless buying. As a result, Comixology was the top-grossing iPad app in 2013.

Then, about a month ago, Amazon bought Comixology. Very quicky, Comixology changed its app so iOS users could no longer buy comics through the app.

Amazon doesn't want to pay Apple its 30% fee iTunes fee. So Amazon said to hell with users. It said to hell with publishers who finally saw a path forward to bring comics into the digital age.

Now, users can only buy through Comixology’s web site, and then go back and sync their iOS app.

Clunky. Lots of time and extra steps which give users pause to consider whether they really want to buy something.

Digital comic buying is much more like the real world now, where comic readers have to find an actual comic shop somewhere, visit the planet on which it resides, and then buy a book. It’s often a pain.

Goodbye, frictionless buying process. Goodbye, volume. Good luck, publishers.

When you rely on a third party for content distribution (regardless of whether your content is free, like videos and blog posts, or available for purchase, like comic books), understand the risks. You serve at the whim of that third party. We see it with Facebook, which keeps making it harder (read: more expensive) for businesses to get their content to users.

But you need to get your content in front of an audience. That takes leveraging the third parties that have those audiences.

Never rely on just one. Twitter or Pinterest or any site can make a change and smack you down, devastate your business, and/or cripple your ability to reach your audience.

Diversify. Use multiple third-party services. And have a content hub you own that holds your best stuff.

That way no one company can send you reeling.