Publishing Comics on Maliven
Maliven accepts comics on the same terms as prose. They appear in the main catalog, in search, and on the shelves, not in a separate section with a fraction of the traffic. If you draw adult or taboo comics, you can publish here without adapting your work to a platform that was designed for something else.
What we accept
Upload a PDF, a CBZ, or a ZIP of page images. All three ingest directly through the standard upload flow at your dashboard — select Comic as the format and drop the file.
The upload size limit is set high deliberately, because comic files are large. Page count and resolution are up to you; there is no imposed ceiling on either. If you have a file that fails to upload, contact support rather than downscaling it — we would rather raise the limit than have you degrade your work.
Covers work the same as prose. Upload one, and it is what readers see on the shelves.
Royalties and payment
You earn 70% on every sale. That rises to 75% for as long as you keep at least one free title live in your catalog. The rate is snapshotted at the moment of each sale, so a sale made while your free title was up pays 75% even if you take it down later.
Keeping a free title live is strongly recommended, not required. It is the single most effective thing you can do for discovery: readers who pick up something free from you are dramatically more likely to buy the rest. Free downloads register in your dashboard as real acquisitions and feed into Trending and Bestselling placement, so you can see the traction even though those reads do not pay directly.
Payouts run on your schedule, with an opt-in automatic option:
- Bitcoin over Lightning — $1 minimum, paid from our own node
- Bitcoin on-chain — $10 minimum
- Zelle or Cash App — $10 minimum, paid manually in USD
Adding both a Lightning address and a Zelle or Cash App handle is worth doing. It lets you draw from whichever pool has funds at the time, which avoids waiting on a conversion.
Pen names
You can publish under up to five pen names from a single account, managed at your pen names page. Pen names are not linked to each other publicly, and readers see only the name attached to the work. If you draw across genres with different audiences, this is how you keep them separate.
Content policy
One rule, applied without exception:
No minors. Any character who reads as a minor results in removal of the work and a permanent ban. There is no appeal process and no argument about stated or canonical ages — apparent age is what governs.
If a subject is adult but thin, petite, or short, that is fine and stays up. Where there is genuine doubt about apparent age, the work is removed with no penalty to you — no strike, no ranking effect, no mark on your account. We keep a log of those decisions.
Beyond that, we do not have a taste committee. If your work is legal and depicts adults, we host it. We do not maintain a list of forbidden themes, and we do not quietly demote work we find distasteful.
How enforcement works
There is no strike system. There is no hidden score. There is no per-author ranking penalty anywhere in the platform — we have audited for it specifically.
If something is wrong with your work, you get a notice in your dashboard explaining what and why. If it happens again, you get a plain warning. If it continues after that, the account closes. Three visible steps, in that order, every time.
AI disclosure
There is a disclosure option on upload for AI-assisted work. We ask you to use it honestly. We do not restrict AI-assisted comics — the disclosure exists so readers can filter by their own preference, not so we can filter for them.
Why publish here
Maliven runs on infrastructure we own. Author payouts come from a self-hosted Lightning node, which means no intermediary sits between the platform and your earnings with the power to decide your subject matter is a liability. Card payments route through a closed-loop credits system that never exposes the content to a processor.
That architecture is the reason our content policy is one paragraph and has not changed since launch. We are not passing along terms handed to us by someone else, so there is nothing to tighten when the pressure shifts.
We are smaller than the platforms most artists in this space have already been through. What we offer instead is that the rules you publish under today are the rules you will be publishing under next year.