Grimmbone
Comics are near and dear to my heart, but it worries me how the industry is faring right now.
Sales for comics aren't great, and prices are kind of ridiculous. $3.50 for maybe 30 pages worth
of content? That's a pretty poor entertainment to cost ratio since a single issue might last you 10 minutes.
30 pages? Where are you getting your comics from, Image? The standard content page count at Marvel and DC (and their subsidiaries) is 20. Sometimes you'll get extra pages in a backup story. Those other 12 pages are all ads.
Grimmbone
So it makes me wonder why the industry isn't pushing digital distribution harder.
Hard-line stubbornness and sheer, pants-wetting terror.
Grimmbone
We have sites like comixology where you can buy digital comics, but the prices are still usually stupidly high! Without printing costs, the price should be significantly lower. It boggles the mind.
Well... Printing isn't the only thing to factor into pricing. You have to pay the cost of the creative team to produce each book up front, and for just the creative staff that will be anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 dollars, or significantly higher depending on the artist.
The average rate for a mid-level mainstream penciler is something like $180 a page, inker is $140, a colorist is $70 (I'm low-balling these figures, rates vary a
lot. Some artists makes $250 for pencils, some make $500 for full art). That's $7,800 per issue to produce art. A writer will get $2,000, so we're now at $9,800. But, we need a cover too. A cover will cost you anywhere from $600 to a $1000. We'll keep lowballing and say $600. This is the cost of the creative staff. They'll have an editor who probably has an assistant, but they'll be working on several titles at once so this will have less of an impact. There will be a production team that assembles the book to make it print ready, a proof will be made, someone is in charge of shipping. We'll round up and say the cost of paying staff to put the book together only tacks another $3,000 onto the price. We're now at $13,400 for the initial cost of assembling the comic and sending it to the printer.
Our theoretical comic book is a mid-level superhero book, so let's say it's selling 38,000 copies a month. At a $3.50 cover price, the theoretical profit is $133,000. But wait! We're not buying comics from DC or Marvel. We're buying them from a comic book store, which buys them from Diamond. Diamond purchases the comics from a publisher for about 60% of the cover price. Our theoretical profit just turned into $79,800. Ouch. Well, that's not so terrible. That's $2.10 per book.
But that's if the book cost nothing to print. Most of the printing comic companies do is in Canada (smaller indie publishers send a book to China, but I know DC still uses Canada). Printing in North America is expensive. I don't know what it would cost to print books in that volume. We'll say it works out to a
very hopeful $.40 a copy. $15,200.
Our profit is now $64,600. Oops, no it's not. We still had to pay all those people beforehand.
$51,200
I don't know what it costs to transport the comics. I don't know how much companies comp for shipping, because when a penciler sends pages to an inker, the company pays the charges. I'm sure there are hidden costs I don't know about. That's not all pure profit either. The company uses it to pay for the accounting department, legal department, the ascending chains of editors and overseers...
Or, conversely, let's look at it this way. Let's be hopeful and say that digitally, the comic still sells 38,000. And let's say fans are willing to pay $2 for a digital copy of the comic. We're at $76,000 for profit, assuming there are no extra production costs. A digital distributor naturally takes a cut. I don't know what Comixology gets, but Apple gets 30%. We're at $53,200. Whoops, have to pay the artists.
$39,800.
Ouch.
I'm for digital distribution. But...clearly we have a problem. I tend to look at is as, "we must sell twice as many comics as we are selling now." I'm not sure the industry knows how to do that. They made a big push for that recently with the DCnU, but sales are leveling out. Sure, the top three books
sold more than 100,000 copies each, but take a look at that list. Number 10 only cleared 65,000. Fables is a good, solid Vertigo book. It sells consistently, it's critically acclaimed, it wins awards. It sells 17,000 copies a month. They make almost
all their money in the trades. So buying trade to catch up may be expensive, but that's where the bulk of the profit is. The future of comics isn't necessarily digital, it's in the trade paper backs. Most of the money made off trades is profit. A chunk goes to the creative teams as royalty money, but for the most part, because the book has already been assembled, edited and paid for once, it's a lot less initial cost to produce.
I believe that the monthly single issues are probably going to die out as they price their way ever more out of the reasonable reach of the average reader, lasering themselves onto an ever shrinking reader base. If there were more readers, and more profit to be found, I think the companies would be a lot less reluctant to make strong pushes into the digital market.
But right now? Sheer, pants-wetting terror seems to be most of their response.
