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Post by rich on Sept 20, 2024 3:28:16 GMT -5
When WAS the last actual new character in Marvel and DC? There are some popular derivative characters (Kamala Khan at Marvel, Jon Kent at DC) but even they are both 10+ years old now. Kong Kenan maybe? (Still derivative) DC tried a few things not that long ago with a diversity goal (I read the Vigil.. not the other ones), but those didn't last or make an impact) Marvel had that manga-ish series (Zero, was it) but that seemed really generic. No reason anyone with a good idea would give it to Disney or Time/Warner. It feels like the big 2 are now where you go to get enough rep to convince Image/IDW/Dark Horse to let you write your REAL idea and hope you're the next Walking Dead Marvel and DC are where you go to get the best page rates (and even their page rates have not kept up with inflation) if you are trying to make a living making comics and don't have gigs outside comics or enough of a back catalog where you get residuals to support yourself, especially artists who can usually only do 1 book a month. It's steady work, you don't have to worry about not getting paid by a fly by night publisher or a company with cash flow issues (looking at you IDW) and there's enough of an editorial and production staff in place you don't have to take on all the extra work of actually getting the book made and to market yourself. I'm putting the rest of my post behind spoilers. Longtime forum members have seen most of it before, so I will offer to spare them having to see it again. Those who haven't seen it who don't want to look at things like the business realities of comics instead of looking at comics through happy nostalgia glasses can't simply skip over it without clicking on the spoiler tag and be on their way.
Image doesn't pay page rates (some of the studios within Image like Top Cow might, but not Image itself. It pays creators on the back end (i.e. a percentage agreed upon in the contract after the book is published and sold). Dark Horse, BOOM! do page rates and offer creator participation and ownership options (with various different levels of strings/clauses in their contracts, but their page rates are typically lower than Marvel and DC because they are smaller publishers. IDW is in the news about page rates lately as one of the internal memos was leaked from their new publisher saying they only want to pay $200 per page total to all creatives involved (i.e. $200 per page to split between the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist and editor combined), especially on licensed books. The publisher also hints that if creators are paid less but offered royalties, they will be more incentivized to promote their books and IDW can save on marketing costs as well.
James Tynion IV made a conscious effort to create new characters for the Batman mythos when he was on the book yielding characters like Punchline and Clownhunter, Bendis did Naomi, etc. but these were creators who all had steady income streams outside the books they are doing for Marvel/DC and had the luxury of doing so. None of those characters seemed to remain prominent after the writer's tenure on them ended either (though Punchline was just the main antagonist in the recent Gotham City Sirens book DC did that wrapped up this month.
There's a catch 22 at work as well-comic fans seem to perceive any new characters created by a creator for the big 2 as a "Mary Sue" or being part of some woke agenda is the character isn't a straight white male (see all the online reaction to Naomi) and reject the character from the time it is announced and never actually buy the characters in print. Especially if they see the new character as getting attention or marketing at the expense of one of their beloved characters who isn't being featured currently or doesn't have their own book. It's actually a very hostile environment in which to try to create new characters right now, especially since the bulk of marketing anything in comics falls on the shoulders of the creators, not the publishers, and social media is the primary venue to try to promote it and a cesspool of negativity fueled by the toxic segment of fandom. And any book is liable to be labelled a cash grab if it doesn't fit within the narrow band of "acceptable" books to that fanbase.
The biggest problem is that there are simply not enough comic readers out there to make a mass market publishing plan centered on periodicals sustainable, and what readership does exist is mostly nostalgia fueled and focused on existing favorites in terms of characters and titles. Some have suggested the cut down the books they offer to focus on quality not quantity here as well. If they make fewer books, they will get fewer sales because the customer base is so small (and we have had the discussion of why customer base entry began the moment that newsstands decided not to carry comics any more and the comic industry chose to focus on the direct market with it's niche destination based shops as their primary outlet and did nothing to create a new discovery market to replace newsstands and thus ensured they would no longer draw in enough new readers to replace those who aged out, lost interest or died off in the long run). On top of that, they failed to keep up with market changes where the print periodical became a dinosaur format that lost its appeal to the mass market as a whole (not just comics) and only appealed as a nostalgia product to those who grew up with it, a huge barrier to drawing new customers despite the popularity of the content in other formats. Fewer books (and no variants) will simply result in fewer sales to the existing customer base each month. And since the balance of economy of scale is already working against publishers because of the small size of print runs (one of the reasons you do variants is to raise print run totals and keep economy of scale at bay to keep per unit costs manageable), which keeps margins small, you have to move volumes of units to make a line profitable. Moving fewer units also hurts your retail partners who are also working on tiny margins. (Those who have been here a while have seen me remind folks of this before but that $4 comic only nets the publisher $1. Publisher sells it to distributor for $1, who sells it to retailer for $2, who sells it at $4 but also pays shipping on it eating into their margins...some variables for discount % apply but that's the principle of how the distribution market works).
Reducing the size of the lines would mean lower profitability for the line as a whole coupled with a loss of jobs as there are fewer books to make-lower profits and higher costs mean page rates likely have to be cut, which would lead to talent flight to other industries so no it would not result in better books as your best talent would leave the field. Fewer books to sell also means fewer sales for your retailers and since so many comic retailers are barely scraping buy would result in the closure of many shops shrinking your outlets, and reducing your overall sales in the process, which will then also move economy of scale further against you raising per unit costs even more. The only way to combat that is to get an influx of new readers, except the main barrier to that is you have no discovery market for new readers to fond your product (and losing what outlets you have when shops close even though they are not discovery markets to begin with) and you are stuck with a format that has no traction or appeal in the mass market for you to possibly be sold in a place where new readers might be. Young adult graphic novels have been one of the biggest growth markets in publishing over the last decade, but periodicals are not part of that market model, and thus Marvel and DC has missed out on most of the growth of new readers that have been created with it (DC has had some minor success there with books tailored specifically for the youth market but not with their mainline though the compact editions they are rolling out seem like they might get some traction in that market).
The biggest issue as I see it (in my unprofessional personal perspective) is that where comic publishers need to go to find growth and new readers is somewhere existing long term comic readers do not want to go. They are nostalgic readers and want to read the characters they grew up with in the format they discovered comics in and don't want to let go of that. The problem is those readers have been aging out, dying off or changing life circumstances for the last 30 years and there has not been new customers coming in to take their place. Potential new readers don't want that format, don't want to have to go to a destination niche shop to find their books and don't want to wait a month or more between tiny installments of the story. Traditional comic publishers are caught in the middle-it's not cost effective to do 2 lines to try to please both, and picking one of the other leaves a customer base too small now to be sustainable.
Periodical comics keep getting more expensive for a number of reasons-in addition to printing, paper and salary costs rising, the smaller the print runs and the fewer books you print overall, the more economy of scale works against you to increase per unit cost for printing, making margins smaller and smaller. Small press books done outside traditional distribution (crowd-funding con sales etc.) are now reaching the $10-15 per issue mark because of small print runs and high per unit costs. Direct market books are headed into that territory, in the not too distant future (bigger page count issues are already hitting the $7.00 and $9.99 mark in the direct market) which will cause the customer base to shrink more (those prices go against the nostalgic sensibilities of long-term readers who want to pay mass market prices even though comics have become a niche market product).
Fans tend not to give a crap about any of this though as they do not like to think of comics as a business. They don't want to think of creators being horridly underpaid or having their creations essentially stolen from them and exploited for millions of which they never saw a penny. They just want their fix, and that cognitive dissonance between those twe perspectives creates a lot of unrealistic expectations, which leads to a lot of disappointments and bitterness.
-M I'll just focus on one point- if it's true that publishers only get 1/4 of the sale price, despite paying for the full production from inception to printing, I can't see how there's any profit in it for them what so ever. In the UK, back in the 80's, when top selling UK comics like Transformers sold as many copies to a population 1/10 the size of modern America as today's best selling US comics, publishers got over half the cover price. Shops got about 1/3. Surely modern distributors don't make infinitely more profit on each title than publishers?! |
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Post by Icctrombone on Sept 20, 2024 4:17:13 GMT -5
Marvel and DC are where you go to get the best page rates (and even their page rates have not kept up with inflation) if you are trying to make a living making comics and don't have gigs outside comics or enough of a back catalog where you get residuals to support yourself, especially artists who can usually only do 1 book a month. It's steady work, you don't have to worry about not getting paid by a fly by night publisher or a company with cash flow issues (looking at you IDW) and there's enough of an editorial and production staff in place you don't have to take on all the extra work of actually getting the book made and to market yourself. I'm putting the rest of my post behind spoilers. Longtime forum members have seen most of it before, so I will offer to spare them having to see it again. Those who haven't seen it who don't want to look at things like the business realities of comics instead of looking at comics through happy nostalgia glasses can't simply skip over it without clicking on the spoiler tag and be on their way.
Image doesn't pay page rates (some of the studios within Image like Top Cow might, but not Image itself. It pays creators on the back end (i.e. a percentage agreed upon in the contract after the book is published and sold). Dark Horse, BOOM! do page rates and offer creator participation and ownership options (with various different levels of strings/clauses in their contracts, but their page rates are typically lower than Marvel and DC because they are smaller publishers. IDW is in the news about page rates lately as one of the internal memos was leaked from their new publisher saying they only want to pay $200 per page total to all creatives involved (i.e. $200 per page to split between the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist and editor combined), especially on licensed books. The publisher also hints that if creators are paid less but offered royalties, they will be more incentivized to promote their books and IDW can save on marketing costs as well.
James Tynion IV made a conscious effort to create new characters for the Batman mythos when he was on the book yielding characters like Punchline and Clownhunter, Bendis did Naomi, etc. but these were creators who all had steady income streams outside the books they are doing for Marvel/DC and had the luxury of doing so. None of those characters seemed to remain prominent after the writer's tenure on them ended either (though Punchline was just the main antagonist in the recent Gotham City Sirens book DC did that wrapped up this month.
There's a catch 22 at work as well-comic fans seem to perceive any new characters created by a creator for the big 2 as a "Mary Sue" or being part of some woke agenda is the character isn't a straight white male (see all the online reaction to Naomi) and reject the character from the time it is announced and never actually buy the characters in print. Especially if they see the new character as getting attention or marketing at the expense of one of their beloved characters who isn't being featured currently or doesn't have their own book. It's actually a very hostile environment in which to try to create new characters right now, especially since the bulk of marketing anything in comics falls on the shoulders of the creators, not the publishers, and social media is the primary venue to try to promote it and a cesspool of negativity fueled by the toxic segment of fandom. And any book is liable to be labelled a cash grab if it doesn't fit within the narrow band of "acceptable" books to that fanbase.
The biggest problem is that there are simply not enough comic readers out there to make a mass market publishing plan centered on periodicals sustainable, and what readership does exist is mostly nostalgia fueled and focused on existing favorites in terms of characters and titles. Some have suggested the cut down the books they offer to focus on quality not quantity here as well. If they make fewer books, they will get fewer sales because the customer base is so small (and we have had the discussion of why customer base entry began the moment that newsstands decided not to carry comics any more and the comic industry chose to focus on the direct market with it's niche destination based shops as their primary outlet and did nothing to create a new discovery market to replace newsstands and thus ensured they would no longer draw in enough new readers to replace those who aged out, lost interest or died off in the long run). On top of that, they failed to keep up with market changes where the print periodical became a dinosaur format that lost its appeal to the mass market as a whole (not just comics) and only appealed as a nostalgia product to those who grew up with it, a huge barrier to drawing new customers despite the popularity of the content in other formats. Fewer books (and no variants) will simply result in fewer sales to the existing customer base each month. And since the balance of economy of scale is already working against publishers because of the small size of print runs (one of the reasons you do variants is to raise print run totals and keep economy of scale at bay to keep per unit costs manageable), which keeps margins small, you have to move volumes of units to make a line profitable. Moving fewer units also hurts your retail partners who are also working on tiny margins. (Those who have been here a while have seen me remind folks of this before but that $4 comic only nets the publisher $1. Publisher sells it to distributor for $1, who sells it to retailer for $2, who sells it at $4 but also pays shipping on it eating into their margins...some variables for discount % apply but that's the principle of how the distribution market works).
Reducing the size of the lines would mean lower profitability for the line as a whole coupled with a loss of jobs as there are fewer books to make-lower profits and higher costs mean page rates likely have to be cut, which would lead to talent flight to other industries so no it would not result in better books as your best talent would leave the field. Fewer books to sell also means fewer sales for your retailers and since so many comic retailers are barely scraping buy would result in the closure of many shops shrinking your outlets, and reducing your overall sales in the process, which will then also move economy of scale further against you raising per unit costs even more. The only way to combat that is to get an influx of new readers, except the main barrier to that is you have no discovery market for new readers to fond your product (and losing what outlets you have when shops close even though they are not discovery markets to begin with) and you are stuck with a format that has no traction or appeal in the mass market for you to possibly be sold in a place where new readers might be. Young adult graphic novels have been one of the biggest growth markets in publishing over the last decade, but periodicals are not part of that market model, and thus Marvel and DC has missed out on most of the growth of new readers that have been created with it (DC has had some minor success there with books tailored specifically for the youth market but not with their mainline though the compact editions they are rolling out seem like they might get some traction in that market).
The biggest issue as I see it (in my unprofessional personal perspective) is that where comic publishers need to go to find growth and new readers is somewhere existing long term comic readers do not want to go. They are nostalgic readers and want to read the characters they grew up with in the format they discovered comics in and don't want to let go of that. The problem is those readers have been aging out, dying off or changing life circumstances for the last 30 years and there has not been new customers coming in to take their place. Potential new readers don't want that format, don't want to have to go to a destination niche shop to find their books and don't want to wait a month or more between tiny installments of the story. Traditional comic publishers are caught in the middle-it's not cost effective to do 2 lines to try to please both, and picking one of the other leaves a customer base too small now to be sustainable.
Periodical comics keep getting more expensive for a number of reasons-in addition to printing, paper and salary costs rising, the smaller the print runs and the fewer books you print overall, the more economy of scale works against you to increase per unit cost for printing, making margins smaller and smaller. Small press books done outside traditional distribution (crowd-funding con sales etc.) are now reaching the $10-15 per issue mark because of small print runs and high per unit costs. Direct market books are headed into that territory, in the not too distant future (bigger page count issues are already hitting the $7.00 and $9.99 mark in the direct market) which will cause the customer base to shrink more (those prices go against the nostalgic sensibilities of long-term readers who want to pay mass market prices even though comics have become a niche market product).
Fans tend not to give a crap about any of this though as they do not like to think of comics as a business. They don't want to think of creators being horridly underpaid or having their creations essentially stolen from them and exploited for millions of which they never saw a penny. They just want their fix, and that cognitive dissonance between those twe perspectives creates a lot of unrealistic expectations, which leads to a lot of disappointments and bitterness.
-M I'll just focus on one point- if it's true that publishers only get 1/4 of the sale price, despite paying for the full production from inception to printing, I can't see how there's any profit in it for them what so ever. In the UK, back in the 80's, when top selling UK comics like Transformers sold as many copies to a population 1/10 the size of modern America as today's best selling US comics, publishers got over half the cover price. Shops got about 1/3. Surely modern distributors don't make infinitely more profit on each title than publishers?! The profit would be from the revenue generated by selling ad space in the actual book. They don't share that with anyone. |
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Post by rich on Sept 20, 2024 4:45:04 GMT -5
The profit would be from the revenue generated by selling ad space in the actual book. They don't share that with anyone. Someone (Kirkman?) said that ads generated so little income in comics as to be nearly inconsequential, and barely worth defacing the issues with. They mainly serve at this point to pad out a comic to the full 36 pages, if true. |
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Post by Icctrombone on Sept 20, 2024 4:49:38 GMT -5
The profit would be from the revenue generated by selling ad space in the actual book. They don't share that with anyone. Someone (Kirkman?) said that ads generated so little income in comics as to be nearly inconsequential, and barely worth defacing the issues with. They mainly serve at this point to pad out a comic to the full 36 pages, if true. Maybe Kirkman is referring to his books in the last 10 years. The books that I read growing up had many ads , as opposed to the Image books. |
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Post by rich on Sept 20, 2024 5:48:00 GMT -5
Comics don't sell enough any more, and certainly don't reach the demographic advertisers might expect. Rather than 10 different comics being purchased for 7 or 8 children, you have all 10 ending up in the hands of one 50 year old. Manga sells better- that usually doesn't even feature adverts, does it? (I'm out of the loop there- the last time I browsed Manga in a shop was ten years ago in Japan!)
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 20, 2024 5:52:42 GMT -5
I could never totally switch to digital comics because using an iPad to swat a mosquito isn’t really practical. I’m not risking a £300 iPad being broken because a mosquito is annoying me. There, I said it. Give up paper comics and you lose a good method of getting rid of such nuisances…
(This is humour brought to you by a Brit who has never told a good joke in his life)
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 20, 2024 13:14:03 GMT -5
Marvel and DC are where you go to get the best page rates (and even their page rates have not kept up with inflation) if you are trying to make a living making comics and don't have gigs outside comics or enough of a back catalog where you get residuals to support yourself, especially artists who can usually only do 1 book a month. It's steady work, you don't have to worry about not getting paid by a fly by night publisher or a company with cash flow issues (looking at you IDW) and there's enough of an editorial and production staff in place you don't have to take on all the extra work of actually getting the book made and to market yourself. I'm putting the rest of my post behind spoilers. Longtime forum members have seen most of it before, so I will offer to spare them having to see it again. Those who haven't seen it who don't want to look at things like the business realities of comics instead of looking at comics through happy nostalgia glasses can't simply skip over it without clicking on the spoiler tag and be on their way.
Image doesn't pay page rates (some of the studios within Image like Top Cow might, but not Image itself. It pays creators on the back end (i.e. a percentage agreed upon in the contract after the book is published and sold). Dark Horse, BOOM! do page rates and offer creator participation and ownership options (with various different levels of strings/clauses in their contracts, but their page rates are typically lower than Marvel and DC because they are smaller publishers. IDW is in the news about page rates lately as one of the internal memos was leaked from their new publisher saying they only want to pay $200 per page total to all creatives involved (i.e. $200 per page to split between the writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist and editor combined), especially on licensed books. The publisher also hints that if creators are paid less but offered royalties, they will be more incentivized to promote their books and IDW can save on marketing costs as well.
James Tynion IV made a conscious effort to create new characters for the Batman mythos when he was on the book yielding characters like Punchline and Clownhunter, Bendis did Naomi, etc. but these were creators who all had steady income streams outside the books they are doing for Marvel/DC and had the luxury of doing so. None of those characters seemed to remain prominent after the writer's tenure on them ended either (though Punchline was just the main antagonist in the recent Gotham City Sirens book DC did that wrapped up this month.
There's a catch 22 at work as well-comic fans seem to perceive any new characters created by a creator for the big 2 as a "Mary Sue" or being part of some woke agenda is the character isn't a straight white male (see all the online reaction to Naomi) and reject the character from the time it is announced and never actually buy the characters in print. Especially if they see the new character as getting attention or marketing at the expense of one of their beloved characters who isn't being featured currently or doesn't have their own book. It's actually a very hostile environment in which to try to create new characters right now, especially since the bulk of marketing anything in comics falls on the shoulders of the creators, not the publishers, and social media is the primary venue to try to promote it and a cesspool of negativity fueled by the toxic segment of fandom. And any book is liable to be labelled a cash grab if it doesn't fit within the narrow band of "acceptable" books to that fanbase.
The biggest problem is that there are simply not enough comic readers out there to make a mass market publishing plan centered on periodicals sustainable, and what readership does exist is mostly nostalgia fueled and focused on existing favorites in terms of characters and titles. Some have suggested the cut down the books they offer to focus on quality not quantity here as well. If they make fewer books, they will get fewer sales because the customer base is so small (and we have had the discussion of why customer base entry began the moment that newsstands decided not to carry comics any more and the comic industry chose to focus on the direct market with it's niche destination based shops as their primary outlet and did nothing to create a new discovery market to replace newsstands and thus ensured they would no longer draw in enough new readers to replace those who aged out, lost interest or died off in the long run). On top of that, they failed to keep up with market changes where the print periodical became a dinosaur format that lost its appeal to the mass market as a whole (not just comics) and only appealed as a nostalgia product to those who grew up with it, a huge barrier to drawing new customers despite the popularity of the content in other formats. Fewer books (and no variants) will simply result in fewer sales to the existing customer base each month. And since the balance of economy of scale is already working against publishers because of the small size of print runs (one of the reasons you do variants is to raise print run totals and keep economy of scale at bay to keep per unit costs manageable), which keeps margins small, you have to move volumes of units to make a line profitable. Moving fewer units also hurts your retail partners who are also working on tiny margins. (Those who have been here a while have seen me remind folks of this before but that $4 comic only nets the publisher $1. Publisher sells it to distributor for $1, who sells it to retailer for $2, who sells it at $4 but also pays shipping on it eating into their margins...some variables for discount % apply but that's the principle of how the distribution market works).
Reducing the size of the lines would mean lower profitability for the line as a whole coupled with a loss of jobs as there are fewer books to make-lower profits and higher costs mean page rates likely have to be cut, which would lead to talent flight to other industries so no it would not result in better books as your best talent would leave the field. Fewer books to sell also means fewer sales for your retailers and since so many comic retailers are barely scraping buy would result in the closure of many shops shrinking your outlets, and reducing your overall sales in the process, which will then also move economy of scale further against you raising per unit costs even more. The only way to combat that is to get an influx of new readers, except the main barrier to that is you have no discovery market for new readers to fond your product (and losing what outlets you have when shops close even though they are not discovery markets to begin with) and you are stuck with a format that has no traction or appeal in the mass market for you to possibly be sold in a place where new readers might be. Young adult graphic novels have been one of the biggest growth markets in publishing over the last decade, but periodicals are not part of that market model, and thus Marvel and DC has missed out on most of the growth of new readers that have been created with it (DC has had some minor success there with books tailored specifically for the youth market but not with their mainline though the compact editions they are rolling out seem like they might get some traction in that market).
The biggest issue as I see it (in my unprofessional personal perspective) is that where comic publishers need to go to find growth and new readers is somewhere existing long term comic readers do not want to go. They are nostalgic readers and want to read the characters they grew up with in the format they discovered comics in and don't want to let go of that. The problem is those readers have been aging out, dying off or changing life circumstances for the last 30 years and there has not been new customers coming in to take their place. Potential new readers don't want that format, don't want to have to go to a destination niche shop to find their books and don't want to wait a month or more between tiny installments of the story. Traditional comic publishers are caught in the middle-it's not cost effective to do 2 lines to try to please both, and picking one of the other leaves a customer base too small now to be sustainable.
Periodical comics keep getting more expensive for a number of reasons-in addition to printing, paper and salary costs rising, the smaller the print runs and the fewer books you print overall, the more economy of scale works against you to increase per unit cost for printing, making margins smaller and smaller. Small press books done outside traditional distribution (crowd-funding con sales etc.) are now reaching the $10-15 per issue mark because of small print runs and high per unit costs. Direct market books are headed into that territory, in the not too distant future (bigger page count issues are already hitting the $7.00 and $9.99 mark in the direct market) which will cause the customer base to shrink more (those prices go against the nostalgic sensibilities of long-term readers who want to pay mass market prices even though comics have become a niche market product).
Fans tend not to give a crap about any of this though as they do not like to think of comics as a business. They don't want to think of creators being horridly underpaid or having their creations essentially stolen from them and exploited for millions of which they never saw a penny. They just want their fix, and that cognitive dissonance between those twe perspectives creates a lot of unrealistic expectations, which leads to a lot of disappointments and bitterness.
-M I'll just focus on one point- if it's true that publishers only get 1/4 of the sale price, despite paying for the full production from inception to printing, I can't see how there's any profit in it for them what so ever. In the UK, back in the 80's, when top selling UK comics like Transformers sold as many copies to a population 1/10 the size of modern America as today's best selling US comics, publishers got over half the cover price. Shops got about 1/3. Surely modern distributors don't make infinitely more profit on each title than publishers?! I worked in a comic ship my junior year in college, volunteered at two other shops owned by friends, one in CT and one here in OH, and seriously considered investing in that friend's shop back when I was living in CT, I did my due diligence into how distribution works. I also was the "publisher" of the school's publications, yearbook etc. when I was teaching back in the late 90s/early 2000s and got a crash course of the economics of publishing as we had to manage per unit costs and conrol economy o scale to do so. I'm not an expert and don't claim to be, but I have a grounding in the basics of how it all works. I was also an economic historian (focused mostly on ancient and medieval, and early modern cultures and their economies), which helps me look at things with a certain perspective of how some of these systems work on a bigger scale, and how to try to place facts in context of the overall systems at work. Granted, I left academia years ago, so I'm certainly out of touch with more contemporary theories. But I know what retailers pay per book-it's s sliding discount, smaller accounts getting about 1/2 of msrp as as discount and bigger accounts getting as much as 50% or more off msrp. I've also talked to Diamond (and Capital back when they were in business about the pricing tiers. I've also worked in places where I saw how clothing retail distribution worked and its pricing structure-the standard is doubling the price at each level, so the producer gets 1/4 of the retail price. It's not unique to comics, that the standard distribution model for pricing tiers. Amazon has altered that slightly (they buy so much in bulk they get better prices so they can pass on better prices but that means the producer gets less per unit not more. But that's pretty much how wholesale pricing works. It's why some producers began to run their own storefronts in the internet age, and cutting out the middleman increases your cut, even if you have to pay to operate the storefront, but an internet storefront is much more manageable than a brick and mortar one. And getting full retail rather than 255 improves margins considerably, even accounting for infrastructure costs. It's part of the reason why comic publishers always offered subscriptions, it was their storefront to sell directly to the consumer and why they could offer discount, because they were cutting out the middle man. But the tiny margins on comics is a big reason why newsstands stopped carrying them. They didn't pay for the space they took up on the floor and they could use the space to stock more profitable goods instead. (standard retail theory, you total all your expenses in a month or year-rent, costs of goods, utilities, labor, insurance, etc. then divide that number by the number of square feet in your store. That yields a dollar amount each square foot has to produce to break even. If the goods you are selling take up x square feet, they need to exceed the cost of that space, usually by a factor of at least 2 to cover the space that is left open for employees and customers to move in your store. If it doesn't produce that amount, it is losing you money to carry it, so you stop and get different products for that space. Through much of the 70s, comics weren't paying for the space they took up in a lot of newsstand vendors. It's part of the reason DC started experimenting with bigger formats-the 50 and 60 cent giants and the dollar books like World's Finest and GI Combat in the late 70s and early 80s, trying to find a format and price point that made their newsstand vendors want to carry the books. Marvel's Giant Size books were another such experiment. But yes, that is how comic pricing structure works and what % of retail publishers get. -M But yeah, knowing wholesale/retail pricing structures and understanding how economy of scale affects per unit pricing are absolute musts if you want to run a publishing company that distributes its product to retail, and why so many ideas by fans about how to run or improve comics companies are doomed form the get go because they don't understand how the actual business works and their ideas would bankrupt the company within a year because they don't account for those factors in their "business" plan. It's why a lot of comic shops fail, as their owners don't understand how publishing or retail actually work, and it's why a lot of creative do not do well when they get into administrative roles at comics companies, because they don't account for the business realities in their business plans. Others have thrived in such roles, and some had a steep learning curve before they did. It's one of the reasons Jeanette Khan was able to make such an impact when she came to DC, she understood the ins and outs of publishing and selling product at retail so was able to institute policies that improved the business model DC employed, and then brought in people who understood the creative side (Giordano and Levitz) to manage the talent and creative aspects of the business. But it's a side of comics that many fans are wholly ignorant of (and even tell-alls like Marvel the Untold Story don't illuminate the nuts and bolts of the business side of it. |
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Sept 20, 2024 13:53:55 GMT -5
I'll just focus on one point- if it's true that publishers only get 1/4 of the sale price, despite paying for the full production from inception to printing, I can't see how there's any profit in it for them what so ever. In the UK, back in the 80's, when top selling UK comics like Transformers sold as many copies to a population 1/10 the size of modern America as today's best selling US comics, publishers got over half the cover price. Shops got about 1/3. Surely modern distributors don't make infinitely more profit on each title than publishers?! But, as MRP points out, it's true. I just finished reading Comic Book Implosion by Keith Dallas about the infamous DC Implosion. There's a lot in there about the sales part of comic book publishing. In the newstand era the profit to the publishers was literally pennies per book. And the profit to retailers was pennies per book. That's why so many retailers were moving away from selling comics to try to put something in that spot that would actually make them some money. DC's attempts at higher priced books was to try to get them to make more of a profit for retailers so that they would handle the books. The cost of comics was kept artificially low for decades by cutting pages and then when 32 pages became the norm, cutting story/art pages for more ads. Other periodicals simply raised prices but kept the page and ad count relatively stable. |
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Post by rich on Sept 20, 2024 17:52:54 GMT -5
I've also worked in places where I saw how clothing retail distribution worked and its pricing structure-the standard is doubling the price at each level, so the producer gets 1/4 of the retail price. Seems strange to me to compare comics with clothing to suggest 1/4 of each equates to the same thing. When I lived in China most of my friends were buyers that dealt in fashion items. Clothing is incredibly cheap to make- a $40 Nike T-shirt can be produced for sub $1, and even if the factory is paid $1.50 for their trouble that still leaves a good few dollars profit for Nike (assuming someone else is selling it for them). A comic sadly doesn't cost 10-15 cents to produce. The margins are comparatively pathetic. |
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Post by rich on Sept 20, 2024 18:02:17 GMT -5
So, companies are expected to pay all the creators, pay their business overheads, pay editorial and production staff and pay to have a comic printed, and still make profit on a single dollar? How much do you think it costs to print a comic? Or are comics just merrily produced at a loss for later trade sales? Plus a few pennies for ads?The printing cost is what hinges on any profit at all being made. When I mentioned the realities of comics in the 80s in the UK, that was just relaying what I'd read on the subject. I'm not old enough to have been employed in that decade. If Marvel UK had received only 1/4 of 30p, and had to pay for printing out of that, on much better and bigger paper than American comics of the time, that wouldn't have left enough to pay the bills. 🤷🏼♂️ makingcomics.com/2014/10/20/royalty-percentage-creator-owned-comics/ This article pegs distributor costs at 16% for a creator owned title, less than the estimated 25% above. Add to the power of DC/Marvel and ai suspect it's lower still for them. This article also pegs the publisher as taking home 11% of the cover price, after printing, so about $44k on a $4 comic that sells 100,000 copies. Not much profit in that... no wonder the industry struggles. Edit: For post-beer maths failures 😅 |
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 20, 2024 19:24:48 GMT -5
So, companies are expected to pay all the creators, pay their business overheads, pay editorial and production staff and pay to have a comic printed, and still make profit on a single dollar? How much do you think it costs to print a comic? Or are comics just merrily produced at a loss for later trade sales? Plus a few pennies for ads?The printing cost is what hinges on any profit at all being made. When I mentioned the realities of comics in the 80s in the UK, that was just relaying what I'd read on the subject. I'm not old enough to have been employed in that decade. If Marvel UK had received only 1/4 of 30p, and had to pay for printing out of that, on much better and bigger paper than American comics of the time, that wouldn't have left enough to pay the bills. 🤷🏼♂️ makingcomics.com/2014/10/20/royalty-percentage-creator-owned-comics/ This article pegs distributor costs at 16% for a creator owned title, less than the estimated 25% above. Add to the power of DC/Marvel and ai suspect it's lower still for them. This article also pegs the publisher as taking home 11% of the cover price, after printing, so about $11k on a comic that sells 100,000 copies. Not much profit in that... no wonder the industry struggles. Publishing is a business where you make your money on volume of sales not margins on individual issues. That's why in the 70s and 80s, books that only moved 100K units a month were demoted to bi-monthly or cancelled (the last statement of ownership before it was cancelled showed Power Man and Iron Fist was selling somewhere around 120K a month, which was not good enough to keep it from being cancelled. Cost to print depends on size of print run. The more copies you print, the less the per unit cost becomes. That's the essence of economy of scale. Comics publishers make more money from licensing than from publishing. For big companies, like Marvel & DC, publishing acts like an IP farm and R&D department and their value comes in maintaining trademarks, and creating characters and stories that can be exploited in other more profitable mediums and product lines. Advertising in the books defrayed some of the costs. In the days before the direct market, you get even less per copy because you had to eat the cost of unsold copies from the newsstand, the direct market ensured there were no returns on unsold copies, and that's one of the reasons why publishers now print to preorders on most books, to ensure there are no unsold copies distributors don't buy. It's also why a lot of trades don't stay in print as evergreens (storage & warehousing of unsold copies are additional expenses that eat into those margins). But yes, publishers do have to pay all the creators, overhead, infrastructure, printing, shipping, insurance, etc. out of the 1/4 of MSRP because that's what distributors pay and distributors have to make their money, and retailers have to make their money too. Without either of those, your product doesn't get to market and you make no money. As sales per title shrunk, publishers need to make up the difference for volume by publishing more titles. Variants help beef up print runs as well. And since it's all non-returnable, once the distributor buys it, there are no returns or cuts in margins. Publishers customers are not readers, they are distributors. Distributors customers are retailers. Retailers cannot return unsold copies to distributors. Readers are the retailers customers. They are the on who burden all the risk on unsold copies. Anything they don't sell, they have to eat. Brian Hibbs, one of the most prominent and knowledgeable retailer/columnists in the biz estimates retailers have to sell 4 out of every 5 copies they order to break even when all costs (rent, salary, utilities, insurance, shipping, etc.) are figured in, so any profit the shop makes comes from the fifth copy sold. But comics are a product that goes through middle men on their way to market, just as clothing is. That produce for pennies on the dollar doesn't figure in all the other operating costs in clothing manufacturing. That's the cost to produce the product itself, not to pay management, rent, utilities, shipping, insurance, legal fees, marketing, etc. etc. so the margins may be slightly better than comics, but not much, and the double at each level of distribution model is still the norm. Some industries with more controlled substances can vary from the norm (when I worked at a liquor store in grad school in Connecticut, the state regulated alcohol prices, and there was only a 10% mark up at retail form distribution and retailers had to work within that margin, making volume of sales all the more important for profitability. But yes, despite how odd it seems, that is the level of margins comic publishers have to operate with. A $3.99 comic that sells 50K copies yields the publisher approximately $200K of revenue from sales (ads would provide more). Standard page rate of $200 per page for 20 pages for a penciller ($4K, $100 per page for writer & inker each (another $4K) and probably $100 combined for letterer & colorist ($2K) means it costs about $10K of that goes to creators. Cover artists make a higher page rate, so that could be another $1-2K depending how many variants you are commissioning. The other $185-190K is split towards paying editorial & production staff, publishing, marketing, support staff, rent, etc. that no single title has to cover but gets paid form the entire line. Reprints of the book in hardcovers and/or trades, digital sales that don't have the same kind of middleman structure, subscriptions to Marvel Unlimited, etc. all contribute to that retail revenue pool. Page rates are estimates based on industry averages that have been put out their by various sources. An established creator like John Romita Jr. is going to get a higher page rate than a newcomer on his first book, so it's all approximations for the sake of providing a tangible example for the math. The theory is that a bigger name creator will increase sales enough to defray the higher page rates. There are provisions for royalties, but you have to hit certain thresholds before they pay out. And many comic creators hold day jobs or other sources of income to make ends meet. Bendis (and many other creators) teaches classes at university, the Kubert brothers help run the Kubert school. Many artists take commissions from fans. Some bigger names get appearance fees form conventions. Sales from their tables at conventions provide income as well. Some lucky ones will get residuals for characters they created appearing in other mediums if such was the policy when they created the character (otherwise it's at the whim of the publishers parent company). But yeah, there's not a lot of profitability in publishing. That's part of why the constantly exploit their back catalog and why movies, TV, and toys/licensing are so important to the publishers. It's not a kumbaya industry where milk and honey flows for all involved. You can make a living doing it, but only publishers are going to get rich, and it won't be from sales of periodicals. -M |
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 21, 2024 3:24:38 GMT -5
I don’t believe there’s a member on this forum - or a comicbook reader on the planet - who isn’t aware of the realities of comic publishing and sales.
With all due respect to those who post about such things, I believe every reader is aware of these things, but people can and do express things emotively. We all do about various topics. Expressing something emotively and being aware of the realities of business aren’t mutually exclusive. I’m sure every reader knows that comic stores and publishers are businesses that are required to make money.
I believe Person A could say this:
“I am fully aware of business realities, profit margins, overheads, etc.”
I also believe Person A, while knowing the above, can also say this:
“I do wish there were fewer Marvel books, I wish there were fewer crossovers, I wish my favourite character could get a book, etc.”
The first comment is an acknowledgement of reality; the second comment is an emotive, engaging comment. It’d be very boring - in comic stores and online - if we couldn’t express a desire - even an unrealistic one - for fewer books, cheaper comics, etc. One can be both aware of reality and emotive about such things. Both should be fine to discuss and express.
You could think about it with other topics. Getting back to our hypothetical Person A, let’s imagine he says this:
“I am aware of the business realities of electric cars, and I am aware of how much they cost and why they cost that much.”
That’s logic, but Person A can be aware of that and also say the following:
“I do wish EVs were cheaper, and I also wish there was more charging infrastructure.”
Every one of us has surely expressed emotive views about, say, the cost of fast food today, or why we wish there were fewer X-Men books. A bit of wish fulfilment and emotive discussion is fine, and I absolutely do not believe that people expressing such views are ignorant about the realities of publishing and comics. Any business exists to make money after all. I could comment on how I wish I owned a house AND also be aware of the realities of the housing market. People are entitled to their views (either way), but I don’t believe any reader expressing emotive views on how they’d like comics and publishers to be is unaware that it’s all business.
After all, in my ideal world, Catman would have an ongoing book, comics would cost under £1, and there’d only be events every four years. That’s my emotive response - and one that could lead to light-hearted discussions. Not everything needs to be seen through the lens of business. Business discussions are interesting and very insightful, but, you know, sometimes we may just want to healthily vent about the cost of comics and the amount of X-Men crosssovers.
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Post by Cei-U! on Sept 21, 2024 3:58:18 GMT -5
I don’t believe there’s a member on this forum - or a comicbook reader on the planet - who isn’t aware of the realities of comic publishing and sales. My experience says you're wrong. The vast majority of comics fans don't know and don't care about those realities and actually resent it if you point them out. The folks here at CCF are remarkably knowledgeable about the industry, which is why I love being part of this community, but we are most definitely the exception to the rule.
Cei-U! I summon the plain truth!
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Post by driver1980 on Sept 21, 2024 5:28:20 GMT -5
It is a shame if that is true. You’d think reality - the bricks and mortar they see in front of them - would be a clue, as would the existence of things like business rates, rent, etc.
But I’m sure you’re right. I have heard similar things about other industries. I don’t really use buses, but in my hometown, bus companies have held off price rises for a long time - even retaining some fares - but some increases were necessary. And you might read comments on FB pages such as, “Greedy bus companies, pure £4 profit from my ticket.” Erm, yes, and diesel needs to be paid for, plus bus driver salaries, maintenance, etc.
I use a local hardware shop for my DIY needs, and one guy I knew said something like, “I can’t use them, they are so much more expensive than online stores.” Yes, but unlike a bored billionaire or two, the shop’s owner has to pay business rates, rent, carry visible stock, etc. Of course that wood cutting tool is going to be cheaper online, but being financially viable as a business isn’t optional for the hardware store owner I know of - he has to charge more.
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Post by MRPs_Missives on Sept 21, 2024 11:29:06 GMT -5
It is a shame if that is true. You’d think reality - the bricks and mortar they see in front of them - would be a clue, as would the existence of things like business rates, rent, etc. But I’m sure you’re right. I have heard similar things about other industries. I don’t really use buses, but in my hometown, bus companies have held off price rises for a long time - even retaining some fares - but some increases were necessary. And you might read comments on FB pages such as, “Greedy bus companies, pure £4 profit from my ticket.” Erm, yes, and diesel needs to be paid for, plus bus driver salaries, maintenance, etc. I use a local hardware shop for my DIY needs, and one guy I knew said something like, “I can’t use them, they are so much more expensive than online stores.” Yes, but unlike a bored billionaire or two, the shop’s owner has to pay business rates, rent, carry visible stock, etc. Of course that wood cutting tool is going to be cheaper online, but being financially viable as a business isn’t optional for the hardware store owner I know of - he has to charge more. It's not just comics, we live in a world where many people expect reality to conform to their expectations rather than adjust their expectations to reality. If the reality doesn't conform to what they want it to be, they ignore it or shout down those who point out the reality. Denial is normative in many. -M |
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