Here's the third part of our annual creator survey with a varied look from people in all aspects of the business from creators to publishers to journalists. As always, buried among the answers you will find a bunch of news items for the sharp eyed and also some preview art. In case you haven't noticed, our panel certainly did: 2015 was the year diversity broke around the comics industry, although much, much, much more needs to be done. Read on to see what our our respondents thought about the year past and what they have coming for 2016.
Over the last year or so, there’s been an increasing amount of talk in creator circles about the low page rates being given out by independent publishers for some of the smaller books. The last two or three years, publishers have been putting out a lot more titles than they used to and a lot […]
Disclosure: Todd Allen is a long-time contributor to this site, so read the following as advanced log-rolling if you will.
That said, the book he kickstarted over the summer, Economics of Digital Comics is out. I have an early digital copy and this is really a book everyone in the comics business should read, especially people going into various digital models, from crowdfunding to subscription to pay what you want. Allen casts a cynical eye on most of this stuff, and runs numbers to show what works and what doesn’t. But he also looks at print costs, and the economies of other channels to give a strong overview of what we talk about when we talk about selling comics in 2014. The book has new interviews with digital players and statistics on what webcomics earn from advertising, how much it costs to print books, what the big players take out of various delivery methods and more. All footnoted. And an introduction by Mark Waid, who has become something of the spokesman for Generation Digital.
I’ll have some more to say about specific parts of the books (including some that I disagree with) but this is definitely a conversation starter for what I suspect will be a very long talk about making money making comics in 2015, as a lot of people look at the most optimistic outlooks and weigh them against reality.
And here’s where to buy it:
In print — $19.99, or digital $9.99
Amazon/Kindle:
B&N
Or just go DIY with Gumroad in various digital formats (and yes the book talks about all of these) for $9.99
Interactive PDF
ePub3 for iBooks
ePub3 for Kobo
ePub2 for basic eReaders

Todd Allen – you know, the guy from this very website? – is taking his first project to Kickstarter. And true to form, not only will he be running the Kickstarter campaign himself… he’ll also be blogging about it. This is ‘The Economics of Digital Comics’.
Notable not just for offering you the chance to see what Todd really looks like, the campaign is for a new book he’s writing in which he delves into digital comics. Having written for Publishers Weekly for a long time, there aren’t many people who know as much as Todd does about comics retailing, and this whole new world of Kickstarters, webcomics, crowdfunding and Patreons could use a little explaining.
The Kickstarter has already crushed the goal, meaning if you jump onboard the Todd Allen train you’re guaranteed to get yourself a copy of the book. Hurrah!
Here's the third part of our annual creator survey with a varied look from people in all aspects of the business from creators to publishers to journalists. As always, buried among the answers you will find a bunch of news items for the sharp eyed and also some preview art. In case you haven't noticed, our panel certainly did: 2015 was the year diversity broke around the comics industry, although much, much, much more needs to be done. Read on to see what our our respondents thought about the year past and what they have coming for 2016.
What about TPBs of the comics they’re printing?
There is obviously printing costs and staff/production costs but the creative costs of writing/drawing/etc.. have already been paid for. I expect royalties are being paid to some members of the creative team, but they are a percentage of sales.
Is there an average TPB order amount for comics selling in the 4000 – 5000 range? What’s the average sale price? Royalties percentages? Is there a long tail of sales for these books with blips of reorder activity when subsequent TPB volumes come out?
Great analysis, and the numbers ring true. Making indie comics is a tough gig, and only sustainable if you can get into the higher print runs… our experience with our indie title is that digital sales still have a long way to go. Our ratio of print and digital is not close to 10%. Comixology and Gumroad are great ways to theoretically distribute your comic around the world, but buyers who reside outside the distribution area of your printed comic book still need to know about your digital title in order to buy it. And that takes marketing dollars.
This is article highlights why i think publishing your comics on the internet is better. Webcomics help you reach a large number of people for very little. Thanks to services like Patreon and Kickstarter it is getting easier to get people to support the things they love. If you can get your foot in the door I’m sure print is awesome, but don’t discount disregard Webcomics.
“What about TPBs of the comics they’re printing?”
1. With these numbers, how many indie publishers have the resources for a TPB program? One that can keep TPBs in print for years?
2. If you’re selling 5,000 or less of a $4 comic, exactly how many copies of a $15 or $20 TPB usually sell?
Mike
Jamie:
That question is VERY hard to answer from public data (and I remind BEAT-ers that http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/1850/icv2s-top-300-comics-top-300-gns-index is a wonderful link that everyone should bookmark for easy access to data) because the velocity of those kinds of GNs tends to be so low that they don’t actually show up on the charts.
I went back a year to Aug14 and scrolled down to the bottom of the chart looking for something I knew had a trade, and I picked DR SPEKTOR, which lists #3 as selling 5621 copies (FWIW #1 sold 16471, #2 sold 7318, and #4 didn’t chart… but Sep14’s chart cut off at 6300 copies)
The TP charts in Dec14 when it initially ships and sells… 443 copies. It never ever shows up on a sales chart again… which only means it didn’t sell between 4 and 500 copies in any following month. At a pure guess that might suggest roughly 1k copies total in month #1 into comics and all book channels combined. Knowing what I know as a bookseller, and how the long tail functions for “no brand” books, I’d hazard a guess that the print run for the trade was probably 2-3k therefore, and it’s probably fairly unlikely that when then sell out of those copies in 2-ish years that they would go back to press on the book due to velocity being so low.
Its profitable, sure — but only in a desultory way. No one is lighting cigars with $100 bills at those kinds of numbers.
Now, when you start talking about POPULAR properties, then the numbers can drastically swing the other way — SAGA sells like 60k-ish as a periodical release? v4 of the the TP came in at month #1 (Dec14) at like 24k, which probably means 60k or more including the book market, and Diamond shows reorders of 8400, 5100, 4400, 6300, 4800, 4400, and 2600 in the subsequent months (you can multiply that by, say, 1.2 to guess at bookstore sales) — or 150% or so of initials over the next 7 months…. but that’s SAGA, and virtually nothing else performs like that, and it would be extremely foolish to build a publishing plan around thinking you’re going to sell like SAGA :)
I think selling roughly 15-20% of your periodical sales as a TP on initials and then perhaps selling that much again over the course of the following entire year, is a much more realistic benchmark for how a low-circ book is going to function — and that tracks fairly well with how I expect most book-format comics seem to do in my strongly book-oriented retail environment.
-B
Don’t forget that many smaller publishers also sell books directly on their website as well as at cons and through other outlets, so sales figures on many of the trades can be higher and not show up in the bookseller indexes.
Hi Brian, thanks for responding.
I was pretty sure that low circulation books were not selling large number of trades and likely didn’t have that much of a long tale, but it is another revenue source that I think needs to be factored in when talking about how much money is being made from low circulation titles. It’s almost a given that books are going to be put into a trade and I would be surprised if a TPB brought in less money then the digital copy of the comic.
So assume 15% on a 4,000 selling low-circ book = 600 books
Assume Introductory $9.99 price for volume 1 = $5,994.00.
Again assume Diamond is taking 60% = $2,397.60 for the publisher.
I’m not sure what print costs, royalties and production costs would be. But it’s possible that the amount left over would be equal or greater than the supposed $800 – $1100 range for a digital comic.
These numbers are dead on. A small publisher will , most of the time, lose a lot of money on comics that sell under 5,000. Factor in the time to put it together, delivery and all the other small things and its a rough business out there.