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altcomix )
I've been thinking about self-publishing a comics series. In answer to a question on her A Distant Soil bulletin board, Colleen Doran responded with this depressing set of numbers:
Without first mover advantage, there are little or no profits in self publishing. The Johnny -come-latelys rarely make any money at all. Even veterans are hurting.
Witness the dead in the water sales of old timers like Elfquest and Cerebus. Cerebus once sold 50,000 copies, now it sells about 6,000. Elfquest just folded up shop and sold out to DC Comics. When they last published a comic book, it sold about 4,000, according to the Diamond charts. In other words, you're looking at average sales drops well in excess of 90% in a decade. The new EQ only sold about 11,000 copies, in full color. That is roughly 10% of what EQ sold when it went to Marvel in the 1980's, and about half of what the new Reign of the Zodiac sold. Not exactly burning up the charts, are they? Once they had first mover advantage--early forays into a new market with little competition. That isn't the case anymore.
Let me put it into these terms: if you've got a $2.50 comic and your discount is 70% (The Aardvark Vanaheim discount to Diamond is higher than that of most publishers), your take is only 75 cents per comic sold. If you sell 6,000 copies, you make $4,500. Your print costs will be about $3,600. That leaves you with $900 per issue. Shipping is going to be about $250. You're down to $650. Can't say what the office costs, phone calls, subscription costs, accounting, yadda yadda come to, I simply don't know, but let's say it's $300 per month.
Wow. Your comic book just made $300. That's it. Most self published comics must have that ridiculously high cover price just to make even a small amount of money, which is the reason you see so many $3 and $4 comics. Some people have slightly lower discounts than 70%, but it really doesn't make a huge difference at these numbers. If you've got, say, a 60% discount (fat chance for small fry companies), you would be making $6,000 for a $2.50 comic selling $6,000, which is not going to bring in enough money to send you dancing into the streets either. Most self published comics move no more than about 1,500. The top of the market, someone like Jeff Smith selling Bone, is probably moving about 20,000. I think he's top dog right now.
Back to the lower echelon creator's dilemna: you better hope your trade paperbacks are selling because 6,000 is considered good sales for a black and white comic and you can see there's just not much money in it.
That's where a book like Cerebus would be making it's money, of course. If we assume an annual sell-through of 500 copies per annum per book on 8 books ( and I think that's being generous in today's market since most of the sales in the direct market are frontlist, not backlist), and the books average $20 per, then the publisher take is $6 per copy. Production cost per book would be about $2 per copy, leaving a $4 estimated profit. $4, times 41 books per month average sale, times eight books, times twelve months brings in a whopping $15,744 per year. Divide with your business partner and background artist Gerhard, and Dave's trades bring in an estimated $7872 for his coffer.
Feel rich yet? He's doing it for the love at this point, which is, of course, why I do A Distant Soil.
If you didn't save your money in those wild, early 1990's, you are pretty broke. Even doubling, tripling or quadrupling this estimate doesn't make you rich. Multiply it five or even six times, just for kicks. You're barely scraping the middle class after taxes and expenses and one thing's for sure--there's no suites at the Ritz, no buckets of caviar and champagne, no year-round limo service, no months long stays in exotic locales. Kiss it goodbye. Especially if you didn't save and invest when you had the chance. Few did.
Even the frontlist sale on a major new trade doesn't bring in that much in the beginning since most of the profit goes to production cost. If you move a few thousand, you get a nice check, but that is the only nice check you are ever likely to see on your book unless it catched fire and sells like crazy. Most books simply trickle along and never move more than about 5,000 copies in their lifetime. And if you don't save some of that capital to go to reprint when you sell out, there comes a day when your sales are so low you cannot go back to press with your backlist. And into limbo your book goes.
Trade paperback collection sales bring in some money for self publishers, but nothing like they once did. Many trades move no more than 500 copies annually in the direct market on backlist. Nothing to write home about. If you have to swallow returns in the book trade, you are taking a big risk and some people have gone under dealing with book trade returns and distributor bankruptcies. The sad delay in the activity on A Distant Soil for the last two years is solely due to a distrubutor bankruptcy. No trade income, folks. I won't start seeing trade income again until November of this year. I worked for roughly two solid years with virtually NO income on A Distant Soil. The next person who tries to tell me that cartoonists are all about money and greed and fame is going to get hit upside the head.
Any idiot could sell a comic and make money in the early 1990's and late 1980's, and a lot of people did. The same people are now broke. The promotion of self publishing as some kind of money machine is not just irresponsible, it's simple false. Most people not only don't make any money self publishing, most people lose a lot of money self publishing.
I made money for some years. In fact, my mainstream page rates were so abominable at the time in history when the comic book industry was at its peak, I actually could make more money self publishing than drawing a book like the Silver Surfer for Marvel Comics, or even Amazing Spiderman, a book which, when I drew it, sold in excess of 300,000 copies. Combining my puny page rate with royalties, I honestly made more money self publishing A Distant Soil. There were mainstream artists at Marvel and DC whose page rates (excluding royalties) were ten times my own. I had every incentive to self publish.
However, when the marklet collapsed, and actually, a little before that, cash flow became precarious because many vendors (i.e. distributors) simply didn't pay up. I had about 14 distributors go bankrupt in six months. That meant my company was essentially without most of its income for at least six months. One of the things they rarely talk about when talking about self publishing is how vendors put the small company lowest on the totem pole when paying bills. If you don't have the operating capital to whether about six months with no income, you probably shouldn't be getting into self publishing today, unless you can acknowledge it as the expensive hobby it really is for most people. I'd bet your chances of profiting on a self publishing venture are about 1 in 500. If you just want to make a comic for people to read, put it on the web and save the printing dough. Take micropayments and paypal donations. Otherwise, if you can't financially face the risk, just don't do it.
I firmly believe that the money you may spend buying new computer equipment and getting adept with the machine, and just putting your comic on the web will be more worthwhile for most than self publishing your comic in print. At least you will have some useful skills and valuable equipment to show for it instead of a pile of unsold books in the garage and a lot of bills you can't pay.
This depresses the hell out of me, not only in terms of my own plans, but for the end of today's wonderful comics renaissance that it implies. Any other insights? Not talking fame and fortune here, but is it possible to make at least a meagre income self-publishing quality?
altcomix )I've been thinking about self-publishing a comics series. In answer to a question on her A Distant Soil bulletin board, Colleen Doran responded with this depressing set of numbers:
Without first mover advantage, there are little or no profits in self publishing. The Johnny -come-latelys rarely make any money at all. Even veterans are hurting.
Witness the dead in the water sales of old timers like Elfquest and Cerebus. Cerebus once sold 50,000 copies, now it sells about 6,000. Elfquest just folded up shop and sold out to DC Comics. When they last published a comic book, it sold about 4,000, according to the Diamond charts. In other words, you're looking at average sales drops well in excess of 90% in a decade. The new EQ only sold about 11,000 copies, in full color. That is roughly 10% of what EQ sold when it went to Marvel in the 1980's, and about half of what the new Reign of the Zodiac sold. Not exactly burning up the charts, are they? Once they had first mover advantage--early forays into a new market with little competition. That isn't the case anymore.
Let me put it into these terms: if you've got a $2.50 comic and your discount is 70% (The Aardvark Vanaheim discount to Diamond is higher than that of most publishers), your take is only 75 cents per comic sold. If you sell 6,000 copies, you make $4,500. Your print costs will be about $3,600. That leaves you with $900 per issue. Shipping is going to be about $250. You're down to $650. Can't say what the office costs, phone calls, subscription costs, accounting, yadda yadda come to, I simply don't know, but let's say it's $300 per month.
Wow. Your comic book just made $300. That's it. Most self published comics must have that ridiculously high cover price just to make even a small amount of money, which is the reason you see so many $3 and $4 comics. Some people have slightly lower discounts than 70%, but it really doesn't make a huge difference at these numbers. If you've got, say, a 60% discount (fat chance for small fry companies), you would be making $6,000 for a $2.50 comic selling $6,000, which is not going to bring in enough money to send you dancing into the streets either. Most self published comics move no more than about 1,500. The top of the market, someone like Jeff Smith selling Bone, is probably moving about 20,000. I think he's top dog right now.
Back to the lower echelon creator's dilemna: you better hope your trade paperbacks are selling because 6,000 is considered good sales for a black and white comic and you can see there's just not much money in it.
That's where a book like Cerebus would be making it's money, of course. If we assume an annual sell-through of 500 copies per annum per book on 8 books ( and I think that's being generous in today's market since most of the sales in the direct market are frontlist, not backlist), and the books average $20 per, then the publisher take is $6 per copy. Production cost per book would be about $2 per copy, leaving a $4 estimated profit. $4, times 41 books per month average sale, times eight books, times twelve months brings in a whopping $15,744 per year. Divide with your business partner and background artist Gerhard, and Dave's trades bring in an estimated $7872 for his coffer.
Feel rich yet? He's doing it for the love at this point, which is, of course, why I do A Distant Soil.
If you didn't save your money in those wild, early 1990's, you are pretty broke. Even doubling, tripling or quadrupling this estimate doesn't make you rich. Multiply it five or even six times, just for kicks. You're barely scraping the middle class after taxes and expenses and one thing's for sure--there's no suites at the Ritz, no buckets of caviar and champagne, no year-round limo service, no months long stays in exotic locales. Kiss it goodbye. Especially if you didn't save and invest when you had the chance. Few did.
Even the frontlist sale on a major new trade doesn't bring in that much in the beginning since most of the profit goes to production cost. If you move a few thousand, you get a nice check, but that is the only nice check you are ever likely to see on your book unless it catched fire and sells like crazy. Most books simply trickle along and never move more than about 5,000 copies in their lifetime. And if you don't save some of that capital to go to reprint when you sell out, there comes a day when your sales are so low you cannot go back to press with your backlist. And into limbo your book goes.
Trade paperback collection sales bring in some money for self publishers, but nothing like they once did. Many trades move no more than 500 copies annually in the direct market on backlist. Nothing to write home about. If you have to swallow returns in the book trade, you are taking a big risk and some people have gone under dealing with book trade returns and distributor bankruptcies. The sad delay in the activity on A Distant Soil for the last two years is solely due to a distrubutor bankruptcy. No trade income, folks. I won't start seeing trade income again until November of this year. I worked for roughly two solid years with virtually NO income on A Distant Soil. The next person who tries to tell me that cartoonists are all about money and greed and fame is going to get hit upside the head.
Any idiot could sell a comic and make money in the early 1990's and late 1980's, and a lot of people did. The same people are now broke. The promotion of self publishing as some kind of money machine is not just irresponsible, it's simple false. Most people not only don't make any money self publishing, most people lose a lot of money self publishing.
I made money for some years. In fact, my mainstream page rates were so abominable at the time in history when the comic book industry was at its peak, I actually could make more money self publishing than drawing a book like the Silver Surfer for Marvel Comics, or even Amazing Spiderman, a book which, when I drew it, sold in excess of 300,000 copies. Combining my puny page rate with royalties, I honestly made more money self publishing A Distant Soil. There were mainstream artists at Marvel and DC whose page rates (excluding royalties) were ten times my own. I had every incentive to self publish.
However, when the marklet collapsed, and actually, a little before that, cash flow became precarious because many vendors (i.e. distributors) simply didn't pay up. I had about 14 distributors go bankrupt in six months. That meant my company was essentially without most of its income for at least six months. One of the things they rarely talk about when talking about self publishing is how vendors put the small company lowest on the totem pole when paying bills. If you don't have the operating capital to whether about six months with no income, you probably shouldn't be getting into self publishing today, unless you can acknowledge it as the expensive hobby it really is for most people. I'd bet your chances of profiting on a self publishing venture are about 1 in 500. If you just want to make a comic for people to read, put it on the web and save the printing dough. Take micropayments and paypal donations. Otherwise, if you can't financially face the risk, just don't do it.
I firmly believe that the money you may spend buying new computer equipment and getting adept with the machine, and just putting your comic on the web will be more worthwhile for most than self publishing your comic in print. At least you will have some useful skills and valuable equipment to show for it instead of a pile of unsold books in the garage and a lot of bills you can't pay.
This depresses the hell out of me, not only in terms of my own plans, but for the end of today's wonderful comics renaissance that it implies. Any other insights? Not talking fame and fortune here, but is it possible to make at least a meagre income self-publishing quality?
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no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:27 am (UTC)Doran is essentially correct -- there are two things she doesn't mention though. 500 sales of the tpb per year is the backlist sale in the direct, so what are the sales up front? If you have a marketable product, you can sell a few thousand up front. The idea is to maximize sales in the first 90 days and sock that money away. Backlist money is "free money" -- product has to roll out fairly frequently.
Clearly, the comic pamphlet is dead. You may want to start online, develop and audience, and then release a tpb that they can buy directly from you, solving the problem of wholesale discounts for at least some of your print run. Then word of mouth will fulfill bookstore and DM orders.
Further, the DM is dying. Bookstores are where its at. The trick to handling returns is to take them into consideration in production -- develop a per unit cost and price point where if you can print 5000, sell only 2500 and still make money. You'll need to get an account with Ingram or another distributor -- there are ways to do that that don't normally cost money up front.
The other alternative is print on demand. You save on inventory costs, but the per unit cost is much higher and doesn't scale downwards as you increase print runs. If you are going to sell fewer than 500 tpbs per year at first, POD is wortwhile. Once you're fulfilling more than 1000 orders, you should definitely go offset.
Doran makes a mistake in describing the first mover advantage. Cerebus and Elfquest didn't make money because they were early self-publishers, but because they were very good, marketable books. They became very shitty, stupid books, which is why their sales dropped. The competition is certainly more keen today, but as long as you don't go bugfuck insane and start going on about the "female void", you're likely to retain more of your audience that Sim did.
Hope that helps. My primary experience is in the adult book trade, not comics, though comics are an interest of mine, so I know more about bookstores and POD.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-09 11:29 am (UTC)The real money is, of course,in the licensing. Fish Police, Sam And Max, t-shirts for Hot Topic, etc. Even a shitty cartoon that lasts for three weeks will make a lot more money than a few years of self-pubbed comics.
Marketable characters, that's where it's at.
Why not submit work to Top Shelf, D&Q, etc. At least you don't need to put up your own risk capital that way.