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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.