moriarty@fluke.UUCP (Henry Vogel) (07/07/85)
First of all, a little info... As you know, the price you pay for a new comic
book is not what the dealer paid for it. The dealer usually pays only 60% of
the cover price - a $1.50 comic costs him 90 cents. The dealer, however, is
no who the publisher sells to - he sells to a distributor. The distributor
pays the publisher only 40% of the cover price or 60 cents for a $1.50 book
(I use $1.50 because that was the original price of the SKs). That leaves the
publisher 60 cents to cover ALL of his costs for producing the book. Here
is a breakdown of our costs for a print run of 5000:
Artwork $ 700 (includes pencils, inks, coloring of the cover)
Printing 2000 (includes full process color seperations for cover)
Shipping 300 (obviously, this fluctuates, 300 is a good average)
-----
Total $3000
The total figure is an average, sometimes the cost was slightly higher, some-
times slightly lower. The overall total rarely varied by more than $100 either
way.
Okay, we've spent $3000 creating, printing, and shipping the book. Now, let's
go one farther and assume we sell out. Gradually, the distributors payments
arrive. So, we sold 5000 comics at 60 cents each. That comes to... $3000.
As you can see, there isn't much profit there. That's one reason the Southern
Knights now cost $1.75 - so there will be SOME profit!
Why does it cost us so much to produce a black and white comic while Marvel
puts our color books for less then half our cost? The main reason is that their
print runs are so much larger than ours. The ONLY difference between printing
5000 copies and printing 300,000 is the presses stay on longer. The actuall
process of printing doesn't cost that much - the set-up cost is high, though.
The presses must be cleaned and then have the plates for printing put on them.
We have to absorb that cost within 5000 copies of a book while Marvel can
split it up among 300,000.
Some things I would do differently if I started knowing what I know now:
1) Try to find an artist to be part of our partnership. If we didn't have to
pay a penciller and inker each issue, we would make a rather nice profit.
As a partner, I get paid half of the profit (no page rate for writing and
scripting) - half of nothing doesn't amount to much.
2) I wouldn't offer to pay shipping to the distributors. They will try to get
free shipping if they can, but they will also pay shipping if they have to
(distributors will charge their customers shipping whether they get charged
shipping or not).
That's really all I would do differently, though.
I know this list of expenses isn't accurate for other publishers. It is, how-
ever, a good reflection of what the smaller companies are up against when it
comes to publishing comics. Their prices are higher, but it's not out of lust
for higher profits! I hope this sheds a little light in an area that has
remained in the dark too long...
Henry Vogel
henry%clemson.csnet@csnet-relay