Recently, I received a phone call from someone affiliated with one of the major Comic Conventions. Daniel and I had applied for an Artist Alley table and were refused- according to the email we received, it was implied that Robot 13 wasn’t as good as the other books represented by those who were chosen for the spaces. The salesman on the other end of the call, however, wanted to sell me a booth space for almost 2 grand. Although he was quite dodgy about it, at least part of the decision in NOT giving us a table was THEY felt Blacklist was “successful” enough to afford to spend a grand on a booth.

Today’s lesson in Failure (and New Math) is: Comics Are A Commodity Item.

Not that long ago, I spoke to you about how to properly price your comics, taking into account cost of goods and resale issues. Today I want to look at the other end of the equation, which is what does that translate to for YOU. While I mentioned that how many copies you print will, in most cases, translate to a cheaper per-issue cost, it still leaves you with a fixed amount of inventory with a fixed cover price.

For argument sake, let’s say you found a way to print 2000 copies of a single issue, full color comic with a $4.00 cover price, and let’s say that your total cost is $1.00 a copy. Depending on how you look at it, your inventory is valued one of two ways. In a wholesale situation, you have $4000 worth of comics- remembering of course that you are selling those books to stores at 50% of cover price. From that, you can expect to make a MAXIMUM of $2000, because your $1.00 cost per book takes $2000 off of the total right off the top. If you didn’t figure postage and packaging into that $1.00, however, that $2000 is reduced by whatever the real shipping figures are, making the profit potential that much less.

If, on the other hand, you sell all your books directly, then you have $8000 worth of books, giving you a $6000 max profit from book sales. If you sell via mail order, in most cases the buyer is paying for shipping, so if you properly calculate that, you will get the whole cover price to work from. What is there to calculate? Shipping books to people isn’t just postage- you have to try and make sure that the books get to their destination “damage free.” What constitutes “damage free” is VERY subjective, however, and if you do your own mail order long enough, you’ll have plenty of horror stories.

Take, for example, what happened when Daniel and I first started doing mail order. We got an order for a large number of copies of issue 1 going to one person. To us, this was awesome because we were selling them at cover price & the person was paying postage as well. Once the books arrived, however, we started getting complaint emails. While I packed these books like they were going to make it to World War 3, the person on the receiving end was unhappy. In his letter, he spoke of “massive damage” and said some books were in “unreadable condition.” All well and good- “send me back the books,” I said, “and I will replace them.”

When I got the books with “massive damage” in “unreadable condition” back, I couldn’t find a thing wrong with them. When I emailed the person back about this, I was told to find the damage in question it took a magnifying glass and that, “most untrained people couldn’t find it.” As a matter of curiosity, I took the books to a comic shop that had on staff a professional Comics grader- that person found all the comics to be near mint except one, and that one comic almost made the grade…

Point being- Mail order & selling your books directly aren’t an easy way to go.  What magnifies that in the case of Comics, is that while they are treated as a “collectible,” they are really a commodity item. In printing, there is always an “acceptable” amount of misprinting, damage and other imperfections that you must accept as normal usually somewhere from 5-10%. EVERY company that prints periodicals like comics or magazines has to deal with that and absorb it, and you have to as well. Your customers, however, don’t HAVE to live with your misprints and damaged copies- some may not care, but many will.

Let’s plug in the worse case and say that 10% of your books are imperfect enough to not sell. That means 200 copies of your original 2000 are not being sold, taking $400 to $800 out of your profit. No, that wasn’t a misprint- a book that doesn’t sell brings you back $0.00, and that means you not only don’t make a profit, you have to sell that many MORE books to break even.

And “break even” is important. Remember back when I kept stressing the phrase “MAXIMUM profit?” That’s because, believe it or not, there IS such a thing as never breaking even. Let’s assume that you printed 2000 books with a $4.00 cover price and you are selling them all through retail stores. The first 1000 copies you sell are doing nothing more than replacing the money it cost you to print, and that is IF the $1.00 figure holds AND you figured the cost of shipping and packaging into your cost of goods AND if all your figures aren’t based on costs that have gone up since you did your calculations….

Will YOU sell 1000 copies of your book? That’s hard to say. For arguments sake, however, let’s say you did one better and you sold your whole run minus the 10% that were imperfect. That will leave you with a grand total of $1600 profit. Well, it WILL leave you with that once retailers pay you. How long will that take? That depends on the retailer. Store owners are people- some people pay their bills quickly, some slowly, some not unless you threaten them and some not at all. Unless you know who you are selling to, there is no way to know if you lucked out and have a lot of responsible customers or a laundry list of deadbeats. In most cases, to be fair, retailers are good people and pay within a reasonable period of time. Just keep in mind these things DO happen.

So, for all your work and effort, you “made” a “profit” of $1600.

Now- at this point, nobody got paid yet. In a perfect world, you would pay everyone up front, and that cost would be figured into the per issue cost of the book. That’s how Marvel and DC and most companies do with their for-hire work, and that is also how YOU should operate if you are hiring anyone. That means whatever it cost you to hire talent has to come out up front and will eat into your profit.  In our example, you have $1600 to work with- meaning that if you don’t want to spend more than you bring in, you have to look at that and budget accordingly.

If you are hiring writers, pencilers, inkers, colorists, letterers and pre-press people, that doesn’t give you a lot to pay any one person, does it? That gives you 4 options- You can find people who will work for what you can afford, you can pay everyone what they ask for and figure out how to make the math work, you can do some or all of the aspects of creating a comic yourself and not pay yourself upfront or you can ask people to work for you and then just not pay them.

While 3 of the 4 options seem reasonable, the 4^th option is actually exercised more often than you might think. Many an artist or writer has signed a contract thinking they will get paid, only to find out that the structure by which their pay is determined is set up in such a way that they never see a dime or, in some cases, the publisher just doesn’t pay even though payment is due. As a rule of thumb- if you are working on someone else’s work, you should get paid before the book goes to print. If you don’t have that arrangement, I wouldn’t take the job… And by ALL means, before you sign ANYTHING, get yourself a lawyer! The couple of hundred bucks you spend will save you immeasurable down the road.

As for the other options- they are all viable depending on your situation. If, for example, you are up front with people and tell them that you can afford to pay them X, it’s up to them to decide if X is worth the work they will be doing. If you want to hire Jim Lee, your X needs to be a much greater number than if you hire a friend who does really cool mini comics, but in every case there is usually someone for just about every budget and project.

Say you decide up front you need to hire specific people regardless- then your cost per issue goes up. If, using our prior example, you are selling your $4.00 book to stores and your print run is 2000, then you have $1600 to work with IF you sell through. If that isn’t enough, the most logical step is to print and sell more copies. If you go from 2000 to say 5000 copies, that increase should not only give you more copies to sell but should also lower your per copy print costs as well.  Can you sell 5000 copies? Is 5000 even enough to break even or get you profit above all costs? That’s for you to figure out. All I can offer on this one is that you should be honest about your project. Will hiring Jim Lee help sales? Last time I checked, yes. Since you aren’t likely to hire Jim Lee, however, you need to see if the talent you CAN afford and hire will help sell your book at the level you need it to in order to make money.

The third option, however, is the most likely. When you own your own project, MOST of the time you are doing some or all of it yourself. In those cases you most likely will be “paying” yourself (or your co-creators) after the fact.

Why would you do that?

Well- when you are your own publisher, the money to run the business has to come from somewhere. If you put $2000 into printing a book and get $2000 back out, then best you can do is stay where you are in terms of print runs and such. Costs are ALWAYS on the rise, however, so even to stay at status quo you need to have a bigger bankroll tomorrow to duplicate what you did today. Where will that money come from? Your pocket, of course! And IF you have a “profit” from selling books, shouldn’t you use some or all of that FIRST before you reach into your own bank account?

What does this all mean?

It means that having a “successful” book from the fan perspective and even on the retail level doesn’t mean you will have much to show for it monetarily. And it may mean that you have to take what you DO “make” from  your books and put it back into pushing on to bigger and better things. Ignoring all the financial facts and believing your own hype is the quickest way to both Failure and the Poor House! So go ahead and spend money you don’t have and have no reasonable way of getting in the end! Remember- the road to Failure is wide and is lined with thousand dollar Comic Con Booths!

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