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Why is it acceptable to pay $5 for a Marvel comic but unreasonable to pay $10 for an Indie comic? Mass-produced, mass-distribution comics are not a good benchmark for pricing Indie mags – price comparison is an irrelevance and a distraction.
What do you think?
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It’s a question of comparative pricing. I would not pay £8 plus £4 postage for a 24 page comic!! Indy creators do not have the following that mainstream comics have so, if anything, Indy comics should be cheaper to be more attractive. That’s why I think an option to buy digital at a big discount would be good.
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I really don’t mind paying a bit more for an indie comic…it’s most-likely going to be a small print run item(meaning there won’t be many of them), and the content(good or bad), will be some creators’ personal vision versus a corporate-mandated character or concept. Of course, if the average comic fan felt like I do, I would sell MORE of my comics!?
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The right price for anything should be determined by the likely purchaser of the product. In a normal business environment the price for a product would be established through market research. The product would then be built or not dependent upon whether it could be brought to market at a price that would yield a profit. If so the product would be launched in the expectation of sales rather than simply a hope of sales. The problem I think most comics seem to have is that they are launched into the world in the hope of sales, but with no real expectation of who will actually buy them. They also require a great deal of hard and dedicated work to produce in the first place and that can be an expensive up-front cost if you are not illustrating your own stories.
I am conscious of this with my own Captain Romford comic-book that I am currently working very hard producing. I’m managing to do one to two pages a week and intend to produce 60 pages in all. I will be producing it as a hard-backed BD-style graphic novel, a bit like the Tintin books in size and look and feel. I’m doing that mainly because I am of the view that a hard-backed book will have a longer perceived (and actual) shelf life than a comic, which people tend to regard as being ephemeral. The Tintin books written over 50 years ago are still on sale and selling today as are many Franco-Belgian BD titles. That is a model I intend to try to replicate in my own small way with what is essentially a local comic based in the area where I live in Havering, London. Also people expect books to carry a higher price than comics and the Artithmeric pricing gives quite some leeway for good profit levels even where distributors may also need to be remunerated.
While I am drawing the book (that will be ready for printing no earlier than summer 2020) I am busily trying to get local interest for the project. The cartoon strip my Captain Romford book is based on ran for a number of years in my local newspaper, the Romford Recorder. I have leveraged that past connection to have the newspaper run an article on the book I am producing, even though it will not be available for sale for quite some time yet. I have also set up a Twitter account in the name of Captain Romford and he has started following local shops, businesses and institutions. I have also, deliberately, set much of the action in the book in well-known locations in the borough and, particularly, in the local nature reserve/park. There is a visitor centre in the park that I will one day be approaching to see if they might want to carry copies of the book on their shelves.
I won’t go on and on about it, but my idea is to put in place a full-on local marketing campaign to get the books bought by people who would otherwise be unlikely to seek out comic books on the internet. I still want to sell to comic-book people too, maybe at comicons, but if I am to have any chance of making a reasonable return on the enormous amount of effort I’m expending writing and drawing the book I have to have as many possible outlets as I can.
My intention is to spend at least as much time on promotional activity next year as I do on producing the comic. When I have finished the production side of things I will have some draft copies made up (Artithmeric is perfect for that) and hawk them around local shops and civic amenities to see what appetite there might be for the project and, crucially, what price can be set for the different strands of distribution. I am also considering doing talks at local schools on comic-book production, digital art etc. and selling some books while doing so. (Many childrens’ authors do just that all the time and my book is deliberately aimed at an all-ages market for that reason too.)
I will also be approaching the local paper to see if they are interested in serialising the book. I have no idea what their response will be to that, but am hopeful as they ran the strip it was based on for many years in the 1990s and early 2000s. But I’m not counting on that; it is just another strand/idea that may take things forward.
After next year’s launch of the book I am intending to maintain the local marketing campaign for at least five years to see if I can reach the 3,000+ sales I have set myself as a target for this project over time. If it looks like getting to anything like that I will then start to write a second Captain Romford story.
That’s the plan anyway…
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I buy most of my comics on comiXology for around £2.99 per 24 page comic. If I were to put myself in someone else’s shoes, and came onto this site and found comics by people I’ve never heard of, featuring characters I’ve never heard of, for twice the amount, I would hesitate. If I was then hit with £4.00 p&p on top of that, I probably wouldn’t buy. It doesn’t really matter how much effort it takes to make a comic, if the comic is selling for well over the market price. That’s why I would argue for digital as well. Doesn’t mean you can’t buy print, but it offers a cheaper way in for the buyer. If they like the comics, they might buy print. Personally, I prefer digital. I get your point about marketing – but that’s a whole other game. I think the option of digital would make Artithmeric a real destination for people who wanted an alternative to mainstream comics, but who didn’t want to commit to paying top dollar on what is essentially a big gamble on their part.
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I don’t think we’d include digital on Artithmeric, our core business is printing and distributing high quality comics and books. Comixology has already got the digital market pretty much sewn up anyway and competing with them would likely be futile. I’m personally not keen on digital comics and would never consider buying one (any more than I would ‘buy’ a digital music album).I think £2.99 for a digital comic is a fortune to spend on something so intangible and something you never truly own.
Where I think digital comics have a place is in the promotional and brand-building spheres. In that sense I could see my own comics being given away free to read as digital versions as a way of getting more interest from potential buyers of my printed work. Quite agree that unknown artists and characters are unlikely to generate a huge following without serious promotion and the generation of awareness. Many webcomics are offered free to read and I think some creators have done well in commanding high levels of sales for their printed comics by first making them freely available for years as webcomics.
I also agree that £4 is a big add-on to the purchase price of one comic, but is the going rate for packaging and dispatch. Our US-based printing partners charge much the same when we use them to print, package and post Artithemeric comics in America. The same will be the case when we open up our Australian print and dispatch services in 2020.
The £4 packaging and posting cost though covers up to 10 comics in the same package at the same price. We are encouraging collectors to buy multiple comics when they purchase from the Artithmeric site and will be doing more to promote that next year. When I buy from Artithmeric to build my own comic collection I buy in batches of 10 comics at a time and I don’t think the per-comic p&p cost of £0.40 is too much. If I bought them one at a time though I probably would think £40 was a lot for p&p.
Next year we are starting to develop our promotional proposition for Artithmeric comics and we’ll be targeting collectors with that. Giving discounts for multiple purchases will likely be a big part of that.
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Steve, your business plan sounds very solid, I wish you all the best. I need to come up with a new plan myself. I have spent more time on social media trying to promote my stuff than I have doing the actual creating process. I have yet to make a sale here on the ARTITHMERIC site, so its back to square one for me as I figure out what my next project will be.
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Me again, new here. Browsing here and I noticed that issue 1 of “The Book of Sarah” manages to retail at £1.30. That surely has to be a “get to know me” price, but how is it possible to produce a 40 page comic at such an affordable price. To be honest, that’s what I’m looking for. I’ve been searching for a way to make my comic as affordable as possible for a 24 page comic. I’m very wary that apart from family and friends, I’d be hard pressed to find people who’d willingly fork out £6 + p&p for 24 pages.
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