Print the floppies on newsprint and charge $1.99 for them

[Gotham citizen]

Well, I can tell you what isn't normal, and that's paying 4 or 5 dollars for one 20 page story that is often just one part of maybe 6 parts. That's paying about 30 dollars for one story that is, much more often than not, mediocre. Those prices are absurd and if things went digital, it would help mitigate that. probably quite a bit, I'd say. One reason things don't go digital is because many people will not pay 4 or 5 dollars for a digital comic (or a physical comic). Part of the reason the prices are so high on digital is so digital comics do not undercut the prices people will find in comic stores, because the publishers feel if the comics stores go out of business, they (the publishers) would lose most of their readership.

When we consider how prevalent piracy is, I think a lot of people are already used to reading digital. I believe the best way to fight piracy is to put out content people really like, so they WANT to support it and want to buy merchandise like figures associated with it, and make it extremely convenient for them to get. More convenient than going to a site and being bombarded with unwanted ads saying that a woman 8 miles away wants to meet them, which may even freeze their browser. If you're going to price the comics super high, put out a bunch of mediocre at best content, and make it so people need to go to far and few between specialty shops to get it, you can bet your ass people are going to be pirating the crap out of that content.

I love you, because you have introduced a thematic I wasn’t able to introduce: if a reader must spend 4 Dollars for a part of a mediocre story 100 pages long that it will endure 5 months, it is highly probable that reader will drop the title, while if the same reader can read the same story in a book 100 pages long at the price of 4 Euro (about 4,4 Dollars), then it is very less probable he will drop the title; the Italian comics are printed on books 96 pages long, which cost 4 Euro and which contains a not colored self-contained story (I don't remember if it is a thing I already said).
So how can they solve the problem of the drop of the sales?
In my humble opinion they should reduce the price of the books and reduce the overall length of the stories; but how?
I fear there is only a way to do it: to adopt a less sophisticated coloring technique, that will allow to use a less expensive paper; even if it will be still a good quality paper. For example when in the start of the two thousand years the Marvel Italy had to change type of paper for its book, because the old paper wasn’t compatible to the new coloring techniques, they had to reduce the number of pages of the book (it seems to me in the nineties the books contained 4 stories) in order to contain the increase of the price; but it was increased anyway. The new problem is: would the readers buy a book with color similar the ones of a eighties book, even if its price is 1 or 2 Dollar lower? I don’t know, but I would.
The second question is: how can the writers write the same story in less pages?
Again in my humble opinion they should restart to use the compressed storytelling, like it happened in the past: look the following two images, where the first one came from X-men 28 vol. 2 and the second one came from Batman Rebirth 86 and look how many information Nicieza put in a single panel of X-men, in comparison to how many information Tynion put in an entire page of his Batman. If the book contains only 20 pages, the writers can’t write a story like the book were 100 pages long, because the readers will start to wonder if the title worths the awaiting and the expense and if the answer is it isn't worth it…

X-men 28
Batman 86

[Gaastra]

Shonen jump in japan is the size of a phone book and uses phone book like paper with tons of stories from dragonball to detective conan in black and white to keep price down. You then get the trades for a better print.

To me again prices are like this. For $12 I could get three 22 page floppies that take 2 min each to read or I could go to books a million and buy a full 100 page trade or buy a manga trade with over 100 pages or buy two or three used trades for the same price! If both are in the same spot which one is the better deal? Plus manga you have more then heroes. You have drama, slice of life, sports, west, sci fi, horror, fantasy, etc. Same with other company trades.

And if your getting a event (can you collect a full year of one title without a event stopping it cold anymore?) that have over 30 ito 40 ssues to it how much are you paying for the floppies? Why pay over $100 for floppies of a event when the trades will be cheaper and look great on your shelf?

I still collect older floppies from pre 90s but I tend to buy trades more now. Not a digital fan. Like having them on a shelf.

[Lee]

People working in the American comics industry have consistently said that changing paper stock wouldn't be enough to lower cover price. It's not the magic bullet some fans make it out to be.

[Gotham citizen]

Can I suggest to the moderators to merge this discussion with this other one? Because in both the discussion we are saying almost the same thing.

I also want suggest the read of this paper of Forbes: "Surprising new data shows comics readers are leaving superheroes behind", in which is show how the problem of the sales is only for the superhero comics (-9.6%). So in humble my opinion the solution can't be only economical (reduce the price of the books) and neither the digital sales or the mass market can be a solution: they must expand the genre of comics they print and they need to rethink the entire concept of the superheroes, because the readers are leaving also the sci-fi genre (-16%) but they are embracing the fantasy (+18.9%).

Obviously this is a hurried post, written without think to much, but I tried to point out how much they are thinking wrong (always in my humble opinion): they need to change totally the way they are thinking their business; like Lego did: "Block by block: how Lego came to dominate its market".

[Tenzel Kim]

People working in the American comics industry have consistently said that changing paper stock wouldn't be enough to lower cover price. It's not the magic bullet some fans make it out to be.

True. Jim Zub made a blog post about the cost of comics 5 years back. Some of the prices might have changed, but probably not a lot.

For the blog post see here: http://www.jimzub.com/creator-owned-...anging-market/

The example he is using is the first issue of Wayward which sold around 30,000 copies according to Comichron.com, so based on that we can actually make a calculation of the printing costs.

Cover Price	3.50
- Retailer cut (45%)	1.58
- Diamond cut (15%)	0.53
Sub total	1.40
- Printing (7%)	0.25
- Creative team (25%)	0.88
Total (Publisher cut)	0.28

Now, this was an Image title. The split between creative and publisher would be different at DC. Also retailers can get up to 55% off the cover price for DC titles depending on how much they buy, but I don't know if this means that Diamond is getting a smaller cut or not. But neither is really all that important in regards to this discussion.

What's important is the fact that only 0.25 dollars is listed as printing costs. So even if newsprint was free changing to newsprint would at most result in a 25 cent price reduction. While DC has titles that sell less than 30,000 copies I'd imagine they have a standard price which would mean that even lower print runs would still get a fairly good price on printing.

Zub made another calculation in 2012 where he talked about the first issue of Skullkickers. That one sold about 1/3rd of Wayward #1 and for that he listed the printing costs as 28% of $3.00 which would be around 80 cent, showing that printing costs are significantly reduced as you go up in print runs.

So there's nothing to support that changing to newsprint would enable you to make a huge change in cover price.

[cranger]

So there's nothing to support that changing to newsprint would enable you to make a huge change in cover price.

Alterna claims that newsprint allows them to have lower cover prices. While I do read Alterna comics I have not looked too much into how they back up that claim.

That said, based on these new comics and my occasional need to reorganize longboxes full of back issues from the 80s, newsprint seems to be much lighter which could potentially see savings on the shipping side.

[Tenzel Kim]

Alterna claims that newsprint allows them to have lower cover prices. While I do read Alterna comics I have not looked too much into how they back up that claim.

That said, based on these new comics and my occasional need to reorganize longboxes full of back issues from the 80s, newsprint seems to be much lighter which could potentially see savings on the shipping side.

I'm not saying that newsprint couldn't be a factor. Just saying that it is not enough to explain their lower price point. I don't think Alterna's print runs are very high though so they could be looking at quite high printing costs (like those Zub had for Skullkickers #1) and if that's the case then it could be that newsprint is a lot cheaper for low print runs than the alternative. So for them it might make a big difference. But for companies like DC it doesn't change much, and as you can see from the calculations above they (DC) wouldn't be spending enough on paper for it to be a huge factor in the pricing.

Alterna like most smaller publishers probably pays a lot less, AND they have a much smaller overhead than someone like DC which has to pay a lot more people than just the creators.

[cranger]

I'm not saying that newsprint couldn't be a factor. Just saying that it is not enough to explain their lower price point. I don't think Alterna's print runs are very high though so they could be looking at quite high printing costs (like those Zub had for Skullkickers #1) and if that's the case then it could be that newsprint is a lot cheaper for low print runs than the alternative. So for them it might make a big difference. But for companies like DC it doesn't change much, and as you can see from the calculations above they (DC) wouldn't be spending enough on paper for it to be a huge factor in the pricing.

Alterna like most smaller publishers probably pays a lot less, AND they have a much smaller overhead than someone like DC which has to pay a lot more people than just the creators.

I just wanted to reiterate it because for some reason they can do it. Obviously there are other things that have to change, and unfortunately those things are obvious and are non-starters for some people (i.e., Marvel/DC have to scale back big time and axe most of the Z list books they publish), as it hinges on being able to sell 100,000 or more of every title they publish. Once you do that, the bar for how you factor in the creative team's cut has more room to be set.

[Tenzel Kim]

I just wanted to reiterate it because for some reason they can do it. Obviously there are other things that have to change, and unfortunately those things are obvious and are non-starters for some people (i.e., Marvel/DC have to scale back big time and axe most of the Z list books they publish), as it hinges on being able to sell 100,000 or more of every title they publish. Once you do that, the bar for how you factor in the creative team's cut has more room to be set.

There's no doubt DC and Marvel would be able to lower the prices if they set higher cancellation thresholds and were willing to get less profit out of each comic sold, but that's not what this discussion has been about. It has been about changing to newsprint in order to lower prices to $1.99 and I'm just showing how changing to newsprint would not even lower the price by 50 cent even if newsprint was free.