Image talks about floppies vs graphic novels.

https://www.newsarama.com/48588-eric...publisher.html

Nrama: I wanted to ask you about the price of comics—$3.99 has become the new standard, with the march to $4.99 going on now. Most of Image's regular-sized titles are $3.99, but then you have Spawn still holding at $2.99 - and Saga at $2.99. I imagine in some respects price point is set by owners of the book, but what are your thoughts on the price of comics?
Stephenson: Overall, I think the majority of comics being published today cost too much, especially if you stop to consider what we’re selling.
And I don’t say that to denigrate the format at all - I think monthly comics can be a great way to experience comics - but I also think readers need to be given something more than a piece of a story or one link in a chain of events when they buy a comic book, and that’s kind of the way things have been going for a while now.
By and large, monthly comics are written with eventual collection in mind, and I think that underserves the format while also shortchanging the reader. Why buy a book every month if you know it’s going to be collected in a few months’ time, especially if you’re going to be paying four or five bucks an issue? We’re forcing people to make a choice, and I think they’re always going to go for the more economical option.
To put it another way, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that sales on monthly comics drop as prices go up. I’ve heard comments from various people within the industry that dedicated fans will pay whatever the price is, but in addition to being a fairly privileged point of view, I think it fails to consider the fact that only selling to those dedicated fans is ultimately a losing proposition.
I know there was some hue and cry over DC’s 100-Page Giant comics recently, but I admire the goal behind that program, which was to get comics into stores that weren’t carrying comics and hopefully create some new readers in the process. I think there’s a way to do that without excluding the Direct Market, but I think it has to be done.
Like I was just saying, I think comic book stores are amazing. I’m a big supporter of the Direct Market, and I think anyone deeply invested in the comics experience is going to get a lot out of visiting their local comic shop, but generally speaking, someone has to already be invested in that experience for that shop to be a destination. Someone has to want to read comics to visit a comic book store, and to my mind, it’s difficult to get people interested in something without exposing it to them.
The more we can expose people to comics outside comics book stores, the better chance we have of getting them into comic book stores. Is that going to happen 100% of the time? Well, no, it’s not. Sometimes people are going to do what I was doing for a while - they’re going to go their bookstore and buy trades and OGNs there. That may not directly benefit comic book stores, the same as kids getting their books directly from Scholastic may not directly benefit comic book stores, but going back to what we were talking about at the start of this interview, comics becoming more commonplace within our culture overall is a good thing.
Well, I’ll say it again: Comics are too expensive. Print comics are too expensive, and digital comics are too expensive. Looking at what the people who admit to stealing comics content are saying online, it seems pretty obvious that there are more comics coming out than the average person can afford to buy. Are there some people out there who just hoard digital comics, downloading full runs of things just for the satisfaction of having them? Sure, but there are also people who just want to read the comics they like without going broke. Comics used to be cheap entertainment. That’s no longer the case. I’ve literally talked to people who say they’ve always been interested in reading comics, but that it’s too expensive. With digital comics priced the same as print comics, it just becomes part of the same overall problem.
Back in 1997, the top selling comic almost every month was Uncanny X-Men, and around that time, it would have been selling around 160,000 copies or so. Today, House of X #1 was a big launch for Marvel with 185,000 copies sold in the first month – but the difference is that whatever issue of Uncanny X-Men came out in 1997 had one cover. House of X #1 had how many? 30 something? I don’t think we know the actual number there in terms of “real” sales to individual readers, and I worry that if we did, the truth would be shock all of us.
According to the estimates published online, only 25 comic books sold over 50,000 copies this September. A little over 100 topped 20,000 copies - meaning three fifths of the top 500 is under 20,000. The somewhat good news is that those figures haven’t really changed all that much in nearly 30 years years, but yeah, I think our industry has some very serious challenges ahead of us.
I think that becomes even more apparent when you look at the top selling trades and graphic novels for September and see that Guts – a book that is selling like wildfire – clocks in at only #25 for estimated Direct Market sales with something like 2,000 orders. Sure – there are stores getting trades and graphic novels from book wholesalers or other book distributors and those numbers don’t show up on Diamond’s charts, and I would imagine some stores are dealing directly with Scholastic, but even so, I doubt that’s going to get that number up to a level where it’s challenging bookmarket sales in any significant way, which means that comic book stores are not the first stop for many of the readers that we want to reach. I think that says something, and I’m not sure we’re all getting the message.
Nrama: You seem to be speaking to the idea that there's more mid-level comic books than ever. Books being sold at sustainable levels, but there's more than ever - which might be hard for retailers to stock. What would you say to retailers who are unsure about stocking when there's such a fat 'middle' so to speak, especially when there's not much option for returnability?
I think that’s a little bit of what caught stores off guard with Jonathan Hickman’s X-Men books was that retailers saw it as kind of a boy who cried wolf situation after so many other X-Men relaunches. When series are constantly being started and stopped, it gets difficult to tell which relaunch is going to stick. Everyone focuses on the adage that new first issues provide great jumping on points, but they somehow forget that the last issues are also convenient jumping off points.