Retailers Complain About Collapsing Marvel And DC Sales

[JKtheMac]

I find it a bit ridiculous that there is this assumption that none of the current crop of new fans will stick around, therefore are not worth catering to. Every new fan starts somewhere, you can't say that none of these fans will not stick around.

All of your points are excellent and speak directly to me. I quote one to save space. As a fan who is older but really hated comic culture and stores, back when I theoretically should have been buying books. Y The Last Man was the first book that made me sit up and realise there was more to comics than occasionally good storylines in Sandman trades or Watchman reprints. And since I have been reading comics again I have spent about twenty minutes in comic shops and usually not found what I wanted or baulked at the overpriced nature of bricks and mortar retail. (Wake up everyone, there is no reason to support a part of the industry that doesn't care about you as a customer. If a store can't discount a trade dont buy, unless they are so well stocked they become a service, which only a few can claim.)

Anyway <rant mode off>, the problem seems to be exacerbated by the idea of fan ownership. The idea that long term fans somehow own the properties, because they have supported them for years. The truth is "support" is a marketing construct. You don't get novel authors talking about supporting books, and the idea is only creeping into TV because the producers have cynically latched onto the idea. The publishers don't care about 'support' they care about sales, and those things are not the same. Batman or Spider-Man are not popular because of a large support base, but because they consistently sell to new audiences. New readers are drawn to the properties. They are brilliant male wish fulfilment characters that appeal to adolescent boys.

The support concept is also flawed because a new reader has the whole back catalogue available to them immediately. They can equally 'support' X-Men from the beginning, by buying the masterworks either on paper or digitally. And in real cash terms that is more significant than a collector amassing a huge collection through back issues. For that matter, a monthly subscription means more to Marvel than any collection.

But the truth is, this new fan will not be as well rewarded by digging into the back catalogue as someone who decides to read Saga in trade, because the continuity and tone of old comics does not hold up to modern tastes. As someone slowly working through the X-Men continuity myself, I am dreading the tonal shifts as I move into the nineties and I am ironically reminded why I didn't buy them before.

[JKtheMac]

Marvel needs to go back to the idea of the miniseries (not sure about the situation at DC). A miniseries allows for writers to test the waters while being able to tell at least one complete story with a beginning and an end. This trend of giving every flash in the pan character an ongoing is just not good overall. It can often lead to unfinished storylines, as writers who planned long arcs are forced to cut things short. At best, this leads to unsatisfactory endings. At worst, it leaves certain characters in a state of limbo that can last for an indeterminate amount of time, keeping them from having any other adventures. The unsatisfactory ending happened to the Venom series which was almost fifty issues long at cancellation (it seems nowadays that the very idea of a series running for that long is almost unthinkable). Moreover, with all of these relaunches and renumberings, alot of people do not expect these titles to last more than about ten issues, which alot of them often don't. This just makes Marvel incompetent and desperate, leads to exhaustion among readers (We have to start over again?) and hurts characters who otherwise might have had a promising career.

You may have noticed they are still experimenting with these. But they don't appear to sell as well as you suggest they would. Plus, I have been going back to the old X-Men mini-series and they are so variable in quality. For every Wolverine mini there is a Longshot mini to remind us that these things were inconsistent to say the least.

[JediMindTrick]

New fans, as in people that are new to comics in general, and not just certain characters, are more likely to buy digitally than from comic shops. When you look at something like The Mighty Thor, that's seen an increase in sales in comic shops but it's also seen a massive increase on Comixology, where it outperforms Ms. Marvel.

Saga sells extremely well digitally. An issue of Saga came out the same week as The Dark Knight III: The Master Race #1, and still took the top spot on Comixology. The Diamond numbers show The Dark Knight III #1 selling 440,234 copies, while the issue of Saga that came out the same week sold just 53,980 and came in at the 36th spot for the month when The Dark Knight III #1 came in at the number 1 spot.

Last week's Saga has also kept the #1 spot on Comixology for the entire week, outselling Old Man Logan #1, which I bet you will have sold significantly more than Saga through Diamond.

East of West, and the Wicked & Divine are two other comics that often don't even make it onto Diamond's top 100 for the month, but routinely beat big name DC/Marvel comics on Comixology.

There are some very significant differences between the digital best sellers and Diamond best sellers, and I think that's at least partly because of new readers that don't want to go to a comic shop to get their comics, and now they don't have to.

What is 5% of mediocre? The answer is digital sales.

Ok, none of us really know what the actual digital numbers are but there is little doubt they are fractional of the print sales. Digital also doesn't really save the companies any money either as most of the cost of the comic goes to the creative team and the printing costs, i.e. paper, are close to the same whether you print 500 copies or 50,000 copies.

Sorry denialists but digital isn't going to save the industry. Much like music, most potential new readers going digital are going to pirate comics just like they do with music. Its why musicians make nearly all their money nowadays on tour just like comic companies make most of their money in print.

[Bl00dwerK]

Comics cost too much, aren't easily accessible, and they just aren't as good as they used to be...

[Raye]

What is 5% of mediocre? The answer is digital sales.

Ok, none of us really know what the actual digital numbers are but there is little doubt they are fractional of the print sales. Digital also doesn't really save the companies any money either as most of the cost of the comic goes to the creative team and the printing costs, i.e. paper, are close to the same whether you print 500 copies or 50,000 copies.

Sorry denialists but digital isn't going to save the industry. Much like music, most potential new readers going digital are going to pirate comics just like they do with music. Its why musicians make nearly all their money nowadays on tour just like comic companies make most of their money in print.

er... you do realize that the pagerate for digital and print stays the same no matter what, right? For Marvel and DC, talent is paid per page, up front, maybe with an added kickback if the issue sells above a certain threshold. The agreement for digital is no different. Putting out a digital edition does not cost any more in terms of creative than it does print, I have no idea where you got that. And there is actually a HUGE difference between printing 500 and 50,000 copies. HUGE. A friend and I came like *this close* to printing a self published book, we had a table at SDCC and everything, but the cost of printing a book that sold anything less than like 5,000 issues and have it in colour rather than black and white, it would have meant that after factoring in distribution, we would have had to price the comic at like 5 or 6 bucks an issue and try and dig up some advertisers 10 years ago to make it even close to worth the amount of work it would have taken, and we would have had to pay up front, making it a huge gamble. (alternately, we could have tried to get picked up by Image to eliminate the risk, but in the end decided to pursue other things) Printing costs are why paper comics have ads and digital ones don't. On the other hand, the cost per issue of digital really is identical no matter how many issues you sell. Comixology takes a cut per issue sold, but it is nowhere near the cost of printing per issue unless you get into hundreds of thousands of issues, it's about the same as what Diamond takes for distribution, actually, so what you would have spent on printing costs just vanish, (and i am sure they have special deals for Image, Marvel and DC due to volume and the traffic they bring in) and no upfront investment to risk. If we were doing it again, we'd do it as a webcomic, and in fact kinda are, just with a different idea. (and yes, I know there are print on demand places now, but their price per issues is fairly high. though it does at least eliminate up front risk) And if you don't want to take my word for it, maybe you will take Mark Waid's http://markwaid.com/digital/print-math/

Also, as you say the 5% figure is a guess. while it is true that generally digitial sells less than the paper versions at the moment, we have direct confirmation that certain Marvel books like Ms Marvel do sell numbers comparable to it's print numbers. And the Image stuff, that obviously sells equal to or more than it's print numbers in most cases, you just have to look at the top selling list to see that plain as day. Those readers attracted by Image will spill over into DC and Marvel, particularly if they would stop being so paranoid about undercutting the brick and mortar shops and discount the prices by a dollar right from day one, rather than a month later).

[Dolores - The Worst Poster Ever]

What is 5% of mediocre? The answer is digital sales.

Ok, none of us really know what the actual digital numbers are but there is little doubt they are fractional of the print sales. Digital also doesn't really save the companies any money either as most of the cost of the comic goes to the creative team and the printing costs, i.e. paper, are close to the same whether you print 500 copies or 50,000 copies.

Sorry denialists but digital isn't going to save the industry. Much like music, most potential new readers going digital are going to pirate comics just like they do with music. Its why musicians make nearly all their money nowadays on tour just like comic companies make most of their money in print.

The number for digital sales is around 10-20% on average, then there are some titles like Ms. Marvel that sell more digitally than in print. Going from that, we can tell what comics sell at least 30, 000 digitally (a conservative estimate as when it was said Ms. Marvel sold more digitally than in print, print sales were over 70, 000).

When it comes to Saga, the 10-20% of The Dark Knight III's sales would mean that its digital sales would fall in between 44, 000 to 88, 000. Which would mean the issue of Saga that beat it, would have likely had its digital sales either close to its print sales or nearly doubling them.

We can also get the bare minimum a comic sells by tracking it's placement on the digital charts. The US charts have 1008 spots, meaning the last comic on the list has to sell at least 1 copy and the number 1 comic on the list has to sell at least 1008 copies to make that spot. The charts also update daily, so if a comic stays #1 for the entire week. that's over 7000 copies sold. It'll fall down the charts with next week's releases, but comics that make the front page of the best sellers list usually last for months on whole list, so it'll sell hundreds of other copies throughout the month on a daily basis.

Yes, these are all estimates, but all we get are estimates when it comes to comic book sales.

For most of the Marvel/DC titles that last that long the digital charts, the sales are still less than what they do in print, and not all their comics do that well digitally, but I wasn't arguing that digital was going to save the industry, I was pointing out that there is a sizable amount of people that buy digitally and that digital buyers have different taste from those that buy from comic shops.

And while not the norm, there are books that survive on account of their digital sales, particularly digital first titles. Injustice would not have lasted as long as it has, if digital sales weren't at least on par with its print sales, since that series routinely does barely over 20, 000 copies print.
The last time we got word on the digital market was that it made up 10% of all comics sold in the US. This was back in 2012 I think, and while that number may have grown it's doubtful that it's grown by much. But again, my point wasn't that digital was going to save the industry, but that there are new fans that buy digitally, and some titles do very well because of those new fans that have different taste from those that buy from comic shops. Digital as it is now, is not going to save the industry as they don't even feature ads, which means companies get less revenue from digital sales.

I also disagree that the majority of people that read comics digitally do so by pirating. I took a quick look at the seeder/leecher/download count of the most popular comic torrents on various sites and they don't stack up to how much Comixology would be selling on a daily basis, going by its best seller list, and that's according to the minimum estimate.

[Wulf1984]

btw. I find it a bit ridiculous that there is this assumption that none of the current crop of new fans will stick around, therefore are not worth catering to. Every new fan starts somewhere, you can't say that none of these fans will not stick around. Yeah, some will leave, just like some fans who started in the 70's, or 80's or 90's never stuck around. But some will. Maybe a lot will. Only time will tell. I was that new fan a bit over 15 years ago. As i said, i read Vertigo, I was not a superhero fan, that was very much secondary, until they updated the line with Morrison on the X-Men and such, or the MAX line with Vertigo-like books like Alias, which sucked me in to the MU, and even then, mostly because the single issues for Marvel were available in my college bookstore but not the Vertigo stuff. I read Preacher, Y: The Last Man, Fables, Transmet, etc. those trades still line my shelves. It's not so different from the new fans who are eating up WicDiv and Saga (which I read and love as well. Image is basically the new Vertigo.) as their first comics, except that i did it via trades (well, mostly, I still have like the first 20 issues of Y and Fables in single issues around here somewhere before i went back to trades) rather than digitally. and there is nothing wrong with Marvel or DC giving them an inviting title or two similar in tone to what they already like to try and get them hooked.

Sorry if I gave the impression that no one new will stick around. You do have some new fans who jump on books and become lifelong fans. Everyone starts somewhere. Alot of the books I collected, I wasn't around for the beginning. But I didn't see high issue numbers as some impenetrable obstacle.

[Vic Vega]

Also, as you say the 5% figure is a guess. while it is true that generally digitial sells less than the paper versions at the moment, we have direct confirmation that certain Marvel books like Ms Marvel do sell numbers comparable to it's print numbers. And the Image stuff, that obviously sells equal to or more than it's print numbers in most cases, you just have to look at the top selling list to see that plain as day. Those readers attracted by Image will spill over into DC and Marvel, particularly if they would stop being so paranoid about undercutting the brick and mortar shops and discount the prices by a dollar right from day one, rather than a month later).

DC actually did this for its inital New 52 promotion, but the brick and mortars screamed bloody murder until they stopped. DC's initial idea was to also advertise on TV and Radio but with a focus on digital. But that would have cost real money so they never actually did it.

The Brick and Mortars got everything they wanted from DC in particular and they are still complaining.

[JediMindTrick]

er... you do realize that the pagerate for digital and print stays the same no matter what, right? For Marvel and DC, talent is paid per page, up front, maybe with an added kickback if the issue sells above a certain threshold. The agreement for digital is no different. Putting out a digital edition does not cost any more in terms of creative than it does print, I have no idea where you got that. And there is actually a HUGE difference between printing 500 and 50,000 copies. HUGE. A friend and I came like *this close* to printing a self published book, we had a table at SDCC and everything, but the cost of printing a book that sold anything less than like 5,000 issues and have it in colour rather than black and white, it would have meant that after factoring in distribution, we would have had to price the comic at like 5 or 6 bucks an issue and try and dig up some advertisers 10 years ago to make it even close to worth the amount of work it would have taken, and we would have had to pay up front, making it a huge gamble. (alternately, we could have tried to get picked up by Image to eliminate the risk, but in the end decided to pursue other things) Printing costs are why paper comics have ads and digital ones don't. On the other hand, the cost per issue of digital really is identical no matter how many issues you sell. Comixology takes a cut per issue sold, but it is nowhere near the cost of printing per issue unless you get into hundreds of thousands of issues, it's about the same as what Diamond takes for distribution, actually, so what you would have spent on printing costs just vanish, (and i am sure they have special deals for Image, Marvel and DC due to volume and the traffic they bring in) and no upfront investment to risk. If we were doing it again, we'd do it as a webcomic, and in fact kinda are, just with a different idea. (and yes, I know there are print on demand places now, but their price per issues is fairly high. though it does at least eliminate up front risk) And if you don't want to take my word for it, maybe you will take Mark Waid's http://markwaid.com/digital/print-math/

Also, as you say the 5% figure is a guess. while it is true that generally digitial sells less than the paper versions at the moment, we have direct confirmation that certain Marvel books like Ms Marvel do sell numbers comparable to it's print numbers. And the Image stuff, that obviously sells equal to or more than it's print numbers in most cases, you just have to look at the top selling list to see that plain as day. Those readers attracted by Image will spill over into DC and Marvel, particularly if they would stop being so paranoid about undercutting the brick and mortar shops and discount the prices by a dollar right from day one, rather than a month later).

Er. I'm not sure you read my post correctly.

I said that nearly all the costs of a comic go to the creative team behind it. I said the print cost's are negligible compared to the rest and printing 500 copies costs nearly the same as 50,000 copies. Digital isn't really any cheaper than print because all the costs are the writer, artist, letterer, and associated creators.

[penthotal]

Er. I'm not sure you read my post correctly.

I said that nearly all the costs of a comic go to the creative team behind it. I said the print cost's are negligible compared to the rest and printing 500 copies costs nearly the same as 50,000 copies. Digital isn't really any cheaper than print because all the costs are the writer, artist, letterer, and associated creators.

Yes, you said that, but it's false. Don't know why you think than printing 500 copies costs as printing 50.000 but you just have to research the topic 5 minutes to know it's not true. You have always been pointed to an article by a creator that explains that, but curiously choosen to ignore it. I will quote another here for you:

-Printing is substantial (and it varies wildly based on the amount printed, paper availability, and press availability so this is NOT an exact figure). 80 cents is a pretty good benchmark for small print runs. On very low print runs (sub 3000), printing can cost more than $1.00 per copy, which really eats into the budget. Source: http://www.jimzub.com/the-reality-of...-owned-comics/

So

1. Costs varies wildly based on the amount printed
2. Printing around 5-10.000 copies cost 80 cents, and just printing a few thousand copies less raise the price more than 20%

Read also this about the topic by Mark Waid http://markwaid.com/digital/print-math/


Also, digital books sell at least 20-30% of their print equivalent. Many Marvel books in digital sell over 30.000 copies because they said Ms. Marvel sells as much in digital and in print and many other Marvel digital comics ranks equal or over Ms. Marvel.

[UltimateTy]

I feel like all of this is "blaming the product" because these people can't fix their dying business model.

This. I asked my LCS owner about how the sales were and he said the shop is doing great right now.

Some of these comic shops need to branch out.

[Tayswift]

Yes, you said that, but it's false. Don't know why you think than printing 500 copies costs as printing 50.000 but you just have to research the topic 5 minutes to know it's not true. You have always been pointed to an article by a creator that explains that, but curiously choosen to ignore it. I will quote another here for you:

-Printing is substantial (and it varies wildly based on the amount printed, paper availability, and press availability so this is NOT an exact figure). 80 cents is a pretty good benchmark for small print runs. On very low print runs (sub 3000), printing can cost more than $1.00 per copy, which really eats into the budget. Source: http://www.jimzub.com/the-reality-of...-owned-comics/

So

1. Costs varies wildly based on the amount printed
2. Printing around 5-10.000 copies cost 80 cents, and just printing a few thousand copies less raise the price more than 20%

Read also this about the topic by Mark Waid http://markwaid.com/digital/print-math/


Also, digital books sell at least 20-30% of their print equivalent. Many Marvel books in digital sell over 30.000 copies because they said Ms. Marvel sells as much in digital and in print and many other Marvel digital comics ranks equal or over Ms. Marvel.

You also have to count that Diamond takes 60% of the comic price to them. comicsbeat published a article about it.
so in a 4 bucks comics, around 1,19 is profitable

[Raye]

DC actually did this for its inital New 52 promotion, but the brick and mortars screamed bloody murder until they stopped. DC's initial idea was to also advertise on TV and Radio but with a focus on digital. But that would have cost real money so they never actually did it.

The Brick and Mortars got everything they wanted from DC in particular and they are still complaining.

Yeah, I remember hearing about that. so stupid. They also whined about the digital comics hitting earlir than they opened, so the publishers arranged to have them released digitally fairly late in the morning to try and appease them. but both DC and Marvel backed down on that and they release around 3 AM where I am (Mountain time) now. So maybe they will back down on the price point eventually as well, though I can't imagine they have that much incentive since it's basically free money for them at this point, but I think they could increase digital volume on day one sales which would offset the reduced profit per issue.

Er. I'm not sure you read my post correctly.

I said that nearly all the costs of a comic go to the creative team behind it. I said the print cost's are negligible compared to the rest and printing 500 copies costs nearly the same as 50,000 copies. Digital isn't really any cheaper than print because all the costs are the writer, artist, letterer, and associated creators.

No. The majority doesn't go to the creative team. You are flat out wrong about this. WAY wrong.

Ok, let's make a hypothetical Marvel book. We will use the page rates found here: http://fairpagerates.com/ at the very top end of the range for all aspects, because hey, this is Marvel. The total cost for creative is $13,020 for a single 20 page comic. The only way that even approaches the majority of the cost per issue is if you get well below the point at which Marvel typically cancels books. And in reality, Marvel would probably tend to use cheaper creative teams on lower selling titles, anyway. Meanwhile, a book can cost between roughly .5-2 dollars an issue to print, depending on the volume. Then you have to pay for shipping thousands of comics to Diamond, then Diamond takes up to a 40-60% cut of cover price to cover distribution and listing in Previews. Paying the creative team is literally the least expensive part of producing a top tier book. It eats up more of the cost for indies, but indies tend to pay lower pagerates, and also don't have to pay the sort of overhead Marvel has to pay, for their offices and staff and so on.

Comixology also takes a fairly sizeable cut per issue, for Comixology submit, they take 50% http://support.comixology.com/custom...earn-%E2%80%A8 though I am sure larger publishers get a better deal due to the traffic they drive towards the site and what they sell in volume. But you don't have to pay printing or shipping, so it ends up considerably cheaper overall, and you still walk away with a higher percentage of the profits from every digital sale. To be fair, the digital comics do not include ads, which helps offset it, and I personally am happy to pay for the convenience factor. but still.

[Laevatein]

This. I asked my LCS owner about how the sales were and he said the shop is doing great right now.

Some of these comic shops need to branch out.

And if a store or company has to resort to "same old, same old" because that's the only thing it can sell, then maybe it deserves to die.