Just Starting Out

This was a great little story from the Comic Book Resources blog about getting into comics, namely the daunting economics of preparing and marketing a book"

"If each issue is a color cover with B&W interiors and, say, a 24 page count and, optimistically, a 3000 copy print run (based on the current climate and the fact that you are unknowns), you’re looking at a publisher committing $30,000 to your printing bill alone. Six full-page PREVIEWS ads will top $7000, and throw in another three grand to round it off for production costs and shipping charges and whatnot, and that’s an outlay of forty grand. Just ballpark, but close enough. If the cover price is $2.95 a unit, and you sell to Diamond at 60% off, you get $1.18 a unit. That means you have to sell an average of around 5600 copies an issue just to break even on expenses before the creators start making money. That’s just unrealistic in this economic environment, where Marvel, Dark Horse, DC, and Image account for 92% of the sales of comics and every single other publisher in the back of PREVIEWS carves up that 8%. It’s just not going to happen."
 The happy moral:
"If you have a story to tell, and a burning desire to have an audience see your work, you’re either going to have to be related to Paul Levitz [the editor of DC comics], or you’re going to have to do it yourself until they offer you a chance to write KAMANDI based on the strength of your indie-darling reputation. But either way, keep at it.

If you love comics as much as I do, you’ll always find a way to make your own"

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