Cited: Marvel Likely Cancelling 30 titles2798

Originally Posted by Lonestar
Wow. Those sales numbers are much lower than I thought. I recall hearing an interview once where it was stated that the break even number for a comic to make money was something like 30K or 40K sales. Maybe it's less for Marvel with the number of titles they print each month. But still, those sales numbers cannot be sustainable for a title.

Originally Posted by Lonestar
@ZosoRocks OK, here's my math, after doing some more searching.

On a $4.00 comic book, distributer gets 15%, retailer gets 45%, printing costs are 25%. That leaves 15% for the publisher to pay writers & artists, as well as other employees (editors, admin, etc.) and things like rent on office space, insurance, etc. So that would be $0.60 a comic book.

Using the lower end of mainstream page rates from fairpagerates.com (for some reason, I can't get the link to work) I get the cost to be about $380 per page for art, script, colors & letters. And $600 for a cover.

Assuming 22 pages of story in a comic book, gives us:
22 x $380 = $8,360 + $600 (for cover) = $8,960 per comic book.

The profession I currently work in, uses a 2.7 multiplier over our labor costs to calculate our break even point. I'm sure its different from industry to industry, but I'll use it.

So $8,960 x 2.7 = $24,192. That is what Marvel should need to make on each comic published in order to break even.

If we divide $24,192 by the 0.60 they make per comic, ($24,192/0.60) you get 40,330 comics needed to be sold just to break even.

Anyone with better information on my assumptions, please feel free to correct me. Any retailers out there? Is my information on the percentages for the distributor and retailers accurate?

Originally Posted by Lonestar
@Oxbladder I have no doubt that there are small publishers losing money, but you can't compare the break-even sales number for them vs. Marvel or DC. The overhead costs for Marvel is much greater than a creator owned/published comic. Thus they need to sell more copies to break even. A comic selling 10K copies might be profitable for a small publisher, but it almost certainly is not for Marvel.

For Marvel, there are certainly many strategic or philosophical reasons for deciding which and how many titles to publish. They may be having internal struggles on which is the best path forward. That is, publish lots of titles that have small profit margins, or less titles that have large profit margins.

Originally Posted by kaptainmyke
Nostalgia is in. Bring back the 90s artists and writers to collaborate again.

Originally Posted by BLBcomics
Quote:

Originally Posted by kaptainmyke
Nostalgia is in. Bring back the 90s artists and writers to collaborate again.

Nothing is going to stop the slow demise of the two staple floppy comic book as a viable vehicle delivering entertainment. Just like "network" TV is fading as viable

Not even making some comic books with 100+ "variant" covers as a gimmick.

How many here still get the local newspaper?

Originally Posted by BLBcomics
Quote:

Originally Posted by kaptainmyke
Nostalgia is in. Bring back the 90s artists and writers to collaborate again.

Nothing is going to stop the slow demise of the two staple floppy comic book as a viable vehicle delivering entertainment. Just like "network" TV is fading as viable

Not even making some comic books with 100+ "variant" covers as a gimmick.

How many here still get the local newspaper?

Originally Posted by Oxbladder


While agree that doesn't explain why they continue with Veritgo or Max books when they often pull numbers far lower than regular U cut-offs.

Originally Posted by OrbitCityComics
Just some food for thought, many of these low book runs open up investment opportunities.

People will chase books that have a 130k in sales, but have a dozen variant covers.

Some of these are good stories, and don't​ currently get the credit they deserve. The future may change all that.