Print on demand sounds great but unless you already have an established name or huge fan base you're not likely to sell much, and a lot of printers require a minimum number of orders. I'd be interested to know who you use. Also, in my experience you see very little return and often have to bump up the price of a book just to make some profit, which then hurts sales because you're book is over priced. I agree digital is great but, as you say, most UK comic collectors are grumpy old men who refuse to embrace change and read digital comics. YA web comics are killing it though, especially Manga and queer romance stories.
Hi Troy, I'd agree that all types of publishing are tough: if you want to be traditionally published you have to persuade an agent, editor or publisher to take you on, and for that these days they are likely to want to see evidence of your followers, or potential fan base.
If you go it 'alone', (because no indie author really does it all on their own: they outsource all the bits they can't do to professionals, such as cover design, proof reading, etc), at least you have control over the entire process, and you aren't at risk of your publisher losing interesting and deciding after an initial print run that you're not worth betting on anymore.
In our experience, print on demand has worked very well.
Take Psychokiller (art by Dave Kendall, co-written by Tony Skinner), the very first comic I published on Comixology in 2014 as a test run to see how it worked. With Amazon's POD, we earn around £3.41 per sale (sale price £12.99), not bad at all considering that the print costs for full colour print is higher than B&W.
On a text book, such as Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! we earn around £2.43 per sale.
So once initial production costs are covered, that title is forevermore available, and has the potential to earn money.
We also use IngramSparks, for two specific markets:
For example, when we sold signed copies of Serial Killer a few years back, we used IS to print off around 200 copies and ship them to us. That worked pretty well. So if you have a friendly bookstore or comic shop that would stock your title, IS are an option. E.g. The Cartoon Museum wanted to stock some Be Pures a while back, so we shipped 10 copies to them from IS. 10 copies is not especially worth it, in terms of profit once the shipping is covered, but it was worth it to get the book in the Cartoon Museum.
IS also list your book in their catalogue and they are international. So a shop in the US or Australia can order your title through IS for their customer, and you make a small profit from that. You can set the wholesale discounts in your dashboard. It hasn't earned us a fortune, but it's passive income and it keeps our titles more widely available. IS used to charge a fee per title upload (refundable on your first order of X amount of copies), but I think they've recently scrapped the fee.
With both these systems we keep our prices within normal market rates, and for digital copies we are often cheaper than trad publishers. E.g. Editions Glenat price all their French, digital Requiem Vampire Knights at €9.99 IIRC, whereas we price vol 1 around £2.50, and vol 2 is £3.99.
But to come to your point about YA and Manga: yes! These are fascinating growth markets. There's an Eng Lang bookshop in San Pedro, down on the coast, and they sell A LOT of kids and YA Manga. We'd love to get into that!
Are you are writer/creator? What has your experience been in this area?
Thank you so much for your reply Lisa, very interesting and definitely worth knowing. I do write. I have a self-published fitness book on Amazon which has done OK (fitness is my day job). I have been writing comics too and have a mini series, issue #1 coming out through kickstarter at the end of summer. It's a historical horror fantasy comic called 'Aphelion: The Rise of Calvus', in collaboration with Barry Renshaw (artist/editor) of Engine Comics. I will also have a Commando comic published later this year, with a couple more in the pipeline.
Print on demand sounds great but unless you already have an established name or huge fan base you're not likely to sell much, and a lot of printers require a minimum number of orders. I'd be interested to know who you use. Also, in my experience you see very little return and often have to bump up the price of a book just to make some profit, which then hurts sales because you're book is over priced. I agree digital is great but, as you say, most UK comic collectors are grumpy old men who refuse to embrace change and read digital comics. YA web comics are killing it though, especially Manga and queer romance stories.
Hi Troy, I'd agree that all types of publishing are tough: if you want to be traditionally published you have to persuade an agent, editor or publisher to take you on, and for that these days they are likely to want to see evidence of your followers, or potential fan base.
If you go it 'alone', (because no indie author really does it all on their own: they outsource all the bits they can't do to professionals, such as cover design, proof reading, etc), at least you have control over the entire process, and you aren't at risk of your publisher losing interesting and deciding after an initial print run that you're not worth betting on anymore.
In our experience, print on demand has worked very well.
Take Psychokiller (art by Dave Kendall, co-written by Tony Skinner), the very first comic I published on Comixology in 2014 as a test run to see how it worked. With Amazon's POD, we earn around £3.41 per sale (sale price £12.99), not bad at all considering that the print costs for full colour print is higher than B&W.
On a text book, such as Be Pure! Be Vigilant! Behave! we earn around £2.43 per sale.
So once initial production costs are covered, that title is forevermore available, and has the potential to earn money.
We also use IngramSparks, for two specific markets:
For example, when we sold signed copies of Serial Killer a few years back, we used IS to print off around 200 copies and ship them to us. That worked pretty well. So if you have a friendly bookstore or comic shop that would stock your title, IS are an option. E.g. The Cartoon Museum wanted to stock some Be Pures a while back, so we shipped 10 copies to them from IS. 10 copies is not especially worth it, in terms of profit once the shipping is covered, but it was worth it to get the book in the Cartoon Museum.
IS also list your book in their catalogue and they are international. So a shop in the US or Australia can order your title through IS for their customer, and you make a small profit from that. You can set the wholesale discounts in your dashboard. It hasn't earned us a fortune, but it's passive income and it keeps our titles more widely available. IS used to charge a fee per title upload (refundable on your first order of X amount of copies), but I think they've recently scrapped the fee.
With both these systems we keep our prices within normal market rates, and for digital copies we are often cheaper than trad publishers. E.g. Editions Glenat price all their French, digital Requiem Vampire Knights at €9.99 IIRC, whereas we price vol 1 around £2.50, and vol 2 is £3.99.
But to come to your point about YA and Manga: yes! These are fascinating growth markets. There's an Eng Lang bookshop in San Pedro, down on the coast, and they sell A LOT of kids and YA Manga. We'd love to get into that!
Are you are writer/creator? What has your experience been in this area?
Thank you so much for your reply Lisa, very interesting and definitely worth knowing. I do write. I have a self-published fitness book on Amazon which has done OK (fitness is my day job). I have been writing comics too and have a mini series, issue #1 coming out through kickstarter at the end of summer. It's a historical horror fantasy comic called 'Aphelion: The Rise of Calvus', in collaboration with Barry Renshaw (artist/editor) of Engine Comics. I will also have a Commando comic published later this year, with a couple more in the pipeline.
very good synopsis - I enjoyed it , thanks