CBR: Pipeline - Nov 8, 2011

[CBR News]

Augie wants to see the 99 cent digital comic grain a greater foothold. This week, he offers three ideas to help push that along, including new websites, apps and subscriptions.


Full article here.

[dfridolfs]

Until the time that all of those suggestions happen, Augie, why not give Arkham Unhinged a try. It's the weekly ongoing series that continues the stories started in Arkham City and the Arkham City Digital Chapters, based on the Batman: Arkham City game.

10 page chapters, coming out every week, 1-3 chapter story arcs, different artists on each arc, new ideas that further compliment the game in tandem, for only 99 cents each!

It's Batman, its affordable, and it's me writing them. All available on Comixology. 3 chapters previously available and the 4th one just came out today.

- Derek

[poneley]

I agree that the price point is not there (yet) for the casual readers. I check the Marvel App religiously for things that interest me. Marvel even seems to be following a pattern where new 99cent material is released on Mondays and Fridays. Release of "new" old issues priced at $1.99 is on Tuesdays. Wednesdays are new releases of course. And on Thursdays new digital collections are released. I've been spending a lot of money buying stuff through the app. The 99cent days are always exciting too because it might be material you've contemplated about reading in the past but weren't sure about. Its an easy purchase to make once it hits the 99cent price.

I agree with most of your thoughts though Augie. Not sure about the "Marvel Prime" membership idea. I know I would sign up for it, but it would depend on the price. $25 would be worth it for sure if you got a $1 discount on all comics. The 99cent ones would just become free.

I know I would be A LOT more willing to try out material if it were priced at 99cents. Wouldn't this immensely help out those borderline cancellation titles?

[uthor]

I don't think a 30-days later site is needed. I get my comics 1-3 weeks late thanks to mail order and have no problem going back and reading old news/reviews. See also getting TV shows between one week and several months late when watching Hulu.

There are two things I think are needed (and should be dead simple to implement). A subscription service that automatically buys for you (or at least alerts) when a new issue of a favorite series is out seems like a no brainer. It prevents the "oh, I forgot, oh well" from happening. The other thing needed is bundles of old issues, probably for a discount. Either a digital TPB with a story arc or something longer like an artists run on a series.

[NCatron]

I don't think a 30-days later site is needed. I get my comics 1-3 weeks late thanks to mail order and have no problem going back and reading old news/reviews. See also getting TV shows between one week and several months late when watching Hulu.

There are two things I think are needed (and should be dead simple to implement). A subscription service that automatically buys for you (or at least alerts) when a new issue of a favorite series is out seems like a no brainer. It prevents the "oh, I forgot, oh well" from happening. The other thing needed is bundles of old issues, probably for a discount. Either a digital TPB with a story arc or something longer like an artists run on a series.

To your point about bundles, I don't buy a ton of digital yet, but I have noticed while browsing Comixology that there are a few "trades" being sold digitally. Usually corresponding to the contents of a print trade for about $1-2 discount over buying the $1.99 late issues individually. The participation in this looks small for now, but maybe that'll pick up with increasing digital adoption.

[DarkBeast]

there are perfectly valid reasons for those price points, but they don't matter.

You can't just say that they "don't matter" and expect that to magically rewrite reality. The numbers are what the numbers are. It's unprofitable to sell new comics for 99 cents a piece. (Do you have any idea how much of a pay-cut the creators themselves would need to take in order to make 99 cents profitable???)

It's an untenable position to hold.

And a more tenable position would be to sell comics for a cheaper price than they cost to produce?

Marketing is more about emotions than logic.

Marketing isn't the same as pricing. They can already pique the emotions of the "Oo! 99 cents!"-meme by having special deals for certain comics.

They've actually been doing that for years and years now, in print and digital, offering special deals for certain great jump-on #1 issues. And by and large that practice has NOT increased readership.

If you insist on charging a price for your goods that your customer base feels is onerous, your audience will never expand past the dwindling numbers of die-hard fans.

The existing fan base likes to SAY that $2.99 and $3.99 comics are "onerous", and yet by and large they're still buying them. In my experience, the people who complain about the prices the most are the same people who CONTINUE to buy the most comics.

But if they lowered the price-point, that does NOT mean that lots of new readers are going to jump aboard. There's no evidence to suggest that that would happen. For the last decade super-heroes have had the best PR campaign possible in the form of dozens of super-hit movies. And that gigantic cultural phenomenon did next to NOTHING to increase the sales of the comic books, even though every bookstore in the world started to showcase graphic novels, and even though Marvel and DC put out a slew of $1 jump-on issues.

"Oh but now people have iPads! They're sure to want to buy comics that way! If ONLY they were priced at an absurdly low price!"

Really? Why would more than 1 in a 1000 people with an iPad want to buy digital comics? Does more than 1 in a 1000 iTunes users want to buy mp3s of opera or bluegrass music? Do the people who like bluegrass music dream of the day when the "stupid" bluegrass executives finally cut the prices of their mp3s? Do they assume that if only bluegrass mp3s were priced at 5 cents a piece, THEN everyone would suddenly want to listen to bluegrass music? Because that's how comic fans act. They overrate the medium's ability to appeal to other people.

It isn't a problem with the pricing. It's a problem with the medium itself. Most people find it very outdated, no matter how "hip" the dialogue, no matter how slick the art. I love comics but comics are a dated, inherently gimmicky art-form, and the gimmick has basically run its cultural course.

If you think comics are a niche industry meant to appeal to only a small group of readers, then your wish is already granted.

Whether it's "meant" to appeal to a small group doesn't matter. It's an inherent part of the medium: comics (much like radio serials) were once mass-media, now they're not. You can try anything you want--hire your dream creative teams, give them the hippest properties to fictionalize, price it as low as you want--and outsiders still won't really care about it.

No more than they'd suddenly start to care about opera if somehow opera tickets got cheaper, and they could watch opera on their iPads, and the stories of the operas were contemporary events.

If you think comics should be read by a wider base, then something needs to change.

What we think about that doesn't matter. There simply are NOT hordes of people out there waiting to read comics if only they were a buck cheaper. These mythical "new readers" do not exist. The bump in sales from the New 52 is due almost entirely to lapsed readers returning.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. I support all of these initiatives to TRY to get more people to read comics. Every single one of the dozen or so new readers we get--hey, that's great. But at the same time we shouldn't have these ridiculously utopian illusions of what comics "could" or "should" be. By this point, people who have been paying attention should understand this stuff by now, instead of dreaming about all of these imaginary readers that would just appear out of nowhere if only the price-point would go back to what it was in 1990. See, really what you're all doing is pining away for your own childhood. It's very Freudian, in a way. You guys think $1 for a new comic sounds good because of your own psychological experience. It reminds you of your youth, but it doesn't have anything to do with the reality of the situation in 2011.

I wonder if in the opera world there are these same sort of pundits, who think that every schoolkid in the world would love to get into opera if only the damn tickets weren't so expensive, or if only there was an opera app on their personal electronic self-important toys.

It's so silly how people make this their crusade. If I could change something in the world, it wouldn't be getting people to read more comics. If people were simply more curious about things, they'd make their way to comics at some point in their life anyway. The problem isn't that they don't read comics, it's that people don't investigate anything outside of their comfort-zone, period.

In the comics industry itself we complain about readers being super-hero centric. Well, the public at large is movie- and tv-centric. You can fight that prejudice but you can't change it. There's never been a case in the last 100+ years of modernity when the masses have gotten more curious. It doesn't happen. At best, they get more pseudo-intellectual, and they start watching shows like "30 Rock" and begin to consider themselves witty. But that's really the closest you get.

You guys are railing against the forces of history and culture here. You can't win. All you'd do by forcing a lower price-point is, basically, forcing Marvel to pay its talent less in order to make the price-point feasible.

Or maybe Marvel can farm out its talent to Chinese slave-labor? THEN maybe a 99-cent price-point would be feasible. I mean, all of Apple's trendy little overpriced gadgets are made by poor, mistreated Chinese people anyway, and you guys don't seem to have a problem with that.

Most people in these discussions seem to have more of a problem with paying a buck more for a comic than they do with all of their Apple toys being produced by slaves in a communist country, which their idol Steve Jobs worked with much like so many businessmen in the 1930s worked with Hitler's Germany.

But really, all of the things I mentioned, I guess "they don't matter".

I guess what matters is railing--railing hopelessly, in total ignorance of the historical and cultural forces that you're up against--for a price-point that is totally impossible if you want to pay your talented employees more than Steve Jobs would pay his Chinese slaves. That seems to be the route that most internet comics pundits are taking, to just rail for a sake of railing for an impossible price-point that reminds them of their childhood or something.

[yoda510]

Red Five Comics does most of their comics for 99 cents after they have been out for awhile and still gives a little bit of a discount for buying their digital trades. I don't know why they can't get these digital prices, subscription services, and trades going it just seems like a no brainer to me.

[BizzleTheBear]

Wow Dark Beast I bet you are fun at parties.

[Beacon]

I’ll never understand the people who claim 99 cent digital comics aren’t viable. It works fine for Archie.

Heck, in last week’s Robot 6 article about Dark Horse’s Digital store it was mentioned that the $6-7 they charge for digital manga is considered “expensive” even though – on a cost per page basis – the 200-400 page manga is a MUCH better deal than even a 99 cent 20 page comic.

[Sv7nd]

I'd like to see different tiers of monthly subscriptions and pricing ie.5 for $12, 10 for $20, 15 for $28 or 20 for $35 etc. But as opposed to being locked into the same title, your open to download any new releases per month you want. This would allow people to get there favourites and maybe try something new each month or grab a tie in issue etc. Then also have a discount for any single issues bought on top and I'm in.

[MarvelMaster616]

Great article! I would definitely sign up for a Marvel Prime or a DC Prime if they offered one. I would also like to see each company offer 12 to 24 issue digital subscriptions for certain series. They did that with print for ages. Why not digital? It's the same concept. But these are the early days of digital. I really don't think Marvel, DC, Archie, and the rest of the publishers know what course to take right now. We'll probably have to wait a few years for it to come together, but that time can't come soon enough.

[dancj]

You can't just say that they "don't matter" and expect that to magically rewrite reality. The numbers are what the numbers are.

I think Augie's talking about what it would take to get a wider readership in.

It's unprofitable to sell new comics for 99 cents a piece. (Do you have any idea how much of a pay-cut the creators themselves would need to take in order to make 99 cents profitable???)

It's really hard to quantify whether they'd need to take a pay cut or if the increase in sales would offset it. Until it's really tried in a big way we can't be sure.

And a more tenable position would be to sell comics for a cheaper price than they cost to produce?

A single digital unit costs practically nothing to produce. What matters is the total dollar sales (minus Apple's/Comixology's cut).

The existing fan base likes to SAY that $2.99 and $3.99 comics are "onerous", and yet by and large they're still buying them. In my experience, the people who complain about the prices the most are the same people who CONTINUE to buy the most comics.

Really flawed logic there. The people who complain about them carry on buying, but the people who just stop buying because of the prices are the problem - and there are plenty of those.

But if they lowered the price-point, that does NOT mean that lots of new readers are going to jump aboard. There's no evidence to suggest that that would happen. For the last decade super-heroes have had the best PR campaign possible in the form of dozens of super-hit movies. And that gigantic cultural phenomenon did next to NOTHING to increase the sales of the comic books, even though every bookstore in the world started to showcase graphic novels, and even though Marvel and DC put out a slew of $1 jump-on issues.

A big promotional campaign and a $1 jump on issue is not anything close to the same thing as an ongoing cost of $1 or less. The fact is that as far as I'm aware there's no real evidence to tell whether people would come back to cheaper comics - and there probably won't be until it's tried.

Really? Why would more than 1 in a 1000 people with an iPad want to buy digital comics? Does more than 1 in a 1000 iTunes users want to buy mp3s of opera or bluegrass music? Do the people who like bluegrass music dream of the day when the "stupid" bluegrass executives finally cut the prices of their mp3s? Do they assume that if only bluegrass mp3s were priced at 5 cents a piece, THEN everyone would suddenly want to listen to bluegrass music? Because that's how comic fans act. They overrate the medium's ability to appeal to other people.

Here's where you sadly might have a point. It WILL take more than just lower prices to get people back, but DC at least are making a really good go at that side of things at the moment.

Whether there's any chance of getting back to the better numbers still remains to be seen. I don't think I can be quite as pessimistic as you are about it.

Or maybe Marvel can farm out its talent to Chinese slave-labor? THEN maybe a 99-cent price-point would be feasible. I mean, all of Apple's trendy little overpriced gadgets are made by poor, mistreated Chinese people anyway, and you guys don't seem to have a problem with that.

Most people in these discussions seem to have more of a problem with paying a buck more for a comic than they do with all of their Apple toys being produced by slaves in a communist country, which their idol Steve Jobs worked with much like so many businessmen in the 1930s worked with Hitler's Germany.

But really, all of the things I mentioned, I guess "they don't matter".

I guess what matters is railing--railing hopelessly, in total ignorance of the historical and cultural forces that you're up against--for a price-point that is totally impossible if you want to pay your talented employees more than Steve Jobs would pay his Chinese slaves. That seems to be the route that most internet comics pundits are taking, to just rail for a sake of railing for an impossible price-point that reminds them of their childhood or something.

Okay, big tangent there, but I'll bite...

Some countries aren't as rich. One major way to help to redress that is to do business with those countries, paying them money in return for goods and services. Without companies like Apple using parts made in China these countries would be even poorer.

So no I'm not going to feel guilty about the Chinese parts in my iPhone.

[DarthCommenter]

Wow Dark Beast I bet you are fun at parties.

Dark Beast made me depressed , but your post made me smile

What if digital books came with an audio track so all you had to do was look at your ipad. Absolutely no effort required by the content consumer. Would that appeal to the uneducated peasant masses?

Seriously though, I think digital is much more than just turning paper into bits. There really is potential for real innovation that will bring comic books to the general public. Don't think smaller think bigger. Don't box yourself into what is, take it to the next level.

What about free advertising supported comics? Google makes 3 billion dollars A MONTH selling little text ads next to digital content (most of the content is in archaic text format, btw). Why can't the comic book industry make a fraction of that sum? That would be enough to support creators.

"Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes... the ones who see things differently -- they're not fond of rules... You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things... they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do." -Apple

[AvengerG]

You can't just say that they "don't matter" and expect that to magically rewrite reality. The numbers are what the numbers are. It's unprofitable to sell new comics for 99 cents a piece. (Do you have any idea how much of a pay-cut the creators themselves would need to take in order to make 99 cents profitable???)

This is ignorance. You state this as fact but you have no clue what you are talking about. I worked for a distributor back in the day for several years. Here's a little comic economics lesson for you...

Back in the days of multi-distributors, Marvel & DC sold their comics to Diamond, Capitol and the others at roughly 60% off. Might have been 65% but it's been awhile and my memory of things isn't great, but it was at least 60%. That means, out of a $3.00 comic, Marvel received $1.20. My guess is this hasn't changed much even though distribution has. Out of that $1.20 they pay for printing costs and cost of moving the books to the distributor's warehouse. This is where the guessing game comes in. How much does a comic cost to print and ship to a distributor? 20 cents or more and we are already below the 99 cent price point but at any rate, it's got to be more than 10 cents per comic. So in the current system Marvel and DC are getting around 99 cents to $1.10 per book after printing and shipping. They are currently able to pay creators and turn a profit.

Looking at going digital, you eliminate much of these costs. No printing fee. No shipping fee. Personnel needs drop as you no longer have to track and schedule shipments. No people needed to deal with the printer, distributor or retailers. You would save a ton. The only added cost would be development of your own app (a moderate outlay of cash at first but then, just maintenance and upgrades) and server storage for your files which gets cheaper by the day.

Why any of these companies are giving some delivery device (Comixology, iTunes or the countless others) 30% of their sales is a complete mystery to me. It's stupid. Do it yourself. Just the money you save from eliminating current logistics costs would probably cover it and the programming isn't that complicated. Heck, do cbr, cbz or pdf downloads from your current website for 99 cents and sell them for $1.99 through the worthless apps to the masses unable to figure out how to download from a website.

99 cents is very much doable and yes it would probably kill the direct market but really, it's just a matter of time now. It doesn't matter if you are one of those who demand print and will never read digital. Do you think 15-20% of current comic readers would switch to digital if the price were 99 cents per comic? I think it would be much more but all it's going to take is about 15-20% of comic buyers to switch to digital and the direct market will collapse. No store will be around after 15-20% of its clientele vanish and it will probably be a bigger percentage than that. It will be a slow bleed but over the next few years it's going to happen as pads and slates become more common and much cheaper. A year ago a friend told me there would never be a sub $200 color reader. Friend, meet the Kindle Fire. Only 7 inches but 10.1 inch pads are dropping in price quickly.

DC and Marvel won't sell same day digital release comics at 99 cents yet. They still need the direct market so they'll bide their time for now. They're not stupid and believe me, they know all of this and plans are being made. The only uncertainty is not if they'll abandon print but when.

[Trey]

DC and Marvel won't sell same day digital release comics at 99 cents yet. They still need the direct market so they'll bide their time for now. They're not stupid and believe me, they know all of this and plans are being made. The only uncertainty is not if they'll abandon print but when.

Is radio still around?

Newspapers?

Magazines?

Theater, plays, opera?

Books?

Live comedy acts?

So slow your roll on the absurd notion that printed comics are going to disappear. It will remain a small niche that will be available for anyone to try and see if they would rather do that then play Angry Birds.

Print has advantages over reading on the screen. IT IS NOT THE SAME AS the music or motion pictures industry.