Why does it cost an artist four times more to self publish?

[GabrielsThoughts]

I was wondering why independent publishing seems to cost more than what the publishers can produce at one quarter the price. I'm also curious to know other peoples take on independent publishing as a whole. Would you be willing to pay $60 for an independently published graphic novel when you can get an arguably comperable product for less than $20?

[Cogidubnus]

If you're wondering why it costs an artist more to produce a comic, than probably because a publisher of size, I imagine, would tend to own all the things that are required to print, like professional-grade presses and binding equipment and whatnot. When you have to pay another for the use of such devices, it obviously brings a cost to you that the publishers do not have - rather, they simply pay for the ink and paper, whilst you pay for the privilege of using a press at all.

If you mean to say why does it cost you more to buy an independent comic, it is because a publisher can afford to spread their overhead out through greater volume. That means that in order to make a profit on the considerably less stock that they have, an independent artist has to charge more to cover their costs, while a publisher can charge considerably less - and because they sell more of said comic, they still make a profit.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each. A smaller publisher carries less stock, and is therefore more versatile, in that they can change what they sell according to popular opinion faster than a larger publisher can, who has a large stock of items that they have to get rid of.

Your economics lesson for the day!

[Turnsky]

I was wondering why independent publishing seems to cost more than what the publishers can produce at one quarter the price. I'm also curious to know other peoples take on independent publishing as a whole. Would you be willing to pay $60 for an independently published graphic novel when you can get an arguably comperable product for less than $20?

paper, ink, time, collating, typesetting, cutting & trimming, even putting the staples in costs money in the end, (and if they're old school, the photo rips and the printing plates, too), and you'd haveta take into consideration supply/demand factors, and the little factoid that a lotta publishers charge by the batch.

edit: this is why manga are purely black and white, it's simply cheaper that way.

[Destina Faroda]

Wait...how much does it cost an artist to self-publish?

[rabid_fox]

Wait...how much does it cost an artist to self-publish?

ALL the money. That's right. ALL of it.

[superluser]

Also, the publishers tend to spread the debt around.  Mega-hits like Watchmen or Spawn finance the relative unknowns like Graphamaximo.

[Jigsaw Forte]

Well, given that I've been trying for at least the past month to shop around for printers, here's the definitive, authoritative, and downright accurate answer:

It's because we can't sell worth a crap.

... No, really.

Print-On-Demand (POD) is expensive, but each book is, for all intents and purposes, made individually. If you only want one book, it's only $X + fees. If you want 100 books, they're still each $X, and the fees get lumped together from sheer volume so they're almost negligible by comparison. If all you can sell is 50 books? Congrats! Here's your 50 books, which you paid a lot for, but still.

Offset Printing costs you significantly less per book, but requires you to order many more books. (Ye Olde Mythical Tipping Point is around 1,000 books, I believe.) So in order for this to work out, you have to be willing to pay for 1,000+ books all at once, and take on the very real risk you might not be able to sell them all.

IF you price your book properly, you only need to get folks to preorder, oh, about 1/4 of what you actually plan on ordering to cover your costs -- for offset, this is 250 books minimum, in other words.

So say we have two artists, A and B. A presells 300 books, but B only presells 100 (Let's just say the books are both priced at $20, and are otherwise equivalent).

Furthermore, A manages to get in on a deal that allows them to print their 1200 books for $5 each ($6000 total, which is totally doable as they made just about that much) , but B has to print books at $15 each because they can only estimate book sales of 400 (same $6000).... except that B didn't MAKE $6000 -- B made only $2000, so B can only afford 130-something books at that price.

Both artists manage to sell all their books eventually, so A not only ends up selling almost ten times more books than B in the end, but also A got to keep 75% of their money compared to B's 25% (thanks to the reduced print costs) -- so B ends up making roughly $500 in profit in the end, while A makes $15,000, all because of a couple hundred more in preorders.  

Oh, and if your book is in Black and White as opposed to color? You can print your books even cheaper, so all these thresholds for how many preorders you need and everything else drop even lower.

... You can see why I'm really kicking myself right now for doing LR in color.

[superluser]

Offset Printing costs you significantly less per book, but requires you to order many more books. (Ye Olde Mythical Tipping Point is around 1,000 books, I believe.) So in order for this to work out, you have to be willing to pay for 1,000+ books all at once, and take on the very real risk you might not be able to sell them all.

I work for an offset printing company.

So I am really getting a kick out of this reply.

It's more or less true: I can't remember seeing any press runs of fewer than 500 sheets, and those are usually paired with other orders from the same company (usually a frequent customer) of 750 or more.

To give you an idea of the types of presses we're talking about, another printer in the area has a 6-color Komori (video, yes, that's 15,000 sheets per hour--and since most comics are 24 pages, you're looking at at least two signatures), which cost $3M.  They won't turn it on for less than $1000.

Actually, the one above is a bit of overkill.  Most full-color comics are only going to be 4-color, not 6-color, but the rest is about the same.

[llearch n'n'daCorna]

superluser, by "500 sheets", you mean "500 identical sheets", hence making a book, you'd be talking about 500 books. Right?

Not, 500 sheets, at 25 sheets to a book, hence 20 books.


The rest of the binding process gets interesting, too...

[superluser]

superluser, by "500 sheets", you mean "500 identical sheets", hence making a book, you'd be talking about 500 books. Right?

Right.

Though it's worth pointing out that each of those sheets would have multiple pages on it, so if you're doing a 24-page book, you might have 2 sheets to a book if you print them in octavo (you'd probably print one octavo and one quarto 2-up).