What Should You Charge for Your Comic?

Based on a survey of 100 comics Kickstarter campaigns

Over the last few weeks, we've been trying to determine how much we should charge for our comic books. To say the least there are a lot of different opinions on the subject. At conventions we were seeing floppies go for as little as $5 or as much as $15 for a normal standard cover. It’s a pretty wide divide!

It got us curious about what pricing we might expect to see on Kickstarter for comic projects. Since there are so many comic projects available and the reward tiers are easy to read, we did an analysis to see how much comics typically cost on Kickstarter.

How to Compare Comic Projects: Price per Page

We decided that the easiest way we could compare comics of different lengths was to look at price per page. Higher page counts mean higher printing costs and a longer story for the reader.

You could make the argument that art quality could have a large effect on the price, but the price per page seemed like a much less subjective methodology.

Here are our findings after reviewing 100 active comic book projects over the last few weeks.

Finding #1: Comics with No Page Count

Here’s where I’d put the page count…if I HAD one

Out of 100 campaigns that we reviewed, 25% of them had no page count listed at all.

It seems odd that you would run a Kickstarter campaign for a comic book and not tell people how long it is, but we guess nobody is rifling through the shelves of Batman comics in an LCS and meticulously counting pages.

Still, we feel like indie creators should err on the side of providing people with more information about their book rather than less.

Kevin LaPorte

has a lot to say on the topic of what information indie creators ought to include in their campaigns.

Finding #2: Shipping Varied

The average shipping cost for US based projects was around $7, but shipping prices ranged from $4 all the way up to $10. International shipping to the US averaged around $9, but admittedly, our sample size here was small.

One of the reasons for this divide could be shipping via Media Mail vs not. Media Mail is much cheaper, but your success with it may vary depending on your local post office.

There’s also the case of people using the shipping cost to pump up their overall revenue, so we included the price of shipping in our numbers.

The Numbers

Here is some information on how we collected the numbers:

• All the comic projects we reviewed were for single-issue floppies of varying sizes. We avoided any perfect-bound volumes.

• The estimates were for standard covers only, not variants.

• We ignored any “extra” rewards included with the pledge level when considering price per page. Although most campaigns were just offering the single book alone.

Safe for Work Comics

• Average cost per book: $13

• Average page count: 30 Pages

  • Average price per page: $0.43

  • Average price per page shipped: $0.66

• Most expensive book per page: 32 pages @ $1.25 per page

• Least expensive book per page: 40 pages @$0.18 per page

Not Safe for Work Comics

• Average cost per book: $15

• Average page count: 26 Pages

  • Average price per page: $0.57

  • Average price per page shipped: $0.84

• Most expensive book per page: 32 Pages @ $1.05 per page

• Least expensive book per page: 32 Pages @ $0.31 per page

NSFW books definitely demanded a much higher price per page. The books tended to be more expensive as well, despite the lower average page count.

What should I charge for my book?

There really isn’t a one size fits all answer for this.

If you’re still building a fanbase, you may want to be within 10% of the average book cost just to maintain competitiveness. If you have something really spectacular that sets your launch apart from everyone else, maybe this won’t be the case, but that’s more of a subjective metric.

Also, just because you’re new doesn’t mean you should price your book CHEAPLY.

A low price doesn’t guarantee you more sales.

If you price too far below the market, it could lower the overall perception of your product and people might not be willing to pay the lower price. If you see three people selling bricks for $12, $10, and $2 you might wonder what’s wrong with the third set of bricks, even if they look great on the outside.

The price you should set for your book is ultimately what your audience is willing to pay for it. Great product, great rewards, and smart pricing will increase your average pledge value.

Don’t Feel Guilty

There’s hesitance from indie creators for charging substantially more than Marvel and DC Comics. If you’re moving your product in comic shops through a distributor, you don’t want to be substantially more expensive if your competition is sitting next to you on the shelf.

On the other hand, it’s important for creators to realize that PRINTING IS EXPENSIVE at low quantities. If you’re printing 500 issues of your book (~30 pages) you’re probably spending close to $1,200. That’s $2.40 per book.

While this varies by product type, a common strategy for manufacturers in retail is something called Keystone Pricing. This would have them targeting a 50% profit margin based on their cost to manufacture.

• Manufacturing Cost: $10

  • Price to Distributor: $20

  • Retail Price: $40

In the case of your Comic, it would look like this:

• Manufacturing Cost: $2.40

  • Price to Distributor: $4.80

  • Price in the Comic Shop: $9.60

So yeah…. don’t feel too bad if you’re pricing your book above Marvel and DC, because the above numbers don’t even take into account the cost of art, lettering, editing, and writing.

We also want to be clear, we’re not suggesting everyone go and raise the price of their books. We’re just very big proponents of experimentation.

What do you think?

• Is Price Per Page a fair metric to gauge book prices, or should another methodology be chosen?

• Do you feel you were under-charging or over-charging for previous books on Kickstarter?

• Does an average of $13 per book surprise you?

• Should art style factor in?

• Do you think indie publishers should try to compete with Marvel and DC on pricing?

Let us know!