Price points and comics Kickstarters
Here's a comics Kickstarter project that showed up on The Comics Beat today. It looks like an interesting project--pretty colored pencil work with a decent visual storytelling sense.
I doubt I'll be backing it.
Most of the Kickstarter projects I back are games, comics, or books. The books and games I back are almost always competitively priced with professional publications--because a lot of them are professional publications, from established companies using KS as a risk mitigator, or from new companies that have really thought through the business implications. Books likewise.
Comics, though--it really seems like the prices are chosen by "I'd like to make $X on this comic, let's just set the price wherever we want and hope for the best."
I groused a few days ago about how overpriced many comics Kickstarters are. This one--Elysia--looks like a poster-child for that. #25 ($38) plus #8 ($12) shipping for a 100-page, magazine-format, paperback color GN? That's INSANE, even before you take into account the fact that the creators are receiving approximately 90% of the cover price as opposed to the 50-60% they'd be receiving if they went through a distributor--in other words, they're making as much per copy as if it were an $55 book.
I don't expect a small press to be able to compete with the economies of scale available to Image or Dark Horse, let alone Marvel or DC. But an original 100-page color GN from Dark Horse would cost in the $25-30 range, and they aren't getting paid up front!
How do these prices make any sense at all?
Well, as I write this, Elysia is about 75% of the way to funding. Only 112 people have backed packages that concentrate on the comics themselves; about half of the funds come from another 14 buyers who have backed packages that include custom art, original art, Tuckerization, or a full customized story. (This is the big Magilla--at #5000, this one customer constitutes one-third of the funding so far.) The low-end rewards are for digital editions, which come closer to reasonable pricing, at #10 ($15) for the 100-page first chapter.
Maybe that's the problem? They're pricing the PDF high enough to not completely undercut the possibility of paper sales, but then they have to price the paper versions even higher because of the substantial printing costs, which leads to them leapfrogging themselves out of price competitiveness. But still, it's just too much money.
I doubt I'll be backing it.
Most of the Kickstarter projects I back are games, comics, or books. The books and games I back are almost always competitively priced with professional publications--because a lot of them are professional publications, from established companies using KS as a risk mitigator, or from new companies that have really thought through the business implications. Books likewise.
Comics, though--it really seems like the prices are chosen by "I'd like to make $X on this comic, let's just set the price wherever we want and hope for the best."
I groused a few days ago about how overpriced many comics Kickstarters are. This one--Elysia--looks like a poster-child for that. #25 ($38) plus #8 ($12) shipping for a 100-page, magazine-format, paperback color GN? That's INSANE, even before you take into account the fact that the creators are receiving approximately 90% of the cover price as opposed to the 50-60% they'd be receiving if they went through a distributor--in other words, they're making as much per copy as if it were an $55 book.
I don't expect a small press to be able to compete with the economies of scale available to Image or Dark Horse, let alone Marvel or DC. But an original 100-page color GN from Dark Horse would cost in the $25-30 range, and they aren't getting paid up front!
How do these prices make any sense at all?
Well, as I write this, Elysia is about 75% of the way to funding. Only 112 people have backed packages that concentrate on the comics themselves; about half of the funds come from another 14 buyers who have backed packages that include custom art, original art, Tuckerization, or a full customized story. (This is the big Magilla--at #5000, this one customer constitutes one-third of the funding so far.) The low-end rewards are for digital editions, which come closer to reasonable pricing, at #10 ($15) for the 100-page first chapter.
Maybe that's the problem? They're pricing the PDF high enough to not completely undercut the possibility of paper sales, but then they have to price the paper versions even higher because of the substantial printing costs, which leads to them leapfrogging themselves out of price competitiveness. But still, it's just too much money.