Patrick Gerard

kierongillen:

To save you clicking through, the answer is “No.” 

The slightly longer answer is “While I generally object to jumping on a singular writer when talking about a larger issue which I see all over industry commentary columns, if you think that you can look at  WicDiv’s sales and think they’re in any way in trouble, you have no business writing an industry commentary column. You simply don’t know enough to be doing this, and in doing so, you are hurting people’s perspective of the industry.”

Jamie and I eye-rolled when we saw the above article, but realised it may be a good opportunity to talk about this stuff, as it happens a lot, for a lot of books. I meant to write it back in may, but I got distracted by working myself to death. However, I appear to have a few minutes spare, and as there’s a lot of comics economics talk going around in the last few days, it strikes me as a good time to throw this into the mix.

In August 2006, the month that our first issue of Phonogram launched, the Walking Dead’s sales figures were estimated at 20,501.

I can tell you, this wasn’t a failure or a cause of concern. Every single creator envied Kirkman and Allard. 

In the same month, Invincible’s sales were estimated as 13,584. 

Maybe that was a cause for concern? It’s basically 2/3rds of Walking Dead. It’s well beneath the line Marvel would cancel a book.

No, it wasn’t a cause for concern. Almost every Image Creator would have also killed for those numbers.

Walking Dead then wasn’t what Walking Dead is now, but it was still the book which set the conversation in terms of what Indie books were capable of. That Kirkman had his name on two books with that level of success made him the go-to example of how to indie comics. 

No, I don’t mean “hey, you get to do your own thing and make some money.” I mean “you are doing financially better than you would by doing a WFH book for the big two.”

I’ll give you some really basic rule of thumbs for indie comic commentary:

Anything selling stably over 10k in single issues is a cause for celebration and joy. The creators are almost certainly extremely happy.

If you’re selling over (ooh) 12k, you’re probably making more than either of the big two would pay you, unless you’re one of the very biggest names.

If you’re selling anything near 20k, you probably have to buy drinks for your friends.

And in a real way, if Phonogram settled around 6k back in 2006, I suspect Jamie and I would have settled into doing it for another 40 or 50 issues.

There’s all manner of exceptions to the above, but if you look at the charts and bear that in mind, you’ll be closer to how the industry looks at those numbers.

None of the above includes digital sales. 

None of the above include trades. You throw trades in, and you change everything entirely. A cursory look at hit indie comic numbers reveals that their trades sell much more than Marvel/DC main universe trades, with a few exceptions (There’s a reason why Matt and David’s Hawkeye was such a big thing, and it wasn’t its monthly sales). Let’s bold another sentence.

You cannot do an industry commentary column on indie books without including  the impact of trades.

There are books that are selling well beneath 10k and are doing just fine.

All the three sentences I bolded in a block were about making  money from the single issues. They do not include any other revenue source, such as trades. If the single issues break even and you make your money in trades, that’s also fine. With a few exceptions, big two comics primarily make their money in single issues. That is one reason why their single issue sales matter so much more.

There’s other reasons why single issue sales need to be higher…

• Overheads. They have more editors staff, etc. What a creator owned book makes, generally speaking, a creator owned book keeps. The overheads are lower.
  
• Profit targets. Books don’t just need to be profitable. They need to be profitable to a level which has been corporately pre-determined, in a set period of time. 
  
• A relatively low selling book is taking the place of a book which could abstractly sell higher. Why keep a book which sells 18k on the shelf when you could have one which sells more?

All those factors interacting are amongst the reasons why the bar is higher for a monthly audience at the big two.

Equally, it would be a mistake to confuse the audience of a book with its monthly sales. As said above, you would have to include a trades for that, and the trades are not a small thing. 

On a personal level, we’ve sold over 50,000 copies of the first WicDiv Trade. Last I looked at Amazon’s stats we were selling about 1000 a month via book shops alone (i.e. not including comic shops, which is usually more.) The orders for 12 were 22k. The initial orders of the second trade are up 33% on the first trade. Realistically, we were hoping to stabilise at around 13k, and we’d have been enormously happy with that, even if we weren’t selling trades. Which we are. WicDiv is a ludicrous success, by far the biggest thing in our entire career. And thanks to everyone’s support in achieving that. 

The idea that there’s articles being written which try and frame discussion of indie comics like this - and it’s an approach which is picked up by comment threads - is entirely counter to the reality of the comics industry.