DC: Get serious about digital comics pricing!

“What is wrong with this freaking picture?”





, offering one-year subscriptions to the print editions of the DC new 52 titles. Note that the prices of subscriptions are from 30 to 35 percent off cover price.



OK, let me get this straight:



DC will print and mail a year’s worth of titles to me as they come out, and give them to me for a minimum of 30% off the cover price. I will get each of those issues within – oh, say a week or two at the outside of their release.



Or I can buy the same issues as downloadable digital files the day of release – files that cost nothing to print and almost nothing to send to me – and pay full retail price.



Or I can wait a full month, buy those same titles as downloadable digital files, and pay $1 less per title (about 33% off).



But wait, I can buy four print-and-mail subscriptions and get the fifth free! That means I’m actually saving a lot more on the print editions.



What is wrong with this freaking picture?



Let’s look at this in cold, hard numbers. Let’s say I buy 5 of the $2.99 titles of the New 52, all 12 issues for a year. Here’s how the numbers come out:



From your local comics dealer, as printed comics:

​$2.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $179.40





From ComiXology as digital files, purchased on day of release:

​$2.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $179.40





From ComiXology as digital files, purchased one month after day of release:

​$1.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $119.40





From DC by subscription as printed comics:

​$24.99/title for 12 issues x 4 titles (but I get 5) = $99.96



Are you freaking KIDDING me?



“DC will happily sell you the same print issues you get from the retailers for 55.72 percent off the retail price…”

DC will happily sell you the same print issues you get from the retailers for 55.7% off the retail price, and you get them within a week or two after they are released. (Uh… What happened to protecting the retailers?) You do have to commit to and pay for those issues in advance, of course.



If you buy digital files from ComiXology and are willing to wait one month to buy them, you are still paying 19.45% more for those comics than if you bought them direct from DC as physical copies which must be printed and shipped.



This is why DC’s digital pricing structure makes no sense at all. Matching digital and print prices flies in the face of all common sense. It is said that this is an attempt to slow down the growth of digital comics to protect retailers – except that the retailers are on their own vs. DC’s own low-priced subscription program. High-priced digital comics sends exactly the wrong message at a time when the reboot is attracting lots of attention from those who are not hard-core comics fans. You want those people to stop, buy, and stay instead of putting off a purchase.



“The masses of people attracted by the publicity surrounding the DC reboot don’t give a rat’s ass about ComiXology or the retailers…”

Let’s look for a moment at the middlemen in the iPad digital comics transaction – ComiXology and Apple. 30 percent of the price of a digital comic bought through the ComiXology Comics or DC Comics web app goes directly to Apple. ComiXology gets a chunk, too, certainly.



To keep selling direct through iPad/iPhone in-app purchases, ComiXology must agree not to charge less for the same item through another non-Apple venue. This means that the 15% of sale price that retailers get as ComiXology afflilates comes out of the 30% ComiXology does not have to pay Apple for those sales. In effect, ComiXology is splitting their savings with the Retailer Affiliate, and is presumably keeping their regular markup too, so they make more on such a sale than they do on an iPad sale. Presumably, ComiXology would rather you buy from their site.



If I could, I’d buy on the ComiXology website (or through a Retailer Affiliate website). This wouldn’t help me, but would help ComiXology and the retailer, and since as a fan supporting the digital format who wants them to prosper, I’m willing to make some effort on their behalf. Bear in mind, however, that the masses of people attracted by the publicity surrounding the DC reboot don’t give a rat’s ass about ComiXology or the retailers. They just have a casual interest in comics that has been fanned by the reboot publicity. That spark can die just as fast if digital prices are the same as physical copy prices, and curious would-be-fans don’t want to spend $2.99 for a taste.



“If I can buy… a top hit video game that I will play for days for less than twice the price of your comic… you lose…”

DC: Your competition for the new fan is not Marvel Comics. Your competition for the new fan is a copy of Lady Gaga’s latest song on iTunes for $1.29, the latest episode of Glee for $1.99 and a copy of Angry Birds HD for $4.99 in the App Store. If I can buy a hit music single for less than half the price of a comic book, a hit TV show episode for less than your comic, or a top hit video game that I will play for days for less than twice the price of your comic – well, you lose that battle way too often.



Unfortunately, the ComiXology site and retailer affiliate sites are Flash-powered, which means they can’t be used directly from an iPad or iPhone. My own favorite local comic retailer is not an affiliate, so even someone as passionate as I am will have insufficient motivation to run all my buying through a desktop computer (a lot more hassle). I like ComiXology, but I’m not going to give up one of the most useful parts of digital comics buying (instant gratification purchase on the go) just to increase their profit margin. (HINT: Stop using Adobe Flash to power your website sales, dammit!)



Let’s assume ComiXology dropped Apple out of the equation (as Amazon chose to do on eBook sales). They could make their Comics app just a reader and make their web-based sales iPad friendly (perhaps the same way Amazon did – with a good web app optimized for the iPad and iPhone). This would mean we could no longer benefit from the convenience of Apple’s one-click sales method, and no longer use Apple iTunes cards to power our comics buying, so there is some sacrifice involved. Let’s also assume that ComiXology gave the whole 30% Apple markup back to the consumer. (Where does that leave the Retailer Affiliates? Either ComiXology has to share their markup with the retailer, or the Retailer Affiliate program is killed.)



Even assuming all that happens, what happens to the pricing to the consumer? Best case scenario – we buy 30 days after print release, getting all of the Apple markup back to the consumer.

Our most favorable scenario comes out this way:

​$1.39 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $83.40



Compare that to the most favorable DC print subscription price, where DC has no middleman to share the revenue with, but still has to print and mail all the comics monthly:



​$24.99/title for 12 issues x 4 titles (but I get 5) = $99.96



Or, put another way, this is reasonable pricing only if the cost of printing and mailing those 60 comic books exceeds the cost of paying ComiXology’s markup by no more than $16.56.



“Digital is the medium you want to grow in and become dominant if you want to make money…”

I don’t believe it. And even if I did the cost of scale is massively different with digital vs. print. Other than the ComiXology markup, it costs almost NOTHING more to double the number of digital comics produced, whereas doubling the number of print comics produced doesn’t scale nearly as well. Digital is the medium you want to grow in and become dominant in if you want to make money. You don’t make that side of the business grow by discouraging digital sales with prices that are as high (if not higher than) physical print copy sales.



Look at the Batman 101 sale going on right now. Under the two-day sale, issues of the Batman: The Long Halloween arc are on sale at half their normal price – 99 cents an issue. The 13-issue arc costs $12.87 on the sale, or $25.87 every day.



Buy it as a printed trade paperback, however, and you can get it any day at a local bookstore or your comics shop for $19.99 retail. That’s $5.88 less than the ComiXology everyday price for the same material in digital.



Worse yet, you can buy the same item from Amazon online at $11.10, which beats the limited-time sale price on the digital edition. Even if you buy nothing else (you need to buy $25 worth from Amazon to get free shipping), and pay the $3.99 shipping charge, you will pay $15.09 for the trade paperback from Amazon, which is $10.78 less than the everyday ComiXology price and only $2.22 more than the best sale price for the digital edition.



Once more, imagine we yank the 30% so-called “Apple tax” off top of the digital sale and give it all to the consumer. That makes the everyday ComiXology price $18.11 – still just a little more than the retail trade paperback and a LOT more than the Amazon price for the same item (even with shipping). The sale ComiXology price looks better minus the 30% Apple markup at $9.01 – but the Amazon price when you spend $25 or more is still pretty good at $11.10. Were printing costs on the item more than $2? What do you think?



“No more than 99 cents for an individual issue…”

Based on all this, it seems that my gut reaction that I “should” be paying no more than 99 cents for an individual issue of a standard-size DC comic book on release day is pretty much dead on. That might be harder to do right now until the digital runs become a more significant percentage of the market. But the way to make that happen is NOT to try to sell the idea that a digital comic should sell for the same as a print comic – or, worse, to say that a digital run of comics should sell for substantially MORE than the same comic as a trade paperback. No one is buying that. The numbers don’t add up, and the psychological impact of pricing digital comics so high is crippling the beneficial effects of digital scaling at exactly the wrong time.



Build digital now by letting those willing to commit to digital have a break. Keep individual issues at a dollar less than the print issues on day of release ($1.99 for the average DC comic), dropping to $1.49/issue a month later and then to 99 cents after a year. A subscription where the buyer commits to a full year of comics and pay for them up front should be at 99 cents an issue. Commitment for entire groups of comics (All the DC new 52 Dark titles for a year, for example) should get the consumer even more of a break – or perhaps additional material like Annuals for free. That pricing takes into effect the economy of scale provided by digital distribution. Long-tail items like comics older than a year should be marketed as full arcs for substantially less than the trade paperback collections, or at no more than 99 cents each when bought individually.



If that requires an Amazon-like end-run around Apple, so be it. Eventually, I expect Apple to drop those in-app purchase markups to more reasonable prices if not dump them entirely for subscription items like magazines, comic books, eBooks, etc. (The 30% markup makes more sense for in-app purchase of add-ons for the apps themselves, and if I were Apple I’d hold the line on those prices.) In the meantime, support the ComiXology sales effort with good web-based HTML 5 apps optimized for the iPad and iPhone and an individual affiliate program like Amazon’s to get the fans to sell comics for you.



“Faint heart ne’er won fair fandom…”

I love it that ComiXology saw this coming and prepared for it so far in advance. I love it that DC took the plunge with digital at just the right time – alongside their reboot. But it is time to commit. Faint heart ne’er won fair fandom.



Start with a strong digital subscription program now to hold on to the regulars who like digital and the lapsed fans who’d come back strong if the price was right. Use the DC new 52 reboot publicity along with low digital prices to grab the people who are just passing by and hook them into becoming regulars.



Don’t want to do this? Say you can’t do this? Really? One more set of numbers:



​A major artist’s latest album through iTunes in digital form: $14.99 (or less)



​12 episodes of Glee through iTunes in digital form: $23.88



​12 new DC comic books through ComiXology in digital form: $35.88



You have no hope of changing buying patterns that way. Make that price for a year’s worth of comics $23.88 and you are competitive enough to hold someone who already likes comics as much as he does TV. Make it $11.88 and you have a solid shot to make someone looking for a little entertainment choose comics over music and TV.



This is your future market calling. Your best chance to grab it in the next five years is happening right now. The iPad and the DC reboot have give you an edge you may not have again. Superheroes are brave and bold, and DC needs to be brave and bold too.



Do it.



Do it now. This is the official DC Comics subscription service , offering one-year subscriptions to the print editions of the DC new 52 titles. Note that the prices of subscriptions are from 30 to 35 percent off cover price.OK, let me get this straight:DC will print and mail a year’s worth of titles to me as they come out, and give them to me for a minimum of 30% off the cover price. I will get each of those issues within – oh, say a week or two at the outside of their release.Or I can buy the same issues as downloadable digital files the day of release – files that cost nothing to print and almost nothing to send to me – and pay full retail price.Or I can wait a full month, buy those same titles as downloadable digital files, and pay $1 less per title (about 33% off).But wait, I can buy four print-and-mail subscriptions and get the fifth free! That means I’m actually saving a lot more on the print editions.What is wrong with this freaking picture?Let’s look at this in cold, hard numbers. Let’s say I buy 5 of the $2.99 titles of the New 52, all 12 issues for a year. Here’s how the numbers come out:From your local comics dealer, as printed comics:​$2.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $179.40From ComiXology as digital files, purchased on day of release:​$2.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $179.40From ComiXology as digital files, purchased one month after day of release:​$1.99 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $119.40From DC by subscription as printed comics:​$24.99/title for 12 issues x 4 titles (but I get 5) = $99.96Are you freakingme?DC will happily sell you the same print issues you get from the retailers for 55.7% off the retail price, and you get them within a week or two after they are released. (Uh… What happened to protecting the retailers?) You do have to commit to and pay for those issues in advance, of course.If you buy digital files from ComiXology and are willing to wait one month to buy them, you are still paying 19.45% more for those comics than if you bought them direct from DC as physical copies which must be printed and shipped.This is why DC’s digital pricing structure makes no sense at all. Matching digital and print prices flies in the face of all common sense. It is said that this is an attempt to slow down the growth of digital comics to protect retailers – except that the retailers are on their own vs. DC’s own low-priced subscription program. High-priced digital comics sends exactly the wrong message at a time when the reboot is attracting lots of attention from those who are not hard-core comics fans. You want those people to stop, buy, and stay instead of putting off a purchase.Let’s look for a moment at the middlemen in the iPad digital comics transaction – ComiXology and Apple. 30 percent of the price of a digital comic bought through the ComiXology Comics or DC Comics web app goes directly to Apple. ComiXology gets a chunk, too, certainly.To keep selling direct through iPad/iPhone in-app purchases, ComiXology must agree not to charge less for the same item through another non-Apple venue. This means that the 15% of sale price that retailers get as ComiXology afflilates comes out of the 30% ComiXology does not have to pay Apple for those sales. In effect, ComiXology is splitting their savings with the Retailer Affiliate, and is presumably keeping their regular markup too, so they make more on such a sale than they do on an iPad sale. Presumably, ComiXology would rather you buy from their site.If I could, I’d buy on the ComiXology website (or through a Retailer Affiliate website). This wouldn’t help me, but would help ComiXology and the retailer, and since as a fan supporting the digital format who wants them to prosper, I’m willing to make some effort on their behalf. Bear in mind, however, that the masses of people attracted by the publicity surrounding the DC reboot don’t give a rat’s ass about ComiXology or the retailers. They just have a casual interest in comics that has been fanned by the reboot publicity. That spark can die just as fast if digital prices are the same as physical copy prices, and curious would-be-fans don’t want to spend $2.99 for a taste.DC: Your competition for the new fan is not Marvel Comics. Your competition for the new fan is a copy of Lady Gaga’s latest song on iTunes for $1.29, the latest episode of Glee for $1.99 and a copy of Angry Birds HD for $4.99 in the App Store. If I can buy a hit music single for less than half the price of a comic book, a hit TV show episode for less than your comic, or a top hit video game that I will play for days for less than twice the price of your comic – well, you lose that battle way too often.Unfortunately, the ComiXology site and retailer affiliate sites are Flash-powered, which means they can’t be used directly from an iPad or iPhone. My own favorite local comic retailer is not an affiliate, so even someone as passionate as I am will have insufficient motivation to run all my buying through a desktop computer (a lot more hassle). I like ComiXology, but I’m not going to give up one of the most useful parts of digital comics buying (instant gratification purchase on the go) just to increase their profit margin.Let’s assume ComiXology dropped Apple out of the equation (as Amazon chose to do on eBook sales). They could make their Comics app just a reader and make their web-based sales iPad friendly (perhaps the same way Amazon did – with a good web app optimized for the iPad and iPhone). This would mean we could no longer benefit from the convenience of Apple’s one-click sales method, and no longer use Apple iTunes cards to power our comics buying, so there is some sacrifice involved. Let’s also assume that ComiXology gave the whole 30% Apple markup back to the consumer. (Where does that leave the Retailer Affiliates? Either ComiXology has to share their markup with the retailer, or the Retailer Affiliate program is killed.)Even assuming all that happens, what happens to the pricing to the consumer? Best case scenario – we buy 30 days after print release, getting all of the Apple markup back to the consumer.Our most favorable scenario comes out this way:​$1.39 each x 5 titles x 12 months = $83.40Compare that to the most favorable DC print subscription price, where DC has no middleman to share the revenue with, but still has to print and mail all the comics monthly:​$24.99/title for 12 issues x 4 titles (but I get 5) = $99.96Or, put another way, this is reasonable pricing only if the cost of printing and mailing those 60 comic books exceeds the cost of paying ComiXology’s markup by no more than $16.56.I don’t believe it. And even if I did the cost of scale is massively different with digital vs. print. Other than the ComiXology markup, it costs almost NOTHING more to double the number of digital comics produced, whereas doubling the number of print comics produced doesn’t scale nearly as well. Digital is the medium you want to grow in and become dominant in if you want to make money. You don’t make that side of the business grow by discouraging digital sales with prices that are as high (if not higher than) physical print copy sales.Look at the Batman 101 sale going on right now. Under the two-day sale, issues of thearc are on sale at half their normal price – 99 cents an issue. The 13-issue arc costs $12.87 on the sale, or $25.87 every day.Buy it as a printed trade paperback, however, and you can get it any day at a local bookstore or your comics shop for $19.99 retail. That’s $5.88 less than the ComiXology everyday price for the same material in digital.Worse yet, you can buy the same item from Amazon online at $11.10, which beats the limited-time sale price on the digital edition. Even if you buy nothing else (you need to buy $25 worth from Amazon to get free shipping), and pay the $3.99 shipping charge, you will pay $15.09 for the trade paperback from Amazon, which is $10.78 less than the everyday ComiXology price and only $2.22 more than the best sale price for the digital edition.Once more, imagine we yank the 30% so-called “Apple tax” off top of the digital sale and give it all to the consumer. That makes the everyday ComiXology price $18.11 – still just a little more than the retail trade paperback and a LOT more than the Amazon price for the same item (even with shipping). The sale ComiXology price looks better minus the 30% Apple markup at $9.01 – but the Amazon price when you spend $25 or more is still pretty good at $11.10. Were printing costs on the item more than $2? What do you think?Based on all this, it seems that my gut reaction that I “should” be paying no more than 99 cents for an individual issue of a standard-size DC comic book on release day is pretty much dead on. That might be harder to do right now until the digital runs become a more significant percentage of the market. But the way to make that happen is NOT to try to sell the idea that a digital comic should sell for the same as a print comic – or, worse, to say that a digital run of comics should sell for substantially MORE than the same comic as a trade paperback. No one is buying that. The numbers don’t add up, and the psychological impact of pricing digital comics so high is crippling the beneficial effects of digital scaling at exactly the wrong time.Build digital now by letting those willing to commit to digital have a break. Keep individual issues at a dollar less than the print issues on day of release ($1.99 for the average DC comic), dropping to $1.49/issue a month later and then to 99 cents after a year. A subscription where the buyer commits to a full year of comics and pay for them up front should be at 99 cents an issue. Commitment for entire groups of comics (All the DC new 52 Dark titles for a year, for example) should get the consumer even more of a break – or perhaps additional material like Annuals for free. That pricing takes into effect the economy of scale provided by digital distribution. Long-tail items like comics older than a year should be marketed as full arcs for substantially less than the trade paperback collections, or at no more than 99 cents each when bought individually.If that requires an Amazon-like end-run around Apple, so be it. Eventually, I expect Apple to drop those in-app purchase markups to more reasonable prices if not dump them entirely for subscription items like magazines, comic books, eBooks, etc. (The 30% markup makes more sense for in-app purchase of add-ons for the apps themselves, and if I were Apple I’d hold the line on those prices.) In the meantime, support the ComiXology sales effort with good web-based HTML 5 apps optimized for the iPad and iPhone and an individual affiliate program like Amazon’s to get the fans to sell comics for you.I love it that ComiXology saw this coming and prepared for it so far in advance. I love it that DC took the plunge with digital at just the right time – alongside their reboot. But it is time to commit. Faint heart ne’er won fair fandom.Start with a strong digital subscription program now to hold on to the regulars who like digital and the lapsed fans who’d come back strong if the price was right. Use the DC new 52 reboot publicity along with low digital prices to grab the people who are just passing by and hook them into becoming regulars.Don’t want to do this? Say youdo this? Really? One more set of numbers:​A major artist’s latest album through iTunes in digital form: $14.99 (or less)​12 episodes of Glee through iTunes in digital form: $23.88​12 new DC comic books through ComiXology in digital form: $35.88You have no hope of changing buying patterns that way. Make that price for a year’s worth of comics $23.88 and you are competitive enough to hold someone who already likes comics as much as he does TV. Make it $11.88 and you have a solid shot to make someone looking for a little entertainment choose comics over music and TV.This is your future market calling. Your best chance to grab it in the next five years is happening right now. The iPad and the DC reboot have give you an edge you may not have again. Superheroes are brave and bold, and DC needs to be brave and bold too.Do it.Do it