New Brevoort Formspring

I don’t accept defeat. Nor do I blame the readers. I simply accept that we work in a Darwinian system, and always have. Not every title that we put out is going to find success, and not every title that we put out is going to go on forever. In fact, the vast majority of them won’t.

Now let’s talk about $2.99 vs $3.99. I’ve done this rap at least once here already, but this will be a good refresher course.

To start with, just to make the math easier, I’m going to round up. So $3 and $4 is what we’re talking about.

At that stage, one thing is pretty clear: you need to sell four copies of the $3 book to make as much money as you would on 3 copies of the $4 book. That’s just to remain at the same level, not to make anything more. So your retailer would need to sell one additional copy in order to make the same money. That doesn’t sound too hard, right?

But now let’s increase it exponentially. In order to make the same amount of money, you need to sell 40,000 copies at $3 as compared to 30,000 copies at #4. And that’s more the ballpark that we’re talking about. At that level, you can see that it’s not at all likely that an additional 10,000 people will pick up the book at the cheaper price. Even if 5000 people do, which is an extraordinary achievement, you’re still in the hole and bringing in less cash, for both Marvel and the retailer.

Let’s look at this another way and slice those figures in half. If hypothetically, your cut-off point for profitability is 20,000 copies at $3, then on order to bring in the same amount, you need sell only 15,000 copies at $4. So right there, regardless of where the true cut-off point is, you can see that you can keep a title alive for longer at the higher price. Which would seem to be obvious, but isn’t, because everybody assumes that more people will try the cheaper book. Some of them will, no doubt–but not enough to offset the loss of income from the higher price.

If we priced everything at $2.99, you’d be seeing a lot more titles give up the ghost at 6 issues rather than 12. Had SHE-HULK been priced at $3.99, it could have run for at least a little while longer.

As to your final point, as any look at the sales rankings will tell you absolutely, books priced at $2.99 do not sell any better than books priced at $3.99. So all that pricing a series at the lower price does is put you into a more difficult position in terms of needing to sell more copies to cover your production nut. And we do that when we can, as often as we can. But it’s not a sustainable bet in the long run, nor does it increase the chances of success.

It’s really all just straightforward math.