You’re making a bit of a mistake here.

Those Alex Ross variant covers are priced at $3.99, same as the other copies of the books they’re on.

But because they are rare, and harder to get, each retailer is free to charge whatever they like for them.

(Technically, they’re free to do the same with any of the books, which is why certain retailers can give discounts for those who maintain pull-lists, etc.)

So your retailer may be pricing those covers at $40.00, but that’s not their retail price. It may, however, be the price that the market is willing to bear for them. That’s the economics of supply and demand.

We don’t make any more money off of those copies than we do a regular copy. Where we do see an upside is in the overall sales of the book, if a retailer, for example, receives those copies in a 1:25 ratio–they are more likely to order 25 copies of a title than 20, in order to get that rare variant. And then they price it accordingly, because they need to amortize the cost of acquisition. But all of this puts more copies onto the racks, which is also a good thing for us.