Creator Confessions: The Difficulties Of Pricing

A hard thing for any business to do is figure out their pricing structure. This is doubly true for creative businesses that have to take into account not just a physical product, but the expertise and skill set used in creating that product. Comics especially are difficult to set a price for mainly because there is so much variation in the markets. A twenty-four page book published by a world-class publisher is not the same as a twenty-four page book self-published by a single creator. And so, there are many calculations that need to be made in order to price each book properly.

A lot of the problems stem from customer expectations. When a potential customer walks into a comic shop and they see books by DC Comics or Marvel priced at a certain point, they then assume that that price is what a comic should cost. But the Big Two publishers print vast amount of books that keep their manufacturing costs low. The same cannot be said for an indie book printing at much smaller quantities. The break-even for a book is going to be much higher, and so an indie creator has to take that fact into account when pricing their product.

Unfortunately, a simple calculation of math isn’t good enough. That theoretical customer’s mindset of how much a comic book should cost is only so flexible. They may be able to understand if an indie book is a few dollars more, but they may question if it is double the price of a mainstream book. And so, pricing an indie comic is a balancing act between recouping expenses and staying within the normal range of what a customer expects. Of course, things get even more difficult when factors such as variant and specialty covers are taken into account. All in all, this just goes to show that how an indie creator prices their book is huge a decision that takes time and thought. It shouldn’t be made lightly as price is often the determining factor between a successful launch and a failure.