Some interesting points about selling digital comics:
1/ Apple take 30% right off the bat.
2/ In the case of Wanted, Comixology then splits 50/50 with the publisher.
3/ Then the publisher pays the agent and creative team out of the remaining cash depending on their deal.
Even if you don’t go through Apple, Comixology’s percentage looks to be pretty high as well. I’m not sure what printing and distribution costs are on paper comics, but I’d be surprised if they were as high as Apple and Comixology’s.
Mark Millar:
In hard numbers, the digital comic is normally half the price of the paper comic, but you have just as many percentages to pay out as a creative team to an electronic distributor and publisher. So effectively the creative team is getting half as much money. For creators, this isn’t great and for comic stores this is awful. I don’t mind paying thirty percent to a local store where my friends work and the guys care about the product. But do I want this money going to Apple?
Millar makes some great points about the finances situation, but let’s keep in mind that right now most of the comics sold digitally were released months and years ago. It wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that most of the current digital comics sales are gravy on top for everyone involved. Put another way, the paper comics have already had their sales run with or without the existence of digital comics.
The real issue comes with how to deal with day and date book releases. There’s still a sizable audience of potential comics readers that have no interest or ability to buy paper comics. How are these people going to be served without being cast aside?
As someone who likes owning the paper books, I still feel a hybrid paper/digital solution is what I would like the best. I want to own the best books for my personal library, while also enjoying the convenience of digital delivery for when I don’t have time to get out to the store.
However, shelling out the same cover price as a paper comic for a digital one just doesn’t sit well with me. Like in the music industry, consumers want all-you-can-eat subscriptions. There’s books that I would want to try out, but with comics being $3.99 or more these days, it’s too hard to justify buying many of them on a whim. We need to have a compromise between the readers, retailers, and creators that leaves everyone happy.
Read: MY BIG CONCERN WITH COMIC DOWNLOADS – Millarworld.tv Forums.