Cha-Ching! Marvel & DC Dropping Prices In January
I confess that my wallet and I were both happy to read the following in a story at ComicBookResources:
During the ICv2 Conference On Comics & Digital - a Thursday afternoon industry pre-event to New York Comic Con - Marvel Senior Vice President of Sales & Circulation David Gabriel confirmed that new books launching in January 2011 will not debut at $3.99. "A lot of talk I've heard [today is] about the pricing increases overall...because of the digital comics sales, prices will decrease," he said as part of a panel whose focus was "Print Vs. Digital."
I have no interpretation of "because of the digital comics sales" other than that it's proving to be sufficiently profitable that Marvel is trying to tie it to an overall drop in prices. I'm no businessman, but I do still have a couple of questions and comments raised by that idea - and there's an important part in all this that isn't being discussed at the headline level.
Read on for more random breeze-shooting about the business decisions of organizations I can't rightly claim to understand!
Nobody buys that Marvel or DC are doing this out of the simple kindness of their hearts; businesses have to grow their earnings or investors start bailing out in droves. That's the simple truth at the heart of almost every case of dissatisfied employees and boneheaded management decisions in the corporate world and it is much worse in the case of subsidiaries that can be squeezed by parent companies. I have to assume that digital comics are so profitable that they can lower the price point on print comics and still grow as a company or at least confidently project that growth; that makes sense, because one imagines the vast majority of the production expenses have been paid by the time there's a completed creative work and the only additional costs are in digitizing and online delivery - a pittance compared to buying paper, getting ink all over it and then driving it to a shop in Nebraska. There's also the compensating control that they will very likely sell more individual books if they sell them at a cheaper price point. Marvel's situation is of course more complicated than that: they've aggressively pushed into the film market in ways DC hasn't done in a long time, they're probably on-par in terms of TV presence and there are countless other things that go into any sort of business decision such as this.
The biggest, most obvious motivator, though, is DC's announcement from the day before that they would be dropping prices in January. Even if all other things were equal, Marvel would have to lower pricing in some noticeable way or they would be nothing more than the publisher that charges a buck more for equivalent books. (I think arguments that one publisher's work is of a higher objective quality than the other are crazy; they both publish some great stuff and some real crap and any more finely sliced judgement is purely subjective taste.)
That's all obvious from a headline-level reading, I know, but I want to get that out of the way to get to the really interesting thing at the heart of this: the changes DC is making to the books whose prices are going down. CBR reports that "[w]hen taking into account mini-series, annuals and specials, more than 80% of DC's comic books will be priced at $2.99," but there are a few caveats. Specifically, they're shortening some books - going from 22 story pages to 20 - and they're dropping second features from some books, dropping from 30(!) to 20 pages of story each issue. DC is trimming back the creative work to make room for lower pricing:
As of January, the following titles standard length ongoing titles, previously priced at $3.99 for 32 pages/22 story pages, will be priced at $2.99 with 32 pages/20 story pages:American Vampire;
Batman: The Dark Knight;
Batman Incorporated;
Green Lantern: Emerald Warriors;
JSA All-Stars.[...]
As of January, the following ongoing titles previously priced at $3.99 for 40 pages/30 story pages including co-features, will no longer include co-features and will be priced at $2.99 for 32 pages/ 20 story pages:
Action Comics;
Adventure Comics;
Batman: Streets of Gotham;
Detective Comics;
Doc Savage;
Justice League of America;
Legion of Super-Heroes;
The Spirit.In January, five books are $3.99 for 40 pages/30 story pages:
Batman: Europa # 1
First Wave # 6
DCU: Legacies # 9
Weird Worlds # 1
World of Warcraft: Curse of the Worgen
So, my big questions are:
- Is Marvel going to do the same to the titles for which it drops prices?
- Is this DC assuming that its best, most popular titles are sufficiently reliable sellers that it can pinch pennies?
- Will creators be paid the same, or are they also being squeezed?
- Is DC simply cutting costs or are they betting that slightly shorter books will be seen as a more attractive balance of content and time investment, or that people will read (and thus buy) more comics than before if their comics contain slightly less?
- Will this affect the quality of those books?
I sure as hell hope not. Marvel and DC were quite right about customer reactions. I certainly felt a little sticker shock when prices went up and sales reports from the summer are showing that I wasn't alone:
"As Co-Publishers, we listened to our fans and to our partners in the retail community who told us that a $3.99 price point for 32 pages was too expensive. Fans were becoming increasingly reluctant to sample new titles and long term fans were beginning to abandon titles and characters that they'd collected for years." said Dan DiDio, DC Comics Co-Publisher.
No joke. It wasn't worth continuing to read iffy titles that might or might not blossom into greatness - Matt Fraction's Uncanny X-Men, I'm looking directly at you - at that price point. A dollar doesn't seem like much of a difference on its face, but when one subscribes to fifteen or twenty comics per month it adds up. I don't think shortening the good books in hopes that customers will pick up the others is the solution, though I'm certainly no business executive. Time will tell, and maybe I won't notice, but at any rate I'm already getting a little misty for those two missing pages of American Vampire every month.
Via:
Marvel Drops $3.99 Price On New Titles - [Comic Book Resources]
DC Cuts $3.99 Ongoing Series to $2.99 - [Comic Book Resources]
Klarion
Posted to Other on 8 October 2010
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: DC Comics, Marvel Comics, Pricing
great post thanks