Day Two: The Wiley and Wonderful World of Finance! (CC)

(Note: From here on out I’ll label each post either CC, ZF, or CC/ZF –it denotes what audience the post will most likely be suited for CC=Comic Creators, ZF = Zombie Fans  and obviously CC/ZF is both.)

So here’s day two of the blog, and it may confuse a lot of people, as most indy comic creators think of it last, but in reality it should be thought of first: The comic’s budget!

The reason for this is simple; by having an idea of what the cost potentially will be I have a better idea of what my final product will look like, and knowing that can drastically effect a lot of the choices I’ll need to make during the process of creating the comic.

1^st thing to consider is that in the past Diamond Distribution required a Sales Minimum of $2,500 retail, and they used to give comics three to five issues to reach that mark.  And yes you read that right (what, you thought you were going to get rich of comics. . .there’s a way but it’s not usually of the monthly sales. . .more on that way later).  The current information on their site doesn’t have sales minimums (that I could find) but still has a wealth of information.  I’ll need to keep this in mind because it will affect how I price the comic, in relation to how many copies I’ll be producing.

Before I go any further, I think it’s important that anyone seriously thinking about comics go to vendor.diamondcomics.com and read EVERYTHING they can.  The people at Diamond are kind enough to have quickstart packages, references, etc. so you know what you’ll be getting into. And brother (or sister) you should KNOW WHAT YOUR GETTING INTO.

Which brings me to the 2^nd part: How much is this going to cost me? I’ll be contacting a number of printers by the end of the day (if I get their permission I’ll be posting the company names) and getting price quotes.  I’ll only be contacting printers that I know A) produce comic books and b) more importantly have a distribution chain established with Diamond. (ie they ship the comics after they are done to the Diamond distribution centers).

Now, I worked for a printer for a few years so I have a halfway decent idea of what I want. If you have no idea about things like paper quality, etc. you’ll want to make yourself knowledgeable on the subject, there are enough books on digital press that I will not go into here, you’ll need to do some research (sorry).  So the following is what I’ll be making my inquiry about:

Run size: I need prices for 1,000, 3,000, 5,000 and very unlikely 7,000 print runs.

Color: to keep costs low and save me time during the creation process I’m going to chose to do Black and White interior pages, which saves a substantial bit of money (and now you know why so may indy comics are in B&W-it’s cost not aesthetics). The cover I will want in color, with color interiors = I want to put an add at the end of the comic for my Crime-Noir comic. If I’m paying to produce this I should put in some free advertising after all.

Page size: 24 pages is the standard. Many companies will only print comics in pages divisible by 8 because of the way set-up is.

Paper Quality: #50 is typical standard, produces a decent quality, and while not the best, is a far better quality that 30 or 40 which is essentially newsprint, and I HATE newsprint (for comics at least-bleeds way to much, ink doesn’t stay. . .let’s just say it’s a mess. For the cover most books I read recommend #70 to #80. 

As soon at the pricing quotes come in I’ll start putting up what I’m looking at, hopefully with the company names and pricing information.

Tomorrow’s blog will more more fun (I promise) as we start getting into the zombie-dino-meat of what our story is going to be. . .and how hard it is to kill a 30 foot creature that can only be killed with a head shot when it’s brain is the size of a walnut. . .>shudders violently<.