Quote from: Tuxedo Mark on March 11, 2017, 07:21:17 PM

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 10, 2017, 12:42:18 AM
No, what ACP should have done, after cancelling one floppy title after another, is they should have started tranferring all that new content (20-25 pages worth) into all the digest titles. To encourage print digest sales, they shouldn't sell a digital version of the digests. They could make the new content from the digest issues available later (6 months to a year) as a digital single, for $2 -- but if you want those new stories earlier, you need to buy the print digest.

Meh, I'm not a fan of the "delay digital to get you to use the old format" tactic. Heck, I was pissed when The CW used to wait 8 days before putting a new episode online. Now, it's the more reasonable day after.

If floppies don't sell anywhere other than comic shops, ditch the physical format entirely and go digital-only. That way, customers can have a 20-page story (or a group of stories totaling 20 pages) for around $3.99 (heck, maybe less) and wouldn't have to pay shipping costs or deal with packaging. For anyone that really wants a physical copy, Archie Comics could set up a POD service.

Digital-exclusive comics are the biggest scam of all time. $4 for what? For a print comic, somehow a printer, a distributor, and a retailer and all the people that work for them all make a living off a slice of that price (in addition to the creators and the publisher, of course) -- and they all have operating expenses to justify the services they contribute. Paper and ink and printing presses and the industry to produce those things cost money. Moving physical objects around in the physical world means you have to pay a lot of people and the cost of fuel needed for transporting those objects. There's no way they're going to tell me that the cost of administering a website and server hosting costs add up to the same. It's a pure scam for the "publisher", who contributes ZERO to justify hoarding all that profit, unless it's underwriting part of the costs of print publishing.

Selling digital-only comics is literally like giving a publisher a license to print money. After the publisher pays the creators a per-page rate, its 100% profit for them from there on. All of those other people who normally get paid out of a slice of that $4 per copy? The publisher gets to keep their share for himself. UNlike the money a publisher had to invest to attempt to reap a profit on a finite number of print copies, that digital comic is infinite and everlasting - it just keeps making new copies of itself. And what has the publisher done to deserve all that? What did he invest or risk to justify reaping those profits? As far as I can see, his investment was minimized and his risk along with it, and all he did was take a lot of jobs away from other people. Why should he get to keep profiting eternally while the creators get nothing more?

The only way I'd consider buying a digital-only comic is if it's creator-owned/self-published, so the people who are doing the actual creative work are the only ones profiting from the fruits of their labor. Any monkey can set up a website to sell a digital comic, but not just any monkey can create a good comic book. How much profit do you think Dan Parent is seeing from the price of every digital copy of LIFE WITH KEVIN sold, as opposed to how much he's seeing from every digital copy of DIE KITTY DIE sold?

That's a rhetorical question, but I'll spell it out for you. Dan Parent created the characters for LIFE WITH KEVIN (except for Veronica) and entirely wrote and drew it himself, but he makes $ZERO profit off the price of every copy ACP sells of the digital-exclusive comic -- which is why I refuse to purchase it. Whatever money Dan made off the story and artwork, he made before the thing ever went on sale, so my money does nothing to contribute to Dan Parent. I have to assume that ACP recouped the cost they invested in paying Dan for that work, probably on the very first day that issue #1 went on sale, so none of my money is contributing to him earning a living. Paying for a digital-only comic where the creator gets nothing extra for selling more copies, but the so-called "publisher"s profits keep growing with every copy sold (and it never goes "out of print"), feels like being an enabler for a rapist. The cost of a page rate for 20+ pages of comic art & story is a drop in the bucket compared to the investment needed to print & distribute a floppy comic book -- and that's the only part where the publisher can be said to contribute anything -- the investment in the printing and distribution.

ACP has the means at its disposal to publish LIFE WITH KEVIN as a print comic and get it distributed, but they'd rather not (that would be risky because it might cut into their pure profit). Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz don't have the means at their disposal to publish DIE KITTY DIE as a print comic and get it distributed. The only way they can do something like that is by running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the cost (something that is normally a publisher's contribution). Once they've managed to do that and pay themselves for writing and drawing the comic in the first place, they then have to work out a deal with someone like Chapterhouse Comics to publish a floppy comic for them -- that's the only thing justifying Chapterhouse making a profit off a comic book that was entirely created by Dan Parent and Fernando Ruiz.

I'd rather see ACP go belly-up than all digital-exclusive.

Interesting. I asked Viz on Twitter whether it's better to buy print or digital if I want to support a series I like (and see more similar series published) and they said print is more profitable for them.

Quote from: irishmoxie on March 12, 2017, 03:21:07 AM
Interesting. I asked Viz on Twitter whether it's better to buy print or digital if I want to support a series I like (and see more similar series published) and they said print is more profitable for them.

Japanese creators own the rights to their own work, so they share in any profits.

Viz might have been lying to you. If what they told you was generally true for publishers operating in both media, why would ANYONE publish a digital-exclusive comic? That makes no sense.

On the other hand, maybe they weren't lying and print publishing really IS more profitable for them. That's AN answer, and it may have been true, but maybe there's a difference in how the profit breaks down between creators and publishers in Japan, and it's a different deal whether it's selling print copies or digital copies. That would make sense in terms of the relative contributions made by the publisher depending on the actual media. In print publishing, the publisher shoulders the burden of risk because of the money they need to invest for printing and distribution, so it makes sense that they should also receive the greater percentage of profits than the creators -- while in digital publishing, the publishers risk next to nothing, so the creators should gain the lion's share of the profits generated.

Maybe the key piece of information they neglected to tell you is that digital publishing is more profitable for the CREATORS.

Something I hadn't though about earlier, but maybe ACP should have made a better effort to accept outside advertising in their comics.  Surely there's some clever sales/marketing people that could have gotten them ads from businesses that want to sell to the Archie readership demo.  I'm sure ACP generates sales and subs through the in-house ads, but I'd imagine far less than if they were instead promoting candy, toys, movies, tween accessories, etc.

Quote from: steveinthecity on March 12, 2017, 07:08:50 PM
Something I hadn't though about earlier, but maybe ACP should have made a better effort to accept outside advertising in their comics.  Surely there's some clever sales/marketing people that could have gotten them ads from businesses that want to sell to the Archie readership demo.  I'm sure ACP generates sales and subs through the in-house ads, but I'd imagine far less than if they were instead promoting candy, toys, movies, tween accessories, etc.

This is true. I've been reading different ACP back issues from different years and making a mental observation of the types of paid advertising that was carried, and there's been a consistent steady reduction of that over the past couple of decades.

Other than the back covers of digests, the ONLY interior paid advertising now being carried in ACP's digests (which is where they'd have the most free space and the biggest circulation to attract advertisers) is for Diamond Comics Distribution. I don't count things like the CW's RIVERDALE and Rachael Antonoff's B&V fashion collection, because where else are they going to advertise, and who knows if it's not paid outright, but some kind of contract/reciprocal arrangement. For that matter, now that I think of it, maybe the DCD ads are some trading arrangement, too.

Quote from: DeCarlo Rules on March 12, 2017, 10:21:42 PM

Quote from: steveinthecity on March 12, 2017, 07:08:50 PM
Something I hadn't though about earlier, but maybe ACP should have made a better effort to accept outside advertising in their comics.  Surely there's some clever sales/marketing people that could have gotten them ads from businesses that want to sell to the Archie readership demo.  I'm sure ACP generates sales and subs through the in-house ads, but I'd imagine far less than if they were instead promoting candy, toys, movies, tween accessories, etc.

This is true. I've been reading different ACP back issues from different years and making a mental observation of the types of paid advertising that was carried, and there's been a consistent steady reduction of that over the past couple of decades.

Other than the back covers of digests, the ONLY interior paid advertising now being carried in ACP's digests (which is where they'd have the most free space and the biggest circulation to attract advertisers) is for Diamond Comics Distribution. I don't count things like the CW's RIVERDALE and Rachael Antonoff's B&V fashion collection, because where else are they going to advertise, and who knows if it's not paid outright, but some kind of contract/reciprocal arrangement. For that matter, now that I think of it, maybe the DCD ads are some trading arrangement, too.

This is actually true for Marvel and DC too.  They used to have all kinds of ads in their comics, now it is just in-house ads.  I wonder if the low print numbers of modern comics make it not profitable for outside companies to buy ads in the comics. 


On the digests, I've always seen those as the most available format, since those are still sold in grocery stores and places like Wal-Mart.  I'm 44 and my town did not have a comics store, and not many comics racks either, so the only times I got actual comics were when we went out of town and I found Archie comics in a rack at a Mini Mart.  You don't even find those racks in convenience stores much anymore, so you'd have to go to an actual comics shop to find them.  That limits their reach even more.  Doing something with the digests would be the way to keep going.