The distribution of the money for cheese will be discussed.
| word from publisher is the opinion column Pedro F Medina †@Studio_Kato), editor-in-chief, responsible for licensing and social networks fandogami and the journalist with an undisguised showman’s face in comic book and manga events |
Let’s make Sesame Street and count from zero to one hundred. Tebeosfera Report 2020-2021, which is a big data summary on the comics market in Spain in the last two years, left a comment on its latest report that made me curious. page 19 of the pdf. Says:
How to compensate for the loss caused by the crisis for writers? The editorial approach remains rigorous: Technicians in the comics industry earn three times as much as creators. In other words, if an author gets 10% of a comic’s PVP, both the publisher, the distributor, and the bookseller get about 30%.
Let’s see. I am the first to vigorously defend the rights of writers, especially when it comes to money. You know me already.. I understand that, to reduce it to explanation, we are simplifying the numbers to their minimum expressions, using the revenue-sharing cake that we burned too much in the oven to bake. But here comes my pullita, What happened to the publisher, distributor, and bookstore each taking 30% and that’s it? Do we also pay for the production of collars? These notes only help to raise more doubts, so we’ll explain this from the beginning. He will take an exam.
The Bookstore Receives 100% of the price (or 95%, if the legal maximum discount applies) of EVERY BOOK SOLD. Earlier it paid the distributor about 65-70% for each book depending on the material and terms, so (when he sells the copy) he’s left with about 30-35%… which is not pure profit, from there you can get local costs, inventories, payroll etc. will find it. And beware, department stores and online platforms take up less than 40% (remember, they’re the ones selling the most comics and especially manga right now). What the bookstore doesn’t sell goes back to the distributor, who has to give the money back… reinvests in more books and so on, nauseating.
The problem here is that there are distributors and publishers who accept book returns and others do not. Planeta, for example, does not intend to take delivery of materials out of their warehouses: unless the bookstore sells volume 79 of One Piece, it’s up to them not to order. In my case, and in the case of many other small and medium-sized publishers, outlets can even return comics that don’t belong to you if you’re a little careless. And one more thing to keep in mind: The bookstore can choose what to display on the shelves and charge more or less depending on what they think. So you can ask the distributor to get the 500 issue of Tokyo Revengers (the trick: Norma has her own distributor with a real shark mentality, hats off before they eat it) and just two copies of the rest of that week’s releases. Or none. They all need comics based on their previous experience, regular customer and market forecasts. You can choose from 300 titles per month. And they choose. No one is forcing them to have everything, but they usually get the latest news because they never know who’s going to buy this weekend and you have to scratch all over the place, at least during launch week.
Distributors who generally do more logistics than commercial business (there are exceptions because what they usually do is carry books on demand, they don’t try to generate new sales where it isn’t already), we said 65 -70. % of the bookstores that come in pay them (and maybe like 60% if the sale is in supermarkets) and they don’t keep a significant piece from there, an average of 20%. For this reason, publishers receive 40% to 50% of the cover price of these charged comics. What they do is first tell you the quantities that were moved AND THEORETICALLY counted as sales, but in the months following publication you will receive updates based on whether more copies are ordered or material is returned. The thing is, at the end of the fiscal year, if you’re willing to go that far, the publisher will actually add up the total of the copies sold and offset the proceeds (the money that will be REFUNDed for the collected comics placed on the eventually paid comics). closed for sale) revenue from the comics continues to be sold on a perpetual scare and billing wheel over the following months. That’s why you should try to publish stuff that pays for itself: spawning minority comics or a small audience at the expense of other commercial titles that make up for your losses isn’t a good long-term strategy. Every comic should be profitable on its own… or not.
And of the 40-50% the publisher gets from distributors (ninety days after bill is issued and get everything with tweezers because they say 2,000 books are sold for a month and then they can return 1,300) is to pay three big costs: printing (hard and real gambling, because the publisher has to pay for all the print work regardless of the final sale, so it’s not a valid expense for any proportionality: all and period, what’s sold is sold), the technical team (possibly translators, sign makers, etc.) and the most important block, base, soul and center: writers. In Spain they take an average of 10% of the strip’s PVP per copy sold, although it is considered to be fixed regardless of what is sold. then weWe idiots offer them 20% and we survive because the ledger value chain, which must be respected for the proper functioning of the industry, is constantly changing and updating, and there is such a thing as direct selling when a middleman bypasses you., especially to carry the catalog fund that the bookstore no longer fits. And many funds will continue to make a lot of money if you keep showing that, or so they said at the last XXV Booksellers Congress.
But I’m not here today to refute the foundations of the industry, rather the editor doesn’t fill 30%, it really isn’t: it fills between 40% and 50% and with that it has to eat up the entire print stream, something none of the others do. And yes, here I am once again breaking the spear for publishers who take risks and commit themselves. They carry the printing press and pay a thousand stories for whatever is sold. They just have criteria to publish and catalogs to make money, they can’t choose to have more Ivrea covers on the shelves this month because it would be better for them. They’re the ones who put all the money first and get any compensation three months after publication and advance the money with no guarantees of return or a plan B to magically turn them into other books that work better. They cannot return them. Well, all monetary andThey sing the goddamn comic we forgot, make their mark, guide the creative team, sometimes rewrite the entire script and don’t show up in the credits, give it to the press, or even shit it. . At least that’s how it should be. Then you have to stop and consider whether the 90% to be divided among the “technicians” should be evenly distributed, or if one incurs a little more cost and/or difficulty than the other and tell me if you can. Where should so much extra really come from to raise funding for copyright? Think. Now think carefully.
This column is not endorsed by the Independent Publishers think tank. Little.
