Big Time!

So, for some reason Chrome keeps letting me know when there are updates by a site called Bound*in*g In!to Comics. (I will be messing with the names of certain sites and people who I suspect do vanity searches)

It is one of those sites that whine about social justice warriors and the like ruining comics.  Anyways, they had this headline article:

The Di*Vers**ity &in& Co!mics guy started an indie go-go campaign for his comic Jaw#@breakers. drawn by former Marvel Artist Jonny M$alin (who got booted after saying some rather… uninformed ideas about Jews and the X-Men). I don’t really care about the comic itself here. The art is certainly passable and kind of has an early Travis Charest look to it.

What I am looking at here is the claim by the article that this is a massive victory and the book has outsold Marvel and DC:

Now, looking at the campaign, it looks like it will easily hit it’s $90,000 stretch goal and I predict it may even hit $100, 000 before they are done. And that is an impressive feat by the standard of any crowd funding.  Especially when their goal was $5,000.

But here is the thing… it should go without saying, but apparently it must be pointed out.  Crowdfunding totals is not the same thing as sales. It is, in fact, apples and oranges.  For instance, there is the fact that your average comic book is between $2.99 and $4.99. With crowdfunding, you have tiers…and for this campaign, there are two options:

Lost Souls is pitched as a 75 page graphic novel. Most basic collections of comics and graphic novels are roughly anywhere from 125-300 pages and sell for less than $25.  If they meet their final stretch goal, and it looks like they will, you are looking at 132 split between a 75 page graphic novel, a 25 page new story and a 32 page remastered version of issue one. For $25-$50 bucks a pop. And that is how crowdfunding works. I am giving money to a project I support, far more than I would have to pay if I just got the final product.

But No matter how much you raise, a crowd funding total is simply not the same thing as actual sales.  The dollars don’t matter there, the overall number of purchasers do. And if you look at the number of people backing the project? You are looking at maybe three thousand backers by the time this is done.  That is your sales. And by that standard? This is not beating Marvel and DC.

Listen, selling 3,000 copies is nothing to sneeze at for an indie title. There are plenty of indie comic book creators that would kill to sell that many copies of their book. But 3,000 copies does not even come close to the number of issues of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and Ms. Marvel…and those are books that were considered sales disappointments for the publisher.  DC’s Hawkman Unbound was a title I had never even heard of, but apparently it sold 22,000 copies.  Marvel and DC far exceed this crowdfunding project in numbers sold.

If J#aw*BreaKers were sold at the average price of $3.99? It would have raked in about $12,000. Which also is below books like the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

So, to sum this all up… Crowdfunding totals (now matter how impressive) are not the same thing as units sold. Selling three thousand copies at a highly inflated price means that actual sales are far below Marvel DC or even Image (whose lower selling titles still reach around 7,000). So…this is not the “in your face” the article thinks this is.