If you are not familiar with Bad Idea Comics, they are a new publisher that will be doing things differently. they are not selling through Diamond. They are only selling at between 20-50 shops. There will be no variants, second prints, digital copies.
TFAW is taking pre-orders for Bad Idea’s first release ENIAC #1 – LIMIT OF 1 COPY PER CUSTOMER. ANY CUSTOMERS ORDERING MORE THAN 1 COPY WILL HAVE EXCESS ORDERS AND COPIES REMOVED! At the height of World War II, the world’s most ingenious minds began a race to create a super-weapon capable of ending the war with the push of a button. One of those projects gave us the atom bomb…. and another produced the world’s first supercomputer: ENIAC — an immeasurably complex mathematical model built to target the Axis war machine. Everybody knows that. It’s real life American History. Or so we were told. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki… Only President Truman wasn’t the one who gave the order. It was ENIAC. And now, 75 years later, its real plan is only just beginning…
From Hollywood Reporter
What makes Bad Idea truly unique, however, is its publishing plan: The company will bypass both digital releases and collected editions, instead choosing to release only single issues priced at $3.99. Additionally, those comics will only be available at a limited number of comic book retailers, initially numbered at just 20, with a plan to grow to “roughly 50” within the first year of operation.
In order to qualify as one of the chosen retailers, the publisher requires stores to meet “a unique system of criteria that includes enhanced signage, promotional displays and rules for stocking and selling Bad Idea releases, including a strictly enforced ‘limit one per customer’ policy on all Bad Idea comics.”
Best of luck to Dinesh and his partners in their new publishing endeavor. I think there could be some great stories being told by this new imprint, Bad Idea Comics. ?
Bypassing Diamond, sign me up. I’m buying just because of that alone.. 😉
Massive print runs I am betting. I like the idea, but just don’t see it lasting very long unfortunately.
Why do you say massive print runs? If they’re instructing 20 retailers to limit to 1 per customer even on pre-sales, I’m sure some will go around the 1 per limit but highly doubt we’re gonna see the masses doing this in high volumes.
Agreed, Poyo. I can not see a new publisher printing more than they need, or is ordered. That just doesn’t make good business sense. I would suspect fairly low print runs. Dinesh was the CEO of Valiant, and is an avid comic collector. I’ve seen photos of his PC before, it’s been incredible. Given that Dinesh is an experienced publisher and collector, I think he is aware of the does and donts of the industry, and over printing is a big don’t.
While I like the premise behind Bad Idea Comics, something just doesn’t add up to me. I think we can all agree that no one goes into business to let customers profit and then lose out themselves. In order to make a decent profit I’m assuming that the print run will be high. They will have no additional printings, TP, or digital versions.
So they will need to print enough to allow for losses on what they would have made on those sales.
Having said that, maybe their is info we don’t know regarding their dealings with retailers. They may charge them a fee to be one of the few sellers. But just based on what we know, the only way to make a decent profit, in my view, would be a high print run.
Remember, they’re cutting out the distributor, who is Diamond. So they’re making up profits by those means as well. Sell directly to shops = bigger profit margins.
Say for instance Diamond sells books to retailers for $2, that means they Marvel sold it to them for $1. By eliminating Diamond, they’ve already increased their profit margins.
So, look at this way. Matt Kindt is the writer and he’s got a artist. We don’t know specifics on deal with publishers but let’s just say he’s splitting profits with publisher, 50/50.
So the book is $4 and they sell to shops for $2. That makes his cut $1 and maybe he splits that with the artist, so he’s getting 50 cents.
And lets’s just say for giggles, they sell 5000 copies to shops total. That means they made $2500, split that with publisher and it’s $1250. Split that with artist and he’s made $625 for that issue. He makes it a 5 issue mini series.. that’s $3125 for his cut. A seasoned writer like Matt Kindt probably wrote most of the story in a matter of hours total. That’s not a bad pay day if you ask me.
This is all assumptions but some creators just love telling stories and if they can make a decent wage from it, that’s all that matters.
Also one should realize, pre-orders are usually done prior to books being printed. My dad use to work for the print press that printed TV Guides long ago. They could print 10-15 million of these in a 3 day weekend. I’d imagine printing a few thousand comics after they’ve put in their print number order can take a few days to format, print, bound with staples, pack and ship to customer, in this case likely the publisher who then sorts orders to ship to comic shops. From start to finish, I’d say about 2 weeks is plenty of time to get the comics to the shops.
So I doubt Bad Idea is just printing an arbitrary number of books prior to getting finalized pre-order numbers from shops taking orders. 😉
They’ve said they would hold some copies back for stores that sign up after issues start shipping.
But that was when it was 50 stores to start, 100 by the end of the year.
So maybe they won’t save as many copies?
It’s also commmon for them to probably have issues for replacements that got damaged, etc.