Question: Any Recommendations For Printing Comic Book Floppies?
Just looking for any good recommendations for places that print small batches of comic books.
In the event that I would first publish "Ithaqa" as seven issues, I'd want something relatively cheap. I've looked at a few places, but there are a lot of people here who have printed in the past, and I'd like to hear about their experiences :)
My experience was far in the past and B&W only... but I’ve always kept this bookmarked to look into more deeply for future projects.
http://www.printninja.com
i've come across them, but I think it might be too optimistic of me to purchase in batches of 250 minimum haha.
I dunno. You may want to consider a full offset print run through something like Print Ninja. But, believe it or not, I'd be advocating going way more extreme than 250! At a print run of 250 each issue is costing you over $5 a pop! Finding any kind of low run printer or print on demand service that can make a quality comic will easily cost you the same or more. If your intention is sales, it'll be really difficult to sell an issue for $6+ dollars meaning you'll need to sell at a loss if you choose to do conventions etc.
The cost rapidly drops with quantity, so at 1,000 copies you're down to about $1.70 each. At that rate you can actually make profit off sales, even selling to comic shops at $2 a copy with a cover price of $3.99. If you think you'll create "floppies" for each issue, you'll potentially have a new round of sales of issue #1 with each subsequent issue release, and it would be better to have low cost stock on hand than go back for multiple high cost small runs.
And consider part of your print run as a marketing expense. You'll want to have copies to give away to media outlets and comic shops. Here too, giving away a $1-$2 promo copy is more sensible than $5-$6.
At 2,000 copies you're looking at about $1.15 per copy. This level would even allow you to distribute through Diamond if you chose, again assuming a cover of $3.99 and needing to sell to Diamond at 60-70% off cover.
1-2k copies would be a big investment. $1700-$2300 per issue, but if you could manage some successful crowdfunding campaigns for each issue it could be attainable for sure.
I'm actually always blown away by this pricing. I spent about the same on black and white more than a decade ago. Newer printing tech (and outsourcing to China!) has made color a lot more reasonable than it was when I printed Seer.
So if you're really considering self publishing, take a good hard look at the numbers and strategy. If you feel like you might gradually print 5 50 copy batches but the price is $6 a copy, that's $1500 dollars that could have pretty much covered a 1K print run and still had 750 free issues left over! You could literally give away 750 copies to help generate 250 copies worth of sales and be no worse off than if you'd just printed the 250. And free issues into the right hands will be the best marketing hands down. Cost per unit is just so critical.
No idea