Graphic Novel Royalties.

Ageless and Evergreen

You’re looking at a segment of a royalty statement that focuses only on graphic novels that are more than 10 years old. This statement is also some years old to throw people off the scent who may be looking to dig into my client’s business.

“Evergreen” is a book that sells over a long period on backlist. So, these are all evergreen titles, books that have been in print continuously (or close to it,) for more than ten years. These are not all of the books I worked on, this is just a segment that shows nothing but these older works.

I have work in dozens of graphic novels from multiple companies.

The royalty period is sales over 3 months during a summer quarter. Sales over the Christmas holiday would be considerably more than this.

Also, none of these books have had new editions in some time. Sales slowly drop over the years and smooth out, settling into a steady drip. With new projects or tie-ins, you’ll get a blip in sales for awhile. Sometimes a big blip. I got a $7500 check once when one of my ancient backlist projects had a huge publicity boost. Prior to the blip, it had been pulling in about $1000 per quarter.

Heck, I even got royalty checks on things like Eclipso because I did one issue thirty years ago and then it ended up in a book collection.

There has been a constant, and to be frank, completely deluded drum beat coming from a certain segment on the edge of the comics industry that comics is dying because front list monthlies don’t sell what they did in 1984.

But this is backlist. And backlist is where the money is.

Over a 3 month period in the summer of this year, a single graphic novel that has been out for well over a decade sells more than the average brand new indie comic from a lot of people who do runs of their books on Kickstarter and crow about all the money they are making.

But they can’t quite process that these big publishers are ALSO MAKING MONEY ON THOSE SALES AND THEY HAVE THOUSANDS OF BOOKS TO MAKE THOSE SALES ON.

My books have been out for 10-30 years. Cumulative sales on some of these titles runs mid six figures.

The lowest selling of the books on this list moved over 14,000 copies in hardcover when it first came out over a decade ago. And it’s still selling.

None of these books are making me rich, but that drip of money adds up over time. Cumulatively, I estimate it comes to about 7-8 years of middle class income in graphic novel royalties alone. Which, again, is not making me rich. But it pays the health insurance bill, or at least it did for awhile.

And it is making the publisher some serious bank.

This is not a complaint on my part, this is showing you where the money is in comics.

Books like classic X-Men, Kingdom Come, Watchmen and so on, these things sell and sell and sell year after year. This is easy money for a publisher.

I was not primary contributor to many of the GN’s on which I receive royalties. In some cases, I did no more than a pin-up or a short story. So I’m not making the big bank. But I’m happy to get money every few months. Sometimes more. Sometimes less.

But the math is clear.

A $19.95 graphic novel which moves only 5000 copies per annum is bringing in about 35 grand for the publisher per year after the distributor takes his cut, and it costs them nothing but a little admin time and warehouse space to do it. If there are 5 volumes in that series, then the series is bringing in nearly $175,000 per year above and beyond what the monthly comic is bringing in.

The trade is bringing in the profit even if the comic doesn’t. But the comic keeps the audience pumped for the trade.

Of course, all trades don’t move 5000 per year. Some are only moving a few hundred per year. But those trades are still making money year after year on work that was paid for a decade or more ago. And then some of those trades go out of print, and the material gets repackaged and repurposed into a new edition awhile later.

Some of the trades on currently popular books are moving 6 figures into the bookstore market.

The reason books like Squirrel Girl and Ms Marvel - which did not up the charts in comic shops - got published by Marvel is because their trade sales were high. Because some people can’t access the numbers on those sales, they claimed those sales didn’t exist.

Just because something isn’t popular in the direct market, that doesn’t mean it isn’t popular elsewhere.

Raina Telgemeier’s work is not popular in the direct market, either. I’m not the target audience. But who cares? She has moved a million GN’s into bookstores and through Scholastic.

While I can’t tell you which book this was, I had a graphic novel sell into the direct market at just under 1000 copies.

But it sold over 100,000 copies outside the direct market. I’ve never made big money on it due to the huge advance for the company that hired me and the royalty split, but last year I saw a decent mid 4-figure royalty check. And I just got another for a couple hundred bucks.

I never really made big money on the A Distant Soil comics either, in part, because when the comic sales were at their highest, my first publisher was paying me peanuts.

I later self published and for the majority of the life of the series, I made a profit, but that ranged from solid, to decent, to barely there.

I’ve often stated that I never made more than $30,000 per year on the comics. But adjusted for inflation…that’s over $60,000.

Not bad. Most people self publishing a comic would cry with happiness to make that kind of money.

But even when I was self publishing, the money was in the trades. When my printer destroyed my negatives, it had a serious negative impact on my finances and forward momentum, I lost thousands of dollars a year in income. Not big money, but just enough to cost me the money I needed to produce about 2 comics per year and put me in the hole when I tried.

I’ve been thrilled with the way the trades sell at shows this year, even if we’re not getting orders from shops. Another reason why, as difficult as it is to balance conventions and making comics, it pays to go to conventions in many ways.

Anyway, it is backlist that makes the big money in comics. There are some people out there who simply don’t believe this, for political reasons or whatever.

But it’s the absolute truth.