Spike on webcomic economics
Posted by: Rich Watson on December 19, 2008 at 1:43 pm
“…I was just looking over some old Fleen articles about Zuda’s contracts and I just cannot freaking get over it. Did you know that, with a 1% cover price share and assuming the books are equal in cost, a Zuda book would have to sell 10,000 copies to make the creator what I would selling 100 copies of Templar? And that?s assuming there are no penalties in the payout for deep discount/damaged/give-away books, and the payout isn’t be split in half between a writer and an artist or something.
“Jeez, man. JEEZ.”
Also: South African cartoonist Zapiro gets sued over a cartoon.
Tyler James December 20th, 2008
Both the Fleen article and your post did manage to omit one pretty big factor. The Zuda artists were already paid for their work initially. For 60 pages of work, they were cut checks in the total of $14,500. That’s before anything went to print.
Has Templar brought in anywhere near that kind of cash? That’s a lot of independent books to sell.
I agree, going to print isn’t anything to get all that excited about for a Zuda creator…most of their money comes up front, with the small possibility of good things to happen should Hollywood come calling. Personal, I think a Bayou directed by Guillermo del Toro would be huge. Whether or not they have the moxi to make that stuff happen remains to be seen.
The Gigcast » Blog Archive » Webcomic Wire - 12/23/08 December 23rd, 2008
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