Another day, another story about Marvel cutting costs. This time, it’s apparently upping the number of trade paperbacks that the publisher doesn’t have to pay creator royalties on. Rich Johnston explains:
In the section where they mention trade paperback royalties, the split between Marvel and the creators seems the same as the old agreement, but they’ve actually increased the percent of books that are exempt from royalties due to the ambiguous “returns, anticipated returns, promotional copies and damages.” It used to be 25%, now it’s 30%.
What sticks out to me about this is that Marvel doesn’t do promotional copies of its books. Marvel doesn’t do comp copies to reviewers or other media in the same way that DC or other publishers do – ie, actually having promotional copies available at all. So, unless (a) Marvel is about to start releasing comps – which really wouldn’t be a bad idea, especially with the upcoming OGN Season One line next year – or (b) Marvel is expecting the number of damages and returns to increase sometime soon for no immediately apparent reason, this really does look like it’s simply slashing creator royalties to save money, pure and simple. That’s going to hurt, but leaves me wondering two things:
- How big are collection royalties at Marvel in the first place?
- Will this change make lower-selling collections profitable, where they might have been making a loss under the 25% figure?
Of course, we may never find out…
November 8th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
When all you care about is the bottom line, everything suffers as a result.
November 9th, 2011 at 6:29 am
Or (3) Marvel re-evaluated and found that they were underestimating the number of damages and returns. Not saying this is necessarily the case, but you suspiciously left it out, possibly because of a pre-existing bias against the Marvel corporation and towards creators.
November 9th, 2011 at 6:30 am
@silvanthalas The same thing happens when you don’t care about the bottom line.
Anyway, I don’t see anything here to suggest that ALL they care about is the bottom line. If that was the case, they’d do what they could to eliminate royalties all together.
November 9th, 2011 at 3:05 pm
When you look at what’s been going on at Marvel the last 10 days or so, it all adds up to bad things for the future of Marvel, imo.
November 9th, 2011 at 4:26 pm
My publisher said that all of his titles had increased returns, from an average of about 30% of orders to almost 50% (my book was among them). He told me it was pretty much uniform across the industry.
So I would imagine Marvel is just adjusting to the new realities of publishing, at least in the book market with their crazy returns system.