DC Cancels Two Digital-First Comics, Cuts Print Edition for a Third

DC Comics has been publishing digital-first comics for over a year now, and its strategy has been to publish the comics first in individual chapters for 99 cents each, then collect three chapters at a time into print comics priced at $3.99 (yes, print costs more than digital here). The logic here is that DC gets to sell the same story twice, presumably to different audiences, although there are probably a few diehards who will buy them both ways. This week, though, DC announced some changes to the lineup: Two series, Ame-Comi Girls and Arrow, are being discontinued in print and in digital, while a third series, Legends of the Dark Knight, will skip the floppies and go straight to trade. A look at estimated sales in comics shops compiled by the retailer site ICv2 makes it pretty clear why: sales of all three comics have plummeted since their release. Legends of the Dark Knight #1 sold 42,904 copies; sales of the second issue were down by more than 25%, to 30,085, and while the curve flattened out a bit after that, each issue still sold fewer copies than the one before, with the most recent issue selling only 16,678 copies in the month it came out. Arrow showed a similar pattern, starting with 25,442 copies of issue 1 and winding up with only 9,671 copies sold of issue 8. Ame-Comi Girls did a bit of a relaunch halfway through, with new numbering, but the first issue sold 24,966 copies, the first issue of the new series sold 16,558, and the most recent issue sold 11,229. The cancellations follow the pattern DC has established with its print comics; Todd Allen did some analysis a few months ago that seems to show that once sales of a print comic drop below 18,000, it is in danger of being canceled. One might expect that threshold to be lower with digital-first comics, because digital as well as print sales contribute to the bottom line. For comparison purposes, let’s look at a couple of digital-first comics that weren’t cancelled this week: Smallville Season 11 #14 moved 15,097 copies in June, and Adventures of Superman #2 sold 22,407. So maybe we can look at sales of 12,000 to 17,000 as being the danger zone, with various factors that we can’t see (how many copies are selling digitally, how much the creators are being paid) affecting the outcome. That may explain why Legends of the Dark Knight is going to go straight to trade, even though it sold more single-issue comics in June than Smallville. DC Cancels Two Digital-First Comics, Cuts Print Edition for a Third is a post from: E-Reader News

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