Have you ever tried to get comics printed?

Oh my gosh... what a hard thing to do! I've been doing some research, trying to find an equitable printer for color books, not just for me, but for some friends, too. If you have any idea of a company who can print in color WITH quality and still enable you to make a profit if you distribute through Diamond, please let me know... Doing the math is just funny on some of the quotes I've gotten. Literally, one place for anything less than a thousand copies came out to just a bit under $20 per copy! Wow, huh? A few places haven't been too bad, but most of the best deals come around 2000 copies and up (to spread out the drum printing setup costs). I'm looking for a "web printer" or "digital printer" I guess, who can handle comic book sizes without actually manually trimming all of the pages, since that's what drives up the cost from what I hear.

Here's the logic...
$2.99 cover price
$1.80 price to Diamond
-----
$1.19 remaining
$X.XX printing costs
-----
$Y.YY profit

To hit Diamond, of course we need to hit the 2000 copy threshold anyway, but even in some of those cases, we were still looking at a little over $1 per copy... $0.19 profit per copy? To hit pro rates, we would actually need to get around, well, Marvel numbers to make a profit. I have confidence in the books I'm working on, but realistically the majority of books do not sell in those numbers. These days, that would be a blockbuster of epic proportions!

Just to compare (for you mathletes out there), here's the direct sales model (if we sell through our own web site using PayPal, for example.

$2.99 cover price
$0.30 PayPal Fees (estimate there)
-----
$2.69 remaining
$X.XX printing costs
-----
$Y.YY profit

If we were paying $1 per copy to print, that puts $1.69 per copy in the creators' pockets... to hit pro rates, we'd only need to sell around 2400 copies and we'd be happy campers. Again, those are Diamond numbers, but much greater profit.

I don't have any issues with Diamond or any other distributor. With those places, it's more about getting the books out there over the profit and a lot of people these days seem to make more profit from GN's than single issues anyway. Exposure to a nationwide audience, the majority of comic stores out there, would be a good thing. Haven is working their magic getting into more stores, which I applaud, and the business model puts a bit more in the creators' pockets (don't have the exact numbers). More power to them for getting out there!

Notice I don't talk about POD or printing services catered to comics? The cost for those may work for direct sales, but there is no way you can distribute through Diamond and get printed through those places because you would pay more to get the books printed and delivered than you would get from sales through Diamond, which is unfortunate...

Anywho, ramble finished...