Retailers Speak Up about Falling Comic Book Sales

A lot of comic books now carry a price tag of $3.99. That is hurting sales.

From a piece in Comics Alliance...

Adam Healy, Cosmic Monkey Comics, Portland:

"We've seen price increases before during certain crises, but never a full third, and with no justification. It's phenomenal, and it's indefensible. When they raise the prices, that directly impacts our ability to stock the shelves and showcase what's out there, because we're only working with so much money... Whatever money we've made from the price increase, we've lost from the extra books we've had to pick up that we didn't sell.

Marvel is currently publishing what everyone else puts out as a $2.99 comic for $3.99, but with no added value. The first monthly book [at $3.99] with no added value was "Dark Avengers," and that's when we started to get nervous about because we realized all our unsold copies were going to cost us more money. At first it didn't seem to hurt sales because people were really excited about it, but now across the board, we've seen the sales for every $3.99 book go down, except for "Hulk" and "Thor." A lot of companies are only printing to order too, so if we sell out we can't reorder the last month's issue, which means we can't grow a lot of things.