Posted in: Comics | Tagged: Amy Chu, Carlos Gomez, Comics, dynamite, entertainment, red sonja

Red Sonja #0 Has Close To 100,000 Orders… And Dynamite Is Losing Money On It

Published Thu, 03 Nov 2016 07:00:23 -0500

Dynamite recently announced a relaunch of their Red Sonja series. This, the fourth volume, will be written by Amy Chu and drawn by Carlos Gomez. Amy is also doing the new KISS series for Dynamite and wrote Poison Ivy for DC. Carlos has been a regular artist on the Jim Butcher's Dresden Files books. To kick the new series off, the publisher is putting out a #0 issue with covers by Gomez, Brandon Peterson and J. Scott Campbell… and they are offering it up for only $0.25.

Now some of you already know all of this, I did a story about it before… but I was curious how well a quarter book would do for Red Sonja. Turns out… pretty damn well. The initial orders for the issue has come in at almost 100,000 copies.

But you can't possibly make any money on a quarter book, especially at 100,000 copies… can you? I asked Dynamite's publisher Nick Barucci that very questions:

Yes, we do lose money on every copy sold, and funny enough, the more we sell, the more money we lose since our printing price is higher than the wholesale we take in. But to us, the Quarter book is an important marketing tool. This series is great! And we want all retailers and fans to know, and to do so, we lowered the cost of entry. This minimizes the risk to retailers at such a low cost wholesale and maximizes their ability to intro their customers to our series, and fans can try it for just a quarter! Again, this is a great series with a lot of passion and incredibly well executed story from Amy's writing to Carlos' art. We know once fans read the #0, that the majority will come back for the entire series!

Dynamite is taking a big gamble to put this book out, which shows their confidence in the new series and that readers will want to come back for the first issue. The zero issue goes on sale December 12th. The first issue, with covers by Nick Bradshaw, Campbell, Peterson, Giuseppe Camuncoli, a cosplay cover and a subscription cover by Mel Rubi, is available for order now and will ship January 11th.