I See Posts Before My Eyes

tomdaylight asked: Assuming the overall sales levels were identical: would you prefer to have a small audience buying all of the books, or a large audience buying only a handful each?

brevoortformspring:

Large audience, every time.

Dan Didio made this point at his Sunday Chat (which was more of a monologue this time) at NYCC.  A regular comic book has a break-even point of about 40,000, a hardback about 10,000.  So there were people in publishing asking “So why not just to hardcovers?” And Dan had to explain that in that scenario, you lose 5,000 readers, you’ve lost half the readership; 5,000 on a book with 40,000 readers is still a hit, but bearable.

It’s ALWAYS better to have a large number of customers buying a little bit each.  It’s more work for you, dealing with many small purchases, but the loss of one customer is much more absorbable.