DavidTai wrote:
but right now Archives are not selling, low cost formats are popular and DC is adapting to the market.


You're confusing sales with profitability in this regard.

The thing here is, as FFF pointed out, DC has a much smaller margin of profitability with the Chronicles compared to Archive -per unit-. That means it has to move that many more Chronicles compared to Archives in order to make the same amount of profit.

The current Chronicles -don't- have the seps cost, because that's already been carried by the Archives - so the margin of profitability is a bit bigger because the costs of the color seps aren't factored in here.

But if you factored in the cost of the color seps, suddenly the profitability margin becomes much smaller, meaning it -must- sell even more units in order to remain profitable. Or you could raise prices, but then you'd likely lose -some- sales because people are going to just not buy them (see: people who dropped Archives because it went up to 60 instead of staying at 50)

If DC is going to the trouble to do color seps for -Chronicles- because they think it's going to be profitable, it seems more likely they'd just release it as an Archive in the first place, where the margin of profitability is much higher to begin with.

Or to put it this way, and this is a -very- simplistic estimate, I think Chronicles would have to sell about 2-3 times as many as Archives, assuming costs to be a 20 bucks chronicle vs a 60 bucks archive, to have the same amount of profitability, assuming -both lines- had the same preparation costs. I don't -think- they actually sell that many, even with the chronicles -not- having the same preparation costs.


But David that is exactly what Showcase does, it make little profit and sell in larger quantities because of the low price tag and that is my point,
Archives as a high price item are not selling as they used to while lower cost items like Showcase and Chronicles and TPBs do,
so what if DC has to spend money to color material from Showcase? They do it all the time with all kinds of TPB.

If you think about it there is no reason why a Jimmy Olsen transformations has to sell more then (for example) Lois Lane in 1954
at the same same price point and page count, the readership is the same.