Comic Distribution Calculator

Without a distributor, the calculator assumes you're selling directly to comic shops at a 50% discount off cover price, so you keep 50% of retail per copy. With a distributor like Diamond or Lunar, that share drops to 40% of cover price, since the distributor takes its own cut on top of the retailer's discount before passing revenue to you. It's a fixed percentage split either way — the tool doesn't model volume-based distributor discount tiers.

Bookstore copies are treated as returnable: only 85% of the copies allocated to that channel count as actually sold when calculating revenue, using the bookstore's 37% cover-price share. But the printing cost for the full allocation — including the 15% that come back unsold — is still subtracted from bookstore profit, since you paid to print those returned copies even though they generated no revenue.

Convention sales in this model use full retail price with no distributor cut and no per-copy shipping cost, since you're assumed to carry copies to the show yourself rather than shipping them. That's the only channel with just one deduction (print cost) between retail price and profit, which is why it tends to show the best profit-per-copy figure among the four — though it doesn't account for your own travel and booth costs, which this calculator doesn't include.

The bulk shipping figure you enter represents freight-rate shipping used for the direct market, bookstore, and convention channels bringing copies in volume. Direct-to-consumer sales are modeled as individual orders shipped one at a time, which costs proportionally more per unit than bulk freight, so the calculator doubles your entered per-copy shipping rate specifically for that channel's profit calculation.