I don’t think it can be denied that life is expensive – every year costs go up a little bit for this, or that, or something else. For us, unfortunately, it’s time to do the same. After 8 years in business we’re introducing our first price rise.
What’s changing?
When Deadstar first started in 2010 we set our prices based on what we felt was fair based on what we’d seen on the market and what we felt comfortable spending to build our own collections, so our graphic novels were set at around £10, and our single issues of comics were either £3.75 if they were in colour, or £3.00 in black and white.
Over the past few months though it’s become apparent that we can’t sustain those prices in face of rising costs – so from May 1st 2018 we will be raising prices on some of our products. An example of that is Dolphin Squad II (oops… spoilers) which will retail for £11.99 instead of the £9.99 price that we released the first book for. Likewise, our colour comics will rise from £3.75 to £4.50 and our black and white comics will go from £3.00 to £3.50 each.
Why are we telling you about this price rise now?
With our prices having stayed the same for eight years we felt our loyal customers deserved to know in advance to give you the best possible opportunity to buy any last items missing from your collection at the old price.
We selected the new prices based on the same criteria we looked at in 2010: what other people in the community are charging, and what we’re happy to spend on similar products. We hope that despite this price rise you’ll feel our titles are still good value for money.
Is there anything that won’t be affected?
As things stand, we aren’t looking to increase the cost of our ebooks. Some publishers price their ebooks at the same rate as their physical releases on the basis that the same amount of work went into their production… while we feel that’s true, there’s no stock costs associated with ebooks. Once they exist, they will always be there and there’s no need to manage print costs, postage, table hire and travel to sell them… so we prefer to keep our ebook prices as low as possible.
If our rising costs have put you off buying a physical book or comic from us, at least take solace from the thought that, comparatively, it will now be cheaper than ever to start that ebook collection!
Hopefully, we won’t have to make another announcement like this until 2026!