It's been a long time since I saw any data, but it used to be the case that the purchasers of trades had a much higher percentage of being female. That is, women who wouldn't often go into the specialty comics shop to buy the monthlies would go to a regular bookstore to buy trades.
This was especially noticeable with manga—girl and women-oriented titles did horribly in the monthly format, but skyrocketed in paperback.
Yeah - trades seem more likely to reach a much broader audience, particularly people wary of the awkwardness sometimes incurred by going to the comic shop (if one can even find a comic shop - a book store is a place some people stop frequently, whereas a lot of comic shops are slightly out-of-the-way).
Another impression I get is that trades attract more readers in their 30s and older, with families, and with more traditional jobs. The cast of Comic Book Men they're not, by and large.
Also, if you just want to read the story, getting the trade usually works out cheaper than buying individual issues.
I wouldn't say the stigma or inconvenience of going into a comic shop in a major factor. In my country, the situation is more or less the opposite of America - you can get a selection of comics is available in every newsagent, but trades are almost entirely restricted to dedicated comic shops; indeed, that's where the comic shops make the bulk of their income. Despite this, trades still outsell monthlies, and also the weeklies not geared towards children.
edited 30th Jan '13 5:49:07 AM by VampireBuddha
Ukrainian Red CrossKinda wish American formats would follow that of Franco-Belgian Comics: Monthly publications combine a ton of comics from the same publisher (ie: Journal De Spirou would include works like Spirou And Fantasio, Le Petit Spirou, Gaston Lagaffe, etc...) and the whole storylines when completed are available as trade-like "Albums".
I'd be more inclined to buy monthly stuff that way. Otherwise getting what... 10 pages of story if we are lucky feels not worth the effort. Plus that'd get me to learn about works I might not consider getting otherwise (And prompt me to then buy the trades).
edited 30th Jan '13 6:45:28 AM by CobraPrime
I know. Seems a bit much!
But seriously, monthlys barely have any content. Last one I bought, Blue Beetle #1 in 2011 was 33 pages long, about half of them were publicity of various forms. The added material is just one benefit beside the possibility of cross-exposure to materials people might not know or be interested in otherwise, and the fact that a single bad story won't sink the publication (Less motivation to pre-emptively terminate a storyline because sales aren't good).
edited 30th Jan '13 10:31:40 AM by CobraPrime
Here's something I realized today in regards to trades vs monthlies. I only just started reading monthlies, bought through comixology on my iPad, and even then, I only have about 5 series I actually read in that format (Sword of Sorcery, Earth 2, Deadpool, All-New X-Men, Superior Spider-Man. I've also slowly started working my way through the back-issues of Saga). For comparison, I own 98 trades (counting only western comics. If you you factor in manga, the number goes up to 110) *.
Trades are just really convenient. If you're strapped for cash, you can put off buying them without ending up with a ton of material to catch up on and you read bigger chunks of the story at once. Yeah, they don't come out as fast as monthlies, and trade readers are usually 6-12 months behind monthly readers, but compare trades to, say, novels. A novel series with a fast release schedule is about one book a year. For most comic series, you'll get 2 graphic novels a year, so it's really only slow compared to the magazines.
And part of the point I was working towards, is that comics publishers often seem to target their material more towards the sort of readers that subscribe to/buy the monthlies—more young-adult, more male, less settled down ... maybe less mature in matters social, psychological and otherwise. The stuff eventually gets bound up and sold as trades, but its content was largely determined by people different from the eventual purchasers. I wonder if that will change eventually, and if so, what factors might help cause it.
Almost all the comics I buy now are trades. I buy online or at the nearest comic book store, depending on price and availability. I don't really feel like there's a stigma towards going to the comic book store. (And even if there was, I wouldn't care.)
My reasons for buying trades:
- It's (usually) cheaper.
- Easier to store.
- It's annoying to drive 25 minutes to go to the nearest comic book store to get a small fraction of a story.
- If I wait for the trades, I'm less likely to waste money on a book that's horrible.
- I plan on buying the trade anyway, so buying the monthlies would result in me buying the same comic twice. That's only going to happen if I really love a series.
Trades here. It's 40 minutes back and forth to the closest comic store. Not worth the time. And honestly, not worth buying monthlies for anything that isn't a super long ongoing story - lots of them just get cancelled. Why buy partial stories that might never get finished.
The industry's reliance on monthlies with no evolution towards grouped publications in magazine format (Like Mangas and Franco Belgian Comics do) is baffling to me.
I always wonder when people say that trades are cheaper. Maybe my calculations are wrong, but I have always thought that trades were more expensive than the individual issues. The first reason for this is the direct cost for six issues (about $16) versus a trade (about $25). But also, there's the money saved if it turns out to not be any good. After all, if you buy an issue of a series and it's terrible, all you spent was for that single issue, as opposed to the entire thing in one trade, where if the story is bad from the beginning you still are stuck having paid for the whole thing.
Another thing about trades I don't like, and this crops up from time to time and is a problem with some reprints, too, is alterations to the original work (different coloring, new lettering or whatever else they want to change). The two immediate examples I can think of are both reprints, but I will say that I have the 75th anniversary reprint of Marvel Comics #1 and I can't stand the "modern" coloring, knowing decently what the original coloring looked like, especially in the Sub-Mariner story, where they changed skin colors to make Atlanteans bluish-skinned but Namor still peach-skinned, even though it doesn't make sense to the story (when it tells of Namor's father and mother first meeting, how could he possibly think she's human when her skin is of no human color?), just to Marvel's current continuity. The other example is a reprint of Amazing Fantasy #15 I got my hands on (the only one I've seen so far to reprint the entire issue, not just the Spider-Man story). For the most part it's fine, but inexplicably they remove the pupils from Spider-Man's mask on the revelation of who the robber is. Granted, I always thought the pupils odd and creepy, but it was in the original art and I want to read a comic with the original art. A part of me not wanting them to change it is respect for the original creators (and though we may not know the names of colorists and letterers going too far back, they did still contribute to the overall issue).
Where the hell did you get this pricing...?
Unless it's hardcover, a 6-issue trade collection is gonna cost between $13 and $18. Maybe even as low as $10 depending on the way it's printed. (For example, Marvel has released a couple series, like Runaways, in manga-esque mini-trades that cost $10).
Barring that, the only trades that are more expensive and aren't hardcovers collect waaaay more than 6 issues. And even then there's no guarantee they'll be superexpensive. Price varies. My copy Hellblazer: Original Sins contains 11 issues and cost only $20. I have 12-issue Batman trades that cost the same. The only time trades cost as much as you claim, they're hardcover. Just wait a few months for the paperback.
And the only times they release hardcover first is when the comic is a big seller. And big sellers tend to be more pricey. For example, the first volume of the New 52 Batman collects 7 issues and is a $25 hardcover. Individual issues cost around $4. So that's $28 vs $25. Not a huge difference, granted, but it's still a cheaper price for a sturdier volume.
Also, sorry for the double post, but I'm kind of interested in seeing how publishers view monthly sales vs trade sales. As I mentioned before, Vertigo makes most of its money off trades, but its parent company, DC, seems to put more stock in monthly sales (for example, I, Vampire was recently cancelled due to low monthly sales, but its TPB was a New York Times Bestseller. I believe it debuted at number 4).
Suppliers can also affect price. Case in point: as I might have mentioned at some point, I am a fan of Judge Dredd. My LCS used to sell the phone books for €22.99 each, then one day they suddenly dropped to €19.99. When I asked about this, the guy said they'd found a cheaper supplier.
Something similar afflicted The Boys. The same shop sells those trades for €19.99 each, though there was a time when they weren't able to get any new volumes in. This was because the supplier for The Boys, who is based in the UK, was experiencing difficulties. While they could have imported them straight from America, that would have added €8 to the cover price of each volume, which would have been frankly ridiculous.
Ukrainian Red CrossI'm going off what I've seen at Barnes and Noble and my local comic book shop. Not to mention that definitely if you want to sell your own comics, single issues are cheaper. Specifically, Indy Planet bumps up the price considerably between glued and perfect binding (saddle stitched is cheaper than glued, but only up to a point, whereas both glued and saddle stitched will always be cheaper than perfect).
I personally think the single issues should be treated differently, anyways. They really should be made with cheaper materials and therefore sold cheaper. If people want the high-quality materials, they can buy the trades. Imagine, if single-issue comics were made more disposable, they might actually start selling a lot better.
Or, another way that things can happen is to market things more like TV. The single issues could be packaged to the public in a way that they're free (like posted on the web or the like) and then everything is released in trade versions later—with the trade including "special features", such as creator commentary, uncolored art or the like (some trades do this, but I'm saying make the special features a standard). This way people would have incentive to read the trade and yet also give them a way to read the comics beforehand without too much of an investment.
Part of the reason I raised the topic is that recently, I idly asked myself when was the last time I bought a individual monthly issue of a comic. Kind of disturbingly, the answer was "sometime in the mid-'80s." Turns out, the answer is the same for many of my friends. At least among my cohort of family men of middle years, there's a solid preference for trades ... to the virtual exclusion of anything else. And when we discuss the things we largely dislike about comics—the inevitable triumph of Status Quo Is God, the adolescent notions of Fanservice, etc.—it seems to be largely the monthly/comic-shop crowd that dictates these creative (if that's the word) decisions.
And I'm not sure if it's because the monthly purchasers account for a relatively large chunk of the publishers' profits, or if it's because employed comic writers & artists spring disproportionately from that demographic, or if it's something else altogether. All I know is, it'd be nice to feel as if trade readers' tastes were of particular concern to the major publishers.
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TV isn't free. You have to pay a license fee, plus there are the ads which bring in money to the program makers.
TV may not be free to the broadcasters, but it's free to the viewer. That's what I meant. And monthly comics already are loaded with ads like a TV program would be, so they are a lot like the print medium's version of a TV show (actually, magazines all are, with the trashy tabloids being the trashy tabloid TV shows that never get collected on DVD, thankfully).

Reflecting on the Writing for the Trade phenomenon, I started wondering how greatly the demographics for trade-version purchasers differ from monthly buyers/subscribers. If—as I suspect—they're significantly different types of readers, that raises the question of whether comics publishers target one group more than other, and what that implies about content and publication decisions.
I don't know where you'd find any hard data, but what, to your minds, tends to distinguish monthly and trade readers? (And yes, I'm sure there's some overlap.)