Printing Money: The Economics of Small Press
We’re obviously in a really strange time for the arts in general: you’ve got a crap economy, everything costs more money, arts funding has dried up, and nobody has a job. This of course sounds absolutely dire, but I think ever since I was in college (going on almost 15 years ago, yikes) people have been telling me that it’s a bad time to be in print. You might be saying Box, are you okay?? Is Diskette going under?? The answer is really quite the opposite for us: we’re having our best year ever, with some incredible comics launches and even some quick sellouts (Sorry if you didn’t get a copy of Moulder, y’all). Diskette actually is doing better than it ever has. As of writing this, halfway through the year, we’re on pace to triple our sales from last year alone. This is really in a large part due to our incredible artists who we have the privilege of publishing making books that people actually want to read and enjoy.
Diskette has never really been a profitable business, it’s really a labor of love that Carta put together, putting countless hours of unpaid labor into making these machines run and put together zines and comics for herself and friends. After her disability made it harder to operate the press, I was helping out paying rent at the studio for years before we took over the press fully, and even still, was financing a good portion of the rent and expenses for the last two years. We almost broken even last year on the back of some great releases from Zoot, Haus of Decline, and Leo Fox as well as going to a number of shows we haven’t been to in years like CXC and TCAF. And because I mentioned it, my personal finances: I got laid off last year, and was left with the reality that we had to get serious about running the operation, as we couldn’t foot the bills without our other incomes (one of which just vanished). So, if you’re wondering why we’ve been going HARD this year, it’s because one of us is attempting to do this full-time, both trying to keep the press afloat while potentially paying myself for the labor I’m putting in. I’ve been able to do this because I’ve been cutting into my personal savings and some personal freelancing gigs on the side. We’re also based in Detroit, where rent and expenses (outside of car insurance, iykyk) are relatively cheap. We truly couldn’t put on this operation in any other major city in the world.
So I ultimately fell into Diskette as a job by accident, which makes me a real novice when it comes to running a small business. Like most artists, I’ve freelanced and even started a couple things masquerading as a business over the years: tried to start a design firm after college with a few friends, I’ve been the president of a small non-profit, and even have had a couple years experience as an event promoter as a part of my installation art practice. None of these were profitable ventures, and some were huge expenses, too. But for the most part, I’ve been an employee as my professional career. So I mean it when I say that I have been making this up as I go along, borrowing some experience working for a couple small companies, and my now useless and cringeworthy undergraduate minor “Program in Entrepreneurship” (its major lesson: raise shitloads of money from venture capital before a bubble bursts and get lucky). But I’m older now: I’m in my second half of my 30s and I’m trying to figure out if this is now my livelihood or if I’m just going through my millennial midlife crisis. So, part of my reason for writing this is that I am going to be getting paid for the first time for my labor here at Diskette. It’s definitely one part some weird midwestern guilt about making one’s living off of other people’s labor and creativity, but it’s also me trying to practice some open book finances that I think should really be the standard. Publishing is an industry that is built on artistic labor–full stop. Robin and I both are artists, and we know firsthand how difficult it is to get paid in this line of work. Much like how you should be talking about salaries with your coworkers, I think it’s valuable for artists and creators to know the economics of the industry. It’s my goal for Diskette to be a publisher that can do right by our artists first, and all the other parts of the business follow afterwards. So this post is an effort to hold myself accountable for that mission.
Let’s get down to the the brass tax you’re probably interested in: how does Diskette operate?
Publishing
Our Publishing Contracts
All of our contracts are 50/50 splits after costs, what that means is that Diskette pays for the production of each book (Between $500-700, depending on paper quality, edition size, length, labor.) Once those costs are paid back via sales, we split everything coming in 50/50 with the artists. Now, given that everything is split 50/50, each individual book sale isn’t a massive payout for us: typically the profit from sales is just going right back into purchasing materials for the next run of books on the horizon (and rent, always rent). But the success in publishing comes down to the mantra: Publish More, Sell More. Meaning, in order to receive enough income from it to be profitable, we need to be constantly selling out of our editions, and do so relatively quickly. We can increase the number of copies in each edition quite easily, as the marginal cost of each extra copy goes down overtime. Generally, our editions size is around 300, which is low enough that it isn’t a huge risk to produce a book, but enough that we can at least keep it in stock for a few months at a time. The time it takes printing, folding, and finishing 300 copies isn’t that much more than 100, and I get faster and putting stuff together with every new project. Turns out, just putting time into something makes you better at it–who knew? Additionally artists receive about 20% of the run as artist comp copies, this has varied a bit because some of our artists table and sell their work, while others just like to have a stack to hand out to friends and family. Given that production costs are also about 20%, I think this roughly equalizes our split between artist and publisher, leaning slightly more in the author’s favor for what it’s worth. Artists can also purchase additional copies of the work to sell at cost, taking it out of their royalties or just paying outright for it.
Truthfully, the one bit about our business that I want to be able to change is our payout structure. Right now, we’re still small enough that our cashflow can’t handle book advances. Depending on the size of book and the publisher, this could be a few thousand dollars, all the way up to tens of thousands with major releases. Paying multiple thousands of dollars to an artist ahead of a project is frankly a huge risk for us when a single advance could be a month’s or even a year’s income for us as a business when compared to industry standards. Book advances typically are the first paycheck an artist receives while making the content for the book ahead of it being printed. It’s not like they can pay rent or buy food solely on the expectation of royalties that they won’t see until months later. If you didn’t know this, comics take a LONG time to complete. And even individual artists’ labor hours per page vary significantly, meaning that ultimately many artists are getting paid wildly different hourly rates based on their skill, style, and workflow. Advances also create a weird power dynamic between the author and the publisher, and can even create situations where artists don’t receive any money (or even owe money!!) due to production costs or lagging sales. I wish there was a good way that we could make sure artists are getting paid ahead of a book being published, while also keeping our finances in check throughout highs and lows of retail sales. Part of smoothing out some of the variability is also paying out royalties quarterly. This keeps big expenses that might drain a bank account from also cutting away at an artist payout, because our liability gets spread out over 3 months. I think there’s a few ways to improve this, but if you have any experience in small business, cashflow is truly the thing that will sink even long-standing, established businesses. So, for now, part of this tradeoff is that we don’t retain any rights over the work: the artist has invested their time and energy into creating the work ahead of publishing, so they are the sole owner of the work at the end of the day. Our artists can publish their work digitally, or even take the work to other publishers after we have completed the print run. It means we only have the rights to print and publish the work one edition at a time, and we sign a new contract each time we do a reprint. I think with our profit split and us fronting production costs, we offer a really competitive arrangement for artists, but always open to improvement!
Generally, I would say publishing pays the bills and keeps us growing. It’s definitely been successful to publish as much as we have this year, but it does put you on this constant treadmill of new content and growth. We’re also now on the grind of doing reprints, too, which adds additional work load to our plate so we can just keep some of the favorites in stock. A simple answer would be to just increase the edition size, which unfortunately means that it takes that much longer for our artists to start getting paid back. Another problem to solve in all of this. So, thanks to you all for buying us out of stock; it’s honestly a good problem to have. We thankfully also have a couple books produced by the Diskette crew as well as stationary like notebooks, that help us have a bit larger profit margin on our overall sales. One more note: while we do calculate production costs including the labor hours spent printing and assembly, there’s plenty of extra labor in just running a press that we don’t factor into the production costs. Things like communications, sourcing, maintenance, shipping, cleaning, etc. These are all just expenses that come out of our profit split and account for the general costs of running a business. I’m not sure if there is a way to factor them into our production costs cleanly, so I’m more than happy to keep that separate while I can.
Pricing Our Work
This is honestly the trickiest and most vexing part of my job: how do I price something so that it will sell and also have a decent return on investment. Like I mentioned before, we typically price things so book production cost is about 20% of our MSRP. This could definitely be lower to raise both our artist’s and our profit margin, but realistically the only thing we can really do at our size without really dropping material quality significantly is to just get faster at making books. But to be honest, I also think we do price things competitively. We’re also broke trannies here, $40 prints and art books aren’t something I can typically afford, and I know our audience can’t either. I hope you know that I felt my skin itch when I priced Girl Yaoi at $25, but the reality of the costs to produce a 40 page, 3-color, perfect bound book necessitates that. I like to say we “price books to sell”. $10 is our average price, and I don’t think our audience would want us to be selling things for the fine art book faire prices, even if we do have one of those sexy Risographs (more on that later).
Conventions
For us, conventions account for about 40% of our sales in previous years. They’re a real important part of our success as a publisher, because we are given direct access to our audience (and one that is actively there to buy our books) and we get to connect with potential new artists and customers alike. Given that there are both monetary and “networking” (barf) reasons to go to a con or a zine fest, it’s sometimes hard to get a sense for if an event is worth it. Now, for record, non of these comments below are intended to be overly critical of any fest, I would describe (almost) every event we’ve tabled at to be worth it, but I do want to lay out the realities of tabling for smaller creators.
Right now, we’re seeing kind of an explosion in table fees, major conventions like TCAF and SPX can be $400 for a full table, and that’s before a weekend of lodging ($450), food (~$100), and transportation ($4 a gallon of gas to drive right now). It’s a huge hurdle for any small creator to go. There are ways to save a bit on this, we’ve crashed on friends’ couches when traveling to other cities, or split costs with multiple artists for an AirBnB, but if you’re going for a convention, you’ll be spending some money before the doors even open. Starting out nearly $1000 in the red is frightening, not to mention with our 50/50 split with artists, our margins at cons are even slimmer. I want to point out, again, that tabling these big events have always been worth it for us. But even small events like local zine fest are starting to charge $100+ for a table, which if you’re selling small zines and things under $10, it means that you’re unlikely to make your expenses back unless you’re someone who pulls in sales. That isn’t to say you need to be over-charging for your work, but you do need to know what is and isn’t working at your table.
Now to be fair to organizers, I personally can attest to the difficulties in putting together events; much of my personal artist practice involves a good deal of event promotion, management, and logistics. However, I do think it’s time that conventions start looking into ways to lower table fees. I think a lot of conventions have started to rely more on these fees to help with expenses that are also ballooning due to inflation, but it does mean that as a seller, I’m getting squeezed from all directions. Maybe it’s increased sponsorships from local businesses around the convention itself? A local craft fair in Detroit actually charges attendees a small amount (<$5) to enter and the venue is always packed, regardless.
I’m honestly very curious about how people are doing at conventions these days, so please hit me up with your feedback and experiences, maybe I’ll write a bit more about it at a later date.
Wholesaling
We’ve started wholesaling our books with bookstores and other distributors at 50% MSRP. And while this means a lower profit margin per sale, it really makes up for it on volume. It’s important to also point out that our artists also receive this lower margin per sale. For example, a $10 book is $5 at wholesale, minus another $2 for the cost, and the artist and I both come away with $1.50, versus the $4 we normally would see. This is obviously a very tricky calculus, but I think it ultimately pays off for a couple reasons. First, it gets books in front of new people without any advertising or posting, and they get to see it in person, which is where the work really shines. Wholesaling has higher cart values, meaning that fewer sales can make up a larger chunk of our monthly expenses. These stores also become repeat customers of new titles and even of the same books over and over, in contrast to a typical customer who only buys a single title, once and has to wait until our next release. One other minor detail: we offer net60 payments, which means wholesale customers have 60 days to pay back their sales, which is another reason for quarterly royalty payouts. So, If you’re a small creator, consider reaching out to local shops; the worst they can say is no. A lot of comic shops have started indie sections, and they always need new and interesting work.
The Expenses
Fixed Costs
Fixed Costs are the things you have to pay regardless of your output; it’s the rent and other recurring expenses that will always be around in a business. We’ve got a very cheap rent at the shop ($750/Month) because we share space with two other studios: Small Works and Teikaut run by Gerald Schulze and Li Chen. A huge part of why we’re still around is because Carta was able to connect with others who shared their love for printing (and acquiring and hoarding machinery, more on that later). Currently, much of Gerald and Chen’s teaching and printing practice is being formalized into a new entity, the Center for the Book Arts Detroit (BAD), and once the non-profit paperwork is finalized, we’ll be under their umbrella.
We also use Shopify for our online store and that’s fine ($348/year), though the variable costs of it have been going up each year as credit card fees keep increasing ($.30 + 2.9% per transaction). It’s a good platform, and makes e-commerce style businesses like ours possible, but I hate being beholden to any platform or credit card processor. Plenty more to rant about there that isn’t completely relevant to this conversation, other than to say that platforms like Square or Shopify are as much of a liability to us as they are beneficial.
Production Costs
We have the benefit (and associated costs) of printing everything in house. For every new book we put out in a year, it means we are also incurring that much more expense. Now, granted, our production costs are really small when compared to much more established presses, but they make a much larger percentage of the overall cost of a book. In general, we’re looking at max production costs of 20% of MSRP. So for a $10 book, that’s $2 for each copy. I’m not entirely sure how this stacks up against other publishers, other than to say that it is higher, probably a lot higher than most. Let me know if you think we’re really screwing something up here, again I have no idea what I’m doing.
Most of the cost of the book is labor (Robin and mine, specifically), though I have yet to actually pay myself out for it directly. Specifically, our billed labor hours consists of printing, cutting, collating, binding, and trimming. Last year I wasn’t counting labor when calculating our costs for books, then bumped it to a modest $15/hour, and finally settling at $35/hour which I think includes some of the labor around the process that we aren’t able to exactly count hourly. There are plenty of untracked labor hours around book production that don’t get factored in: test prints, pre-press revisions, reprints for errors found later in the process, fixing broken drums that stop halfway through a run, etc etc. A lot of these billed hours is still real manual labor; we hand fold our zines and are often hand collating covers onto stacks, or combining collated stacks if the length of the book is larger than our collator tower can handle. Over time, I’ve gotten faster and faster at every step in the process: folding jobs that used to take hours, are now rote processes. I would say an edition of 300 32-page comics takes about 10 hours of tracked labor, down from 15 or more last year. It bears repeating: anything can be a skilled trade. Having some machines like collators and wire stitchers make a huge deal of improvement in our production time. We’re obviously fortunate to have great studio mates in Small Works, who share our bad habit of acquiring old machinery off of Facebook Marketplace. The reason why we can even operate is in a large part due to the closing of other print shops in the area, which makes machinery available at costs that are pennies on the dollar; you just have to find a way to move and store it. For a bit of gallows humor, I often think of the shop itself as memento mori: someday your print shop will die, too.
Paper clocks in at the next most expensive part of our production process. In general, we try for $.06 a sheet of ledger-sized paper for interiors and about $.20 a sheet for covers. In some zines we’ve opted for more expensive paper and it’s a real trade-off. On one hand, that nice paper really makes a difference in printing: it absorbs ink better, feels nicer in the hand, and even is cut square before we get it (which believe me, feels like a real luxury if you’ve ever had to deal with paper that comes out of square). I’m typically fine spending a bit more on our covers, French Paper in particular makes some wonderful stock that makes a huge difference in the quality of a book on a display. So please, judge our books by their covers, they’re beautiful. Additionally, if you’re a small publisher, I really recommend building a relationship with a local or regional paper supplier. We’ve been working with Millcraft for a few years, and it’s been a huge cost savings for us. Whenever i head to the warehouse to pick up paper, I’m reminded of how small our scale really is: a dozen reams of paper a quarter in comparison with truckloads of pallets heading off daily to large-scale commercial printers.
Finally, our last major expense is the printing itself. And if you’ll let me, here is my side bar on the perception and economics of Risograph: I’m personally really sick of Riso being seen as a fine art printing style in part because it’s disingenuous to the actual medium of printing. Risograph Duplicators were designed as inexpensive office printers: these are for church pamphlets, school forms, and vast producers of paperwork. Furthermore, the ink doesn’t dry and it isn’t archival. People love to point out that it’s made of soy (and now rice bran oil), but that doesn’t make it any more or less environmentally friendly than other inks. The fact that the inks are vibrant and the print quality is good is almost an unintended side effect of the low-cost format. They’re relatively cheap to buy used and they’re cheap to run, so they have become popular with small artists and self-publishers, which only grows mystique and attractiveness as a medium. Comparing printers, Digital Laser Printers cost about $.11 per single-sided 8.5x11” sheets, while Risos clock in at just $.04 a sheet (this is our shop rate, based on combined machine maintenance and ink costs, in earnest ink alone is more like $.00125/sheet). Tubes of ink are between $50-$60, and can do from 5000-10,000 impressions, depending on the ink coverage and opacity. To give you an idea about our scale, we’re now at the stage where we’re ordering $500-$700 worth of tubes a quarter, and the ink is only going faster as we start more complex projects. Masters are about $1 each for ledger-sized drums, so as long as you’re printing off at least 50 copies of anything, it’s relatively cheap. That isn’t to say it hasn’t also been affected by inflation; our per-tube ink costs have at least doubled since 2024 and Riso Kagaku, the manufacturer, has shown no signs of dropping prices despite changes in tariff policies. Your biggest single expense on all types of printing presses will always be labor and parts, but even Risos make the maintenance portion of it accessible. Riso technical manuals are amongst the best around, and if you’re willing to get your hands a bit dirty, almost every issue is user-fixable. (Shout out to our favorite community Riso technician, Robert Baxter)
This is all to say, it’s not a bad thing for us that Risograph printing is popular, but I do want to point it out to be honest about what it’s like to run a press and the economics of Risograph printing in general. In fact, we’re in the process of upgrading our two, 30-year-old GR Risos to a newer models because Risograph really is best the type of press that allows us to work at this scale (sub-thousand copy editions). Once we start hitting multiple thousands of copies for each edition, then we might start considering different printing presses (Gerald did just bring in two offset lithographs to the shop…). It’s nice from a marketing standpoint that it’s this sexy, popular printing style, and at the end of the day, I wouldn’t be printing using it if I wasn’t a fan as well. I think it’s important to be honest about why we do things here in the shop, and to cut through the bullshit that often surrounds a technical process that people don’t understand.
Other Income
Jobbing
Job printing, also just known as “Jobbing” is something relatively new for us at Diskette. Carta did a bit of it in the past (In fact, I was an early client of that when I was running a non-profit and Diskette was operating out of a garage on the west side of Ann Arbor). But since I’m in the print shop full time now, it seems like an obvious thing to add. Most jobs come in the ~$100 range and take an hour or so to complete, so it’s quick work for me. Theoretically, this would be cash I would just pocket for my own labor, but we’ll get to that when I get there.
I’m stealing this take almost whole cloth from our studio mates, but there’s a prevailing theory of labor amongst printers right now where people only take on the high paying, high quality clients. This isn’t incorrect when you consider all of that unpaid labor of communication with job leads and general setup time. However, the trade of printing has traditionally been about producing work quickly for anyone who comes through the door. I went to a talk years ago by a master sign painter who, like most grumpy old trade guys, wanted to talk about how slow and unskilled the labor is right now. It’s easy to dismiss as a boomerism, but he’s honestly right. The more you print, the faster you get, and what’s more; the better you get at it too. So I’m taking every job I can, it’s been a crash course in production printing and it’s definitely made me a better printer as a result. Not to mention, if you just knuckle down and get through a job, it still pays well hourly if you’re diligent about it. Thanks again for everyone who has ordered prints and jobs from us, it’s really keeping the lights on!
Conclusion
If you’ve made it to the end, I hope any of this was useful to you. Like I said in the introduction, this is a part of me holding myself responsible for Diskette’s mission to make work by queer and trans creators. To continue to own the means of production and produce work in 2026, we do still need to engage with and exist within a capitalist system that rewards exploitation and dishonestly. Despite it all, I think there exists a pathway forward that both our artists and ourselves can make a life that is true to our values. It might not be a sexy, lucrative, and glamorous one, but there’s still good honest work in printing and art making to be had, and I’m confident it’s a life where I can sleep soundly.
This post is very much inspired by our friends at Freaky Little Guy Press, who wrote some great zines, Art Sux and Art Sux 2, about the finances and realities of tabling at conventions, so hats off to them.