The graphic novels from U.S.-based publishers that we see on the shelves in this country’s comics stores, bookstores, and libraries are printed all around the world. So when the incoming Trump administration announced a plan to raise tariffs across the board – including raising tariffs on books printed in China from the current 7.5% rate to 100% – publishers took notice.
If you’re not reading this article with a background in economics, tax law, or international shipping, let’s start with some basics, namely: What is a tariff?
We asked Comic Book Legal Defense Fund Interim Executive Director Jeff Trexler to explain. “Generally speaking, a tariff is an import tax. The term can be used to encompass all sorts of cross-border transaction fees, such as customs duties, and the terms ‘tariff’ and ‘duties’ are often used synonymously," he said. "However, ‘tariff’ is also commonly used to refer in particular to fees imposed on certain goods or countries in order to protect industries in the importing country.”
So if a U.S. publisher is printing a book overseas, they’ll pay the printer for the books themselves, and for the shipping – but they’ll also pay the U.S. government to be able to bring the books to the U.S. “The tariff rate can differ by country and item,” said Trexler. “For example, under current law, importing books from China can be subject to a 7.5% tariff, while the same book might be subject to no taxes when imported from Canada.”
I asked Trexler to break down how the nitty-gritty of tariff finances works on a title-by-title basis, using a hypothetical example: a book with a retail price of $10.00 that costs $1.00 to print.
He told me it’s slightly more complicated than that. “The total amount paid in tariffs is based on the customs value when the item is imported, not the item's ultimate retail value. Customs value typically includes other costs beyond materials and manufacture, such as shipping and insurance. However, to keep things simple we'll use the $1.00 value to illustrate how the increase in a tariff rate can have a substantial impact. Under current law, at the 7.5% rate the tariff would be 7.5 cents per book – $1.00 x .075 – for a total of $1.075. A 100% tariff rate would effectively double the cost at the border – in addition to paying $1 for the book itself, the publisher would also pay an additional $1 tariff for a total of $2.”
His conclusion: “this would likely lead to a significant increase of the sale price.”
That’s a huge jump in price – paying $1.00 for something that used to be 7.5 cents! Would all comics publishers be affected if this tariff on goods imported from China comes to pass?
Talking to eighteen comics publishers – from small presses who publish five or six titles a year to publishers who produce monthly pamphlet comics to graphic novel imprints at mainstream book publishers – produced a multi-faceted global picture of contemporary comics printing. Several publishers print their comics primarily in the U.S., but most publishers I talked to are printing comics at multiple places around the world. Only a few publishers I spoke to had only one printer they work with. And by far the most frequently mentioned country publishers print in was China.
As you can see from the above chart, getting comics on bookshelves in the U.S. is a global endeavor, touching many countries in Europe and Asia as well as the U.S. and Canada, with China in the lead as the country where publishers most often print their books.
Why China? Part of it is about the money.
“I had printed exclusively with domestic printers up until recently and was getting killed with the costs,” Zachary Clemente, the Publisher of Bulgilhan, said. “To give context, the last two books I printed were around $1.46/book at a print run of 3,000. To do something similar in the US would be closer to $5.50 per book, meaning I would lower the print run and likely have to raise the cover price.”
Using our back-of-the-handkerchief math, with the current rate at 7.5 cents, Clemente would pay $328.50 in tariffs on his print run of 3,000 copies. If the rate goes up to 100%, he’d pay $4,380.00 on future books with that same printing cost and print run. That’s a significant change, and one that’s making publishers think about other options.
Alex Hoffman of Fieldmouse said, “If we see a 60% tariff on printing in China, we would consider moving to European printers or domestic printers; European would likely be the most possible scenario, given the available options. The chances of us being able to make lemonade out of lemons in this situation is pretty slim – we would obviously try to do anything we could do regardless of the situation because we have book projects scheduled through 2027, but we also have to consider the raw facts of tariffs of this magnitude. Even a 20% tariff would be extremely damaging to our business.”
But decisions on where to print aren’t just about cost. Many publishers I spoke with also brought up printing quality, and the ability of U.S. printers, who generally specialize in printing black and white prose fiction and nonfiction titles, to produce books that are as complicated as full-color graphic novels, especially titles that have extra design effects, like spot gloss, foil, die-cuts, fold-outs, stamped page ends, and more.
Eric Reynolds, VP and Associate Publisher at Fantagraphics, said, “Even if we could find printers domestically who could do a lot of the higher-end, hardcover visual art books that we do, they would cost roughly twice as much or more as the same book would cost to print overseas, our options in terms of paper and printing/binding would be limited, and the quality would likely suffer as well.”
Avi Ehrlich, the publisher of Silver Sprocket, said, “The decision to print overseas isn't just about cost (though they are cheaper), but really about quality and options. We haven't been able to find domestic printers able to offer the quality and options available from printers overseas, such as the high quality interesting paper stocks, binding options, and unique foils that make our books stand out. We used to print primarily in Canada and finally moved most of our printing overseas after a series of very frustrating quality issues and delays due to North American printers simply not having all of the resources available under one roof to efficiently and correctly make books with the quality we want to be producing.”
He added, “Printing overseas is often quicker than domestically, even with the long shipping times, because printing domestically often means one printer handling the covers, another handling a special cover effect, and a third printing the text block (inside pages), which introduces so many extra opportunities for mistakes and delays as the project is moved between different printers.”
And it’s not just costs, quality, and options that are a challenge when using U.S. printers. If the country’s graphic novel publishers were to start exclusively printing in the U.S., would domestic printers be able to keep up with the potential influx of titles? If the idea behind tariffs is to protect and build local industry, would U.S. printers be able to reap the benefits from an increased tariff rate on books imported from China?
“I just know for our odd business, there's no manufacturing capacity to do books like these in America, and that capacity could not be easily rebuilt. It's less about labor costs than the machines and expertise just not existing to do high end book publishing,” said Josh O’Neill, publisher of Beehive Books.
“I read somewhere that there hasn't been a new paper mill built in the U.S. in something like 35 years, and that the number of existing paper mills is a small fraction of U.S. printing's 20th-century heyday. I wish there was an infrastructure here that tariffs would kickstart, but there just isn't,” Reynolds said. “It's not like there are paper mills and printing presses just waiting to have the lights turned back on. Even if the tariffs spurred a long term investment in paper and printing, with new mills and presses being built, it would take years and a lot of publishers may well go out of business before that bears fruit. It could be quite disastrous.”
Tariffs on importing the finished books from printers aren’t the only thing that this proposed increase would affect in the costs publishers need to pay to get their books made.
“Tariffs are already part of the pricing calculus for imported goods, and the prospect of an increase in tariffs is something that will factor into strategic planning across industries. This is true even for publishers who print their books here in the U.S. – we live in the era of the global supply chain, in which materials used to make the book are themselves likely to be imported,” Trexler said.
Leyla Aker, Director of Publishing at Square Enix Manga and Books, agreed “Aside from tariffs on finished books printed in other countries, the other area of concern would be tariffs on paper, which would have the potential to affect titles printed in the U.S. as well.”
“While this environment may benefit American printers, it will harm smaller American publishers disproportionately in relation to larger publishers,” Damien Wassel, Publisher of Vault Comics, said. “Print costs are extremely scale sensitive. Publishers who are producing work with larger print runs will still be able to find margin without making significant changes to their publishing operations or strategies. Smaller publishers simply will not have that luxury.”
"Maybe there's some post-globalist future in which American manufacturing has been rebuilt, but in the near term I expect this will just make most products far more expensive and less profitable,” Beehive's O’Neill said.
What would publishers do in response to a tariff hike? For many, the price they charge for their books would go up – which has the potential to have negative effects on both them and on readers.
“The only possible responses to higher costs are to take the hit, increase prices, or cut costs elsewhere. None of these are desirable,” said Ben Applegate, Director of Publishing Services at Penguin Random House, which is responsible for the Kodansha print manga program.
Ed Chavez of Denpa, said, “As pricing is more of an issue for manga (a lot of manga is priced between $10-15 for 200 pages, black and white), I feel margins are a lot tighter for the manga industry. So this may end up hurting customers down the line if prices eventually do go up.”
“If tariffs were imposed, we’d have to look at how to absorb the additional costs, which could include measures like changing book specifications or consumer pricing,” Aker said.
Publishers can’t just raise prices and still expect to sell the same number of books.
“Higher production prices means higher final book prices, and readers are very cost-conscious when it comes to entertainment items like comics. There's only so much you can pass through on MSRP [Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price] before pricing yourself out of someone's entertainment dollars,” Hoffman said.
Depending on when the potential tariff changes go forward, raising prices quickly enough to respond and still make a profit on a book could be a challenge.
“One major concern is not knowing exactly when and how a new tariff will go into effect," Sprocket's Ehrlich said. “We design and send our books to print about three months before they arrive, with budgets in place and a suggested retail price printed on the back cover. If a tariff is enacted while the books are in transit, it could mean our production costs jumping by a tremendous unexpected amount, wrecking a project's break-even point and potential profitability.”
Tariffs are one of the many factors that are affecting printing costs today. Over the past several years, costs on shipping have also gone up, leading publishing to become more and more expensive. So adding an increased tariff cost to already-strained supply chain budgets could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on printing in China for some publishers.
“Since the pandemic, the increasing costs of shipping from Asia have made printing in the US more attractive. And increasing tariffs could definitely make printing entirely domestically more of a real option for us,” says Liz Frances, publisher of Street Noise Books.
Vault Comics' Wassel also calls out the overall increase in supply chain costs over the past several years. “We have already seen tariffs affect the environment on digest and manga sized printing, where a combination of tariffs, timelines, and freight costs have made key U.S. suppliers cheaper on medium runs," he said.
Applegate said, “We also expect increases in costs for domestic printing, both directly in higher paper prices, which have already been a major pain point for print publishers over the last five years, and indirectly in tariff-driven inflationary pressure (S&P recently predicted an increase in inflation of up to three percentage points under the current proposal).”
It’s the opposite for other publishers. “With production costs rising over 100% since the pandemic, more of our books are being made overseas,” Chavez said.
In addition to the printing and shipping, there are more costs publishers take on in the supply chain, including storage fees. “The warehouse charges imposed by our distributor make it less advantageous to print in larger quantities, but smaller print runs are more costly on a per book basis,” Street Noise's Frances said. “So it is extremely difficult."
With printing, shipping, and warehousing all getting more expensive on top of potential new tariffs, how will publishers go forward? Some I spoke with are confident in their ability to adapt with the times, especially in the short term.
Lindsay Matvick, PR Director for Lerner Publishing Group/Graphic Universe, told me, “One great thing about being owned by an independent publisher is that we can change our processes, including printing, quickly to react to changes in the marketplace.”
“Right now I don’t see any significant changes in the immediate future,” Chavez said. “However, as we start to see how the new administration’s policies actually play out we may have to make some big decisions down the line.”
And other publishers weren’t printing in China to begin with, so new tariffs would have a negligible effect.
“About 95%+ of our print volume is in North America," Wassel said. "For publishers of our scale, timelines have always been a challenge when choosing international suppliers, and that can wash out the benefit of any savings realized abroad.”
For some publishers I spoke to, there are also larger issues with politics and content to consider when thinking about printing in China.
“I get my black and white graphic novels printed in Quebec. Some color in Canada, but most of it in Asia. Never in China, though. This is because of their human rights issues, especially the occupation of Tibet. So I pay more to print in Malaysia, Korea, Thailand. I was printing in Singapore, but got told the content of my books was too inappropriate for the culture,” said Andy Brown, publisher of the Canadian graphic novel publisher Conundrum.
But for most publishers, China is still the go-to option for printing their graphic novels, and a tariff increase at this level would significantly alter what and how they publish.
An acquisitions editor who spoke to me anonymously told me, “If the tariffs are enacted as currently indicated, they will definitely affect my criteria for selecting comics to acquire. I only print in China when it comes to big or long comics because it would otherwise be cost prohibitive for a smaller publisher like mine. Unfortunately, that means I will be less able to push the comics medium to the degree that I have, and it'll be much harder to stand out in a crowded field of big-money players. I suppose that's sort of the point with this coming administration: to make things harder for everyone but the moneyed elite.”
Conundrum's Brown said, “I could not print the color books domestically without charging a list price that would make it impossible to sell. So if I had to print domestically, I'd be only printing black and white books.”
He’s not the only one thinking about different formats. “One thing that comes to mind is not taking on books with a high page count,” said Jennifer Norton, EDP of Graphic Mundi.
Reynolds at Fantagraphics sees the potential for a similar shift in the kinds of comics he publishes: “The tariffs may well force our hand in regard to printing in China. There are ripple effects to this, as we often choose printers based on the types of printing and binding they specialize in and materials they have to work with. So this would limit those options, which might result in materially different books than they would have been conceived as, otherwise.”
"If there were a massive tariff on all foreign goods, we would have to figure things out here somehow," Beehive's O’Neill said. “Which would probably involve completely changing our business model and going even further in the direction of handmade luxury books, letter press, hand bound, etc., which can still be done here. But we would have to charge five to ten times as much as our current prices.”
In an article for ICv2, Rob Salkowitz brought up the possible publishing opportunity for ebooks. “The increased cost of raw materials and importing physical products from overseas to the U.S. could accelerate a shift to digital services.”
Publishing only in black and white, publishing shorter comics, publishing handmade books, a rise in ebooks – those are all significant changes that would alter the face of U.S. comics publishing today.
Ehrlich foresees a major shift for Silver Sprocket in response to increased tariffs – but on the operational side. “Printing costs are already one of our biggest expenses as a publisher. If said costs were to rise by as much as these proposed tariffs would suggest, we simply would not be able to keep as many of our books in print, and would likely have to cut or significantly delay a lot of our planned publications. We would also have to completely rethink our plans for each book in terms of costs and end price paid by the reader to make sure we are still breaking even and paying out a reasonable royalty to creators, because the economics have to make sense to have a sustainable publishing operation. This could mean smaller print runs if we don't expect books to sell as well at a higher price-point, or having to rely much more heavily on direct sales from our website than sales through distribution channels which take larger cuts, or potentially having to start crowdfunding or turning to other alternative models to cover costs in a sustainable way.”
Fieldmouse's Hoffman sees an even bigger possible effect. “As a 501(c)3 nonprofit press and a young press without traditional distribution, we're operating on thin margins to begin with, and the ‘profit’ we make on books goes right back into future projects or into SOLRAD, our literary magazine," he said. "We don't have a financial reserve to handle this kind of impact, and we have made the decision that we are not going to finance our printing plans by taking on debt. We've seen how that works out for other small press operations who make independent art comics, and there are horror stories from a variety of independent small presses (comics and literary alike) of unpaid royalties, bankruptcy, wage theft, and other things that are completely antithetical to our mission.”
“I think I would include ‘publishing books altogether’ on the list of things that might change," Hoffman said. "It's a tough pill to swallow, but we'll have to see how everything shakes out before we can determine what our next steps are going to be. Maybe that means putting our publishing on pause until more favorable economic conditions appear.”
What would be the ultimate consequence of these tariffs? A tariff resulting in a price hike would hurt readers – and maybe even see fewer people reading.
Neil Brideau, publisher of Radiator Comics, said, “I do feel like I'll need to raise the prices on future books, which is upsetting. I want the titles Radiator Comics publishes to be accessible, and don't want the price to be a barrier for readers.”
Reynolds agrees. “Tariffs will do nothing but result in higher costs for us and higher prices for consumers, because we'll still be forced to print overseas. Already slim profit margins will be slimmer," he said. "The only benefactor will be, I suppose, the U.S. government, at the expense of fans, creators, publishers, and booksellers.”
“Obviously I'd like to believe that what we're doing is important and essential to our readers, but we have to admit that we'll likely have less customers with higher prices,” Hoffman said.
Dan Sinkyin, author of Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Fiction, calls out the difficulty of a rise in book prices while people are already dealing with a tough economy. “If the Trump administration raises tariffs on books manufactured in China, it will do to books what Trump's tariffs will do to all goods: raise their prices at a time when American consumers are ever more hard-pressed to pay their bills. Conglomerate publishing is under pressure to hit quarterly growth numbers, which is tough enough as it is. Under such tariffs, we could well see book consumption take a considerable hit, and the publishing industry could contract.”
“Economists also worry that an immediate and dramatic rise in consumer prices due to tariffs could spark more inflation, leading to higher interest rates, and perhaps a decline in overall economic activity. As we saw in 2008-2012, when the overall economy gets sick, the comics business gets pneumonia,” said Rob Salkowitz, in an article for ICv2.
But the CBLDF's Trexler isn’t sure that such an extreme tariff hike will come to pass. “Trump sees himself primarily as a negotiator, not a tariff absolutist,” he said. “It's likely that the threat of high tariffs is a tactic to extract concessions from other countries – if the threatened tariffs from 25-100% do get imposed, it's possible they might not last for long, at least at those levels.”
What will 2025 have in store? Looking at the incoming administration, publishers aren’t happy.
“It’s pretty fucked up that this administration is throwing so many wrenches into our operation – both trying to censor our books, and also in making the basic economics of book publishing untenable,” Ehrlich said.
Zachary Clemente, Publisher of Bulgilhan, concluded, “I'm going to take it as it comes, but it absolutely sucks.”
The post What will potential tariffs mean for comics publishers in 2025? ‘We’ll likely have less customers’ appeared first on The Comics Journal.
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