How much does it cost to make a graphic novel?
What comic artists charge per page for pencils, inks, colors and letters, what a 100-page graphic novel costs, and how long the art takes.
The Storieta team3 min read
If you hire separate artists for pencils, inks, colors and lettering, the average US rates add up to about $274 a page. A 100-page full-color graphic novel comes to roughly $27,400 for the art alone, before a cover, book design or printing. Black and white drops the colorist and brings that to about $20,600.
The figures come from the Cartoonist Cooperative's 2024 Comics Worker Survey, which asked 189 US comics workers what they were paid for work done in 2023.
What each page costs, job by job
A finished page passes through four jobs, often done by one person. The penciller lays out the panels and draws the figures and backgrounds, the inker turns the pencils into final line art, the colorist adds color, and the letterer places captions, balloons and sound effects.
What one comic page pays, by job
Average page rate in US dollars
| Pencils | $87.46 |
|---|---|
| Inks | $76.21 |
| Colors | $67.94 |
| Letters | $42.72 |
Source: Cartoonist Cooperative, 2024 Comics Worker Survey. 189 US comics workers, pay for 2023 work.
Experienced artists charge well above these averages. The top pencil rate in the survey was $700 a page, eight times the mean.
If you are adapting a novel, someone also has to turn the prose into a comic script that says what happens in each panel. Writers paid for scripting averaged $69.39 a page, a cost you skip if you write the script yourself.
What the whole book will cost
Multiply the page count by the per-page rate: $274.33 for a full-color page at the survey averages, or $206.39 without a colorist.
What the art for a whole book costs
Estimated total in US dollars, art only, rounded to the nearest $100
- Full color
- Black and white
| 60 pages | Full color: $16,500 Black and white: $12,400 |
|---|---|
| 100 pages | Full color: $27,400 Black and white: $20,600 |
| 150 pages | Full color: $41,100 Black and white: $31,000 |
| 200 pages | Full color: $54,900 Black and white: $41,300 |
Source: Cartoonist Cooperative, 2024 Comics Worker Survey. 189 US comics workers, pay for 2023 work.
Treat these as a starting estimate. They leave out the cover, character designs and publishing costs. If one artist does every job, ask for a package rate: the Australian Society of Authors says it should be no more than 15% below the separate jobs combined, which puts a fair US rate at about $233 a full-color page or more.
A quote far below these numbers usually means an artist fitting your pages around better-paid work. Survey respondents earned $5,600 from comics in 2023 on average, and on a book that takes most of a year, reliability is worth more than a lower rate.
How long it takes
One full-color page takes about 15 hours across the four jobs, and about 11 in black and white. A 100-page color book is close to 1,500 hours, or around 37 weeks for one person working full time on nothing else. Publishers in the survey scheduled about 9 months for a book of 26-150 pages and 17.5 months for 150-300.
Ways to spend less
Black and white saves about a quarter of the art budget, since color is roughly 25% of a full-color page's cost.
You can also draw less of the book. A first act or one self-contained chapter gives you something finished to show readers, a publisher or a crowdfunding page, for a fraction of the full cost.
Or find a publisher, who pays the creators instead of you. Average advances in the survey were $17,000 for a book of 26-150 pages and $45,000 for 151-300, though an advance only comes after a publisher buys your pitch.
Before you hire anyone
Settle these first, because each one changes the quote:
- The page count. Break your novel into scenes and estimate pages per scene.
- A script, or at least a panel breakdown of the first chapter, so the artist can price real pages.
- Character references, and what must stay the same from page to page.
- Who owns the original art, and where you may use it, in writing.
- A payment schedule tied to finished pages.
See your book as comic pages first
The page count is the hardest number to guess, and it sets the whole budget. Storieta reads an EPUB or PDF and draws it as comic pages, chapter by chapter, in the book's own words. Use it as a storyboard to see how many pages each chapter needs, then take that to an artist for a firmer quote. The first chapter is drawn free.
