I find a very interesting web page..\”kissing Walt\”, take a look….

The industry needs more great men like John Byrne.

God I love that man!

I love that! I have an image of a store owner boldly claiming “Ok, We’re going to have to start branching out into this manga stuff!” Then buys just one copy of Naruto, which never sells, then declares “Well, that didn’t work out.”

Probably not what happened, but that’s my image.

No?

Then please stop using that phrase.

I pointed out in the Beat’s original blog post that I carry a bunch of indy stuff. There are 3 other comics stores in town, and as much as I don’t agree with many of their operating practices, they all carry SOME level of indy comics. That’s 4 different stores, with 4 different business models, 4 different approaches to merchandising, 4 different clientèles, all carrying at least some indy stuff.

I can say most comics stores *in my area* are indy-friendly. I can’t speak for the rest of the country.

Neither should you.

If by “$10-$20 art comics” you mean a LOVE & ROCKETS trade paperback, then yes, any college with an art department will have at least a dozen or more students who will regularly spend money in your store.

That’s why a disproportionate number of “diversified” stores are found in places like Athens, GA (Wuxtry’s), Nashville (The Great Escape) and Berkeley (Comic Relief).

I would never open a shop in a non-college, non-metropolitan area and go whole hog with the independents. That would be suicide.
But I’d certainly maintain a small section of “the other stuff,” no matter where my shop was.

Otherwise, I may as well be opening a video store that rents only action flicks.
It might succeed, but it wouldn’t be a full-fledged movie store.

With that in mind, it’s apparent that a lot of comic book retailers aren’t ordering books published by Fantagraphics. Why then pick on this specific retailer? Because his shop is in the same state as Fantagraphics? Because his shop is in a college town? Do college kids attending a state college have money each month for $10 - $20 art comics?

IIRC Diamond offers 45% off, minus 3% reorder penalty (which makes it a little less than 42%) then charges shipping on the books, which can bring it down to 40% or less.

B&T is a flat 40% with free shipping and returnability.

Plus there is the feel good factor of giving Diamond some competition. Which is a plus for those who much enjoyed the times of multiple distributors competing for their money by offering better discounts and services. Some folks really want to encourge that to happen again.

Stores probably should be using a bookstore distributor anyhow. Last time I checked, Diamond doesn’t carry Tin Tin or Asterix books. Nor do they carry a lot of comic strip collections like Calvin & Hobbes, Farside, etc.. And some Manga books (if they sell them) come from bookstore distributors quicker than the DM. Not to mention prose books by a number of popular comic writers.

Not really, because the buying public is aware. We sell a pretty disproportionate share of books outside the direct market: probably between 60/40 and 70/30 these days.

I don’t think so. What retailers want most is deeper discounts. Returnability means A) smaller discounts and B) More work - in having to remember which books came out 3 months ago and physically package them up and mail them (which costs time and money they’d rather not spend).

Returnability is great if it doesn’t cost them anything (or very little) and especially something like a new weekly comic series where they have to order 12 of them before they know how it’s going to sell. It would probably also be good on the first few issues of a new series, just so they can order lots and find it’s upper most sales level. But after that, the series numbers aren’t likely to go up unless a new popular creative team jumps on and they typically have previous sales numbers to guess with in those situations.

But your good point remains that other publishers had a prior existence.

That’s how I got into the game of carrying Fantagraphics & Drawn & Quarterly in the store I once managed in North Hollywood - because JESSE McCANN, I, and several other LA area retailers got together on a monthly basis ( over pizza and pepsi ) to discuss the PRODUCTS that RETAILERS should be carrying in their stores- and THEREFORE I WAS INFORMED about them.

Face to face discussion and class handouts. Not this internet crap to ween these retailers what they should carry in their stores.

~

Coat

Archie. Last Gasp. Rip Off Press. (And I think Aardvark-Vanaheim predates them in actually publishing comics, rather than magazines about comics, although I could be mistaken.)

Or even better, maybe some friendly publicity from said publisher. I mean, sure, criticism’s waaaay easier, but whatever floats your boat, I guess.

More and more folk are buying online because it’s cheaper. And there can be higher product availability.

No one here is suggesting that stores don’t carry indie comics. Only suggesting that one carries what one can sell.

And yeah Calvin & Hobbes used to be a pretty easy sale. But how many Journal of Modok Studies can you move?

It’s all about your customers. Or perhaps you have a mind control device that you’re not mentioning

And Joe, if you’d ask your LCS would likely order TCJ for you. Or is the plan to be an ongoing frustrated non-buyer?

Yeah, why bother having comic shops in the first place?

So if my local video store only rents B-grade sci fi films and doesn’t care enough about movies OR its customers to even make the other genres visible, even with a poster, then I and every other person who doesn’t love crappy B-movies should just go find what we’re looking for online.

And if my local grocery store only sells carrots, I should go online and find out all about corn, then go back to my myopic grocer and “request it .”

It just doesn’t fly.

I was a retailer for six years and I managed to make a decent living servicing the dedicated superhero readers AND the rest of society that just wanted to walk in and buy a damn CALVIN & HOBBES trade.

YES, the superhero product constituted over 75% of my sales.
But I’m very proud of the remaining 25% that I managed to attract and cultivate. I still hear from many of them, and as far as I know they all still look forward to their favorite indy books and trades.

The store that most of them now patronize keeps a decent selection of non-hero trades in stock, and in fact that product accounts for at least 20% of THEIR business. This is the same store that, 10 years ago, didn’t stock a single indy book or trade paperback of any kind.

These days I visit that store whenever I’m in town, and I almost always hear the same thing: “We never imagined this stuff could sell so well for us.”

That this retailor is unaware of these books strongly suggests that he views the comics part of his business as an adjunct and simply goes with what is safe and easy.

That he is friendly and customer service oriented also suggests that he might welcome having his eyes opened to the possiblities, by being shown sales figures for some of the titles Heidi mentions.

Can this guy not even find his way to “F” in Previews? It’s even at the beginning of the section! That means he probably never orders anything from Oni so does that mean he can’t sell Scott Pilgrim or Local because everywhere else they sell pretty well? It also means he’s never bothered to sell a copy of JTHM or Lenore from Slave Labor, or maybe he thought they were out of business since they’re right behind Fantagraphics in term of indy publisher longevity?

If you don’t even bleeping know that one of the longest running publishers is still in business (name one besides DC or Marvel that’s been around as long) then you probably should get some criticism from said publisher, especially if that same company is home to Robert Crumb (had a famous and POPULAR documentary FILM named after him), Chris Ware, Charles Schulz (Peanuts doesn’t only sell in bookstores you know), George Herriman (the cartoonist who created the character the guy’s shop is named after!), Dan Clowes (a “film buff” might even have heard of Art School Confidential or Ghost World), Gilbert Hernandez (the guy had one of his comics, for cryin’ out loud but he doesn’t know the publisher of Love and Rockets is still in business?), etc.

Wasn’t it Warren Ellis who said most comics shops were the equivalent of walking into a video store and seeing nothing but nurse porn? I’ve been to several stores that don’t carry The Comics Journal because “it doesn’t sell” even though I WOULD BUY IT (so much for only ordering “what sells”) and they seem all too happy to eat several copies of Wizard, Beckett and plenty of other shitty magazines with a much shorter shelf life along with untold number of comics that will NEVER sell even for 25¢!!

It would help if most of the people here would actually read Reynolds’ original post instead of going into instant Internet Debate Mode. Then again maybe it’s just Harland Ellison, Peter David, Shannon Wheeler, and everything else Gary Groth has ever pissed off posting under various pseudonyms though if that were really true this thread would be like the Rick Olney/Gail Simone threads ; )

Or they could discover something online and decide they want it, go to the comic shop which doesn’t have it, and then request it.

Or they could just order it online…

But that’s only true if they’re already a customer.

As far as I can determine I’m the only person who buys the TCJ in a city which has between 30-40k college students. The magazine is in a prominent position and doesn’t sell. I have a copy on my pull list and one copy is out there. For a while there was another person who would purchase a copy. So the store would stock a total of three copies for a period of time. But no additional sales and there are years of that unsold single copy in the back issue bin.

I could buy it elsewhere and save money doing so. My purchase of this magazine and some others which are in a similar situation keep them stocked in the store. But it is sort of a sick joke as no one has of yet appeared interested in buying them.

So I go easy on the retailers.