Looking at more news on today’s sales figures, including this Tilting at Windmills article (via The Beat blog), I discovered that Vertigo’s sales have dropped considerably in the past three years. The observation that the editors of this line ended u…

Yeah, but you’re assuming that MOST customers will buy the same book, and that’s not really a supportable assumption.

>> If the total regular readership of pamphlet comics is in the area of a million as Brian suggests, then the top-selling comics with mainstream appeal like “Civil War” or “Sandman” or “Buffy” should sell more than 100K or 200K, yes? >>

Not necessarily, no.

The movie audience is way larger than the attendance of the top hits. The TV audience is way larger than the audience for the top shows. And so on through books, magazines and more. There’s no reason to assume comics are unusual in that respect, and that the people out there buying NARUTO and SANDMAN are FABLES and ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY are predominantly also buying WORLD WAR HULK.

>> Or maybe not, but the fact that no comic can ever break that mark is impressive to me>>

Comics have broken that mark before and will doubtless do so again. But the aggregate comics-buying audience simply isn’t all (or event mostly) made up of people who want to read a BUFFY comic any more than the aggregate book-buying audience are mostly out this week buying PLAYING FOR PIZZA by John Grisham (to pick the current NYT bestseller).

Audiences just aren’t that monolithic in their tastes.

kdb

Well, I was estimating UP from those top-selling numbers, since it’s clear that not every single customer will ever buy the same book.

My point is more along the lines of some mathematical probability (which I’m crap at by the way!). If the total regular readership of pamphlet comics is in the area of a million as Brian suggests, then the top-selling comics with mainstream appeal like “Civil War” or “Sandman” or “Buffy” should sell more than 100K or 200K, yes?

Or maybe not, but the fact that no comic can ever break that mark is impressive to me and I think it says something about the size of that audience — an audience that needs serving with the same focus and attention it is now, but not at the expense of customers outside the DM.

You can be replaced, sir.

By a small, underinflated bladder stapled to a long but splintery stick.

Watch how you go.

kdb

Of course not.

Because Stephen King fans have no taste.

HA HA HA Ha Ha Ha ha ha eugh.

Sorry.

“It seems to me we’re zeroing in on something: This is a weird area where the interests of the retailer and the interests of the reader don’t necessarily match up. (There aren’t really all that many in this field.) Of course the retailer wants time to sell through single issues before a trade comes out; and of course a reader who prefers the trade paperback format wants that book to come out as soon as possible. Both parties (rightly) express their preferences and concerns to the publisher, and the publisher has to balance out the needs of each as they apply to each specific project.”

I’m not sure how true that is. I mean, sure, the retailer doesn’t want to be left holding the bag; then again, the retailer gets to sell a copy of Watchmen a week. And a bloody great Absolute Sandman. And so on.

If Brian’s right, and there are significant cash flow problems associated with the death of pamphlets, then the direct market’s just going to die, and that’s that.

But delaying the trade just means putting off the day you’ll get my money. And I’m not sure how that helps the cash flow any.

“I only used Vertigo as an example because they’re the most visible publisher with an (albeit unstated) ‘We WILL do a TP’ process.”

Unstated because it’s not true. TPs of “The Dreaming” just stopped, and there is still no trade of “The Girl Who Would Be Death.” I’m sure there are others that have fallen through the cracks.

No, it doesn’t. That assumes that the entire audience is all interested enough in the same thing to buy whatever the top-selling book is.

But there’s a large section of the audience that isn’t going to buy a mainstream superhero event, whatever it is, just as there’s a large segment that isn’t going to buy PERSEPOLIS, regardless of how it does beyond the Direct Market.

And then there’s people like me, who buy a ton of superhero stuff, but are nonetheless more likely to buy PERSEPOLIS than CIVIL WAR.

There’s a huge audience out there for SANDMAN. They don’t all buy WORLD WAR HULK, so they’re not a subset of the WWH audience. There’s some overlap, but not to the point that you can assume the entire market is about the size of the audience for the bestselling books.

It works that way in other bookstores, too. The audience for Stephen King is not a subset of the audience for Christian self-help books, and vice versa. And the overlap of either of those groups with the audience for cookbooks will not be a majority, either.

kdb

“Today, I’d say something approaching half of my “book” sales are to people who come into a DM once a year or less. That’s a guess, however, I haven’t done any rigorous analysis of it!”

For the other half, the regular customers, I wonder if they have “rules” about trades vs. floppies.

“There HAVE to be way more than 300k DM customers. In my estimation, even something as widely popular as CIVIL WAR only sold to a small percentage (10-25%-ish) of the DM readership; I’d put the DM client base at no less than a million readers, personally.”

Yes! Now we’re talking turkey. See, my thinking on the total readership was that if sales on something like “Civil War” represented a book that almost all regular customers wanted to buy, and it sold 200,000, than estimating up to 300,000 is more than fair (since it’s silly to think that EVERY comic book fan bought “Civil War”).

I’m still guessing, just like you are, but if no comic ever breaks that sales point then the ceiling has to be hovering around there. “Regular books” have sales ceilings as well, which is what makes something like “Harry Potter” so impressive (since those books MUST be bringing in people that don’t regularly visit book stores).

Lest it seem like thread drift, I should say that my reason for lingering on this point is that I feel the Direct Market, though vital and necessary, is but a small percentage of the potential customers comics COULD be reaching, and that floppy buyers may represent a small percentage of the customers comics are ALREADY reaching.

“Jesse, I’m glad to see the lesson of Disney Adventures have been impressed on another generation. If I’m reading your posts correctly, the comics-only specials also sold around 100Km meaning they would have charted well on the periodical lists.”

Yes — many lessons to be gleaned from that, indeed! “Comic Zone” (the comics-only quarterly) actually sold much more than that — the average was around 200,000, give or take 20,000. Regular “Disney Adventures,” which had a comics section, ranged between 100K and 200K. If our comics were ballyhooed on the cover than sales went up, as they did if Zac Effron or Johnny Depp were on the cover (yes — 75% of the readership were girls!). And none of that includes the 1.3 million subscribers.

“Of course that front of the store pocket was very expensive. I’m not sure that this can be applied to any other mags — do Archie’s digests ever have postal circ figures?”

Yeah, they must — all subscription magazines have to have a Statement of Ownership once a year. I think they also lump all the titles under one code so you can’t distinguish between sales of “Betty and Veronica” or “Jughead.” Maybe if Fred Mausser is reading this he can chime in!

But I don’t think the pockets themselves are the whole of the point. Granted, this certainly provides an “impulse buy” boost to sales, but the point is that the comics are there — right out in the open, where regular people shop. They can be on the mainline newsstands, spinner racks, whatever.

“My gut level feeling is that a digest of kid friendly Spider-man or Batman comics racked next to the candy bars and recipe books would sell well”

That’s been my secret wish for many years now! I can’t think of anything else that would make more of an immediate, positive impact on the comics business.

Of course. But there’s a large gulf between “imprints mean nothing,” which was the original claim, and “imprints aren’t a guarantee.”

The usefulness of imprints can comfortably fall between the two, with varying results depending on how strong the imprint identity is, and how well it matches a reader’s tastes.

kdb

There was a point, roughly 5 years ago or so, where yeah, that was pretty much true — “trade waiting” in a phenomenon of the last half decade, really.

Today, I’d say something approaching half of my “book” sales are to people who come into a DM once a year or less. That’s a guess, however, I haven’t done any rigorous analysis of it!

(and half of my sales in general are books — thus about a quarter of my sales are from “civilians”)

“I always assumed that the same 300,000 or so (high estimate!) DM customers throughout the country were accounting for all sales, regardless of format, every month.”

There HAVE to be way more than 300k DM customers. In my estimation, even something as widely popular as CIVIL WAR only sold to a small percentage (10-25%-ish) of the DM readership; I’d put the DM client base at no less than a million readers, personally.

-B

“That supermarket rack placement cost many many thousands of dollars however, didn’t it? Further, there are a limited amount of “pockets” available in the first place, so this can’t be universally replicated across all publisher’s entire lines…”

Well, the “Disney Adventures” pockets are now up for grabs, unfortunately!

And yeah, they are expensive, but that’s why big-gun publishers like DC and Marvel could potentially tackle those. But I wasn’t suggesting anyone should exactly follow the Disney/Archie model, just illustrating a point about wide audience access.

Wide visibility = wide sales. I was talking to a friend of mine today who still hasn’t picked up the last two comics I worked on. She said, “I don’t even know where a comic book store is. That’s why I wait for you to send me these things so I can read them.”

That may read as ignorance (and it is), but really, putting this stuff in front of more people so they CAN’T ignore it can only ever be a good thing.

“Don’t support the floppy, the floppy goes away, then there is no product to produce the trade. No new floppy product, then where will the next Sandman or Preacher, or Fables come from?”

Could online distribution of individual chapters replace the floppy? I loved Seth’s comic that was serialized in the New York Times Magazine (which I read for free online, with ads). And now I can’t wait for the printed version so I can buy it and have it on my coffee table at home. I don’t know if there will be a print version but there should be.

Also, I think it should be emphasized that the floppy as a format does not need to go away if it is, in fact, a viable business for publishers. In my view, consistent 10K to 30K monthly sales translates as a failure but I am just an editor and not a publisher, so I have no idea if I’m right.

If it is, in fact, a failure and not the preferred format for customers then it’s high time to change gears, streamline the operation, and increase profits and sales. Most of this thread has been devoted to tossing around ways that that can happen which is, in my view, very productive. We shouldn’t just axe the floppy, but neither should we keep it around as the default way to publish a comic book story if it’s not necessarily the best way.

Brian’s thoughts on reader behavior are very intriguing — are you saying that most TPB sales are from “new” readers (in other words, people that are neither waiting for the trade nor buying singles every week)? I’m curious because I’ve never spoken to a retailer about this and I always assumed that the same 300,000 or so (high estimate!) DM customers throughout the country were accounting for all sales, regardless of format, every month.

Regarding VERTIGO sales numbers: It is truly are to believe how low they have sunk. I’m willing to share my numbers here. Most of the new titles sell less than 5 copies in my store. For comparison sake, the top Vertigo sellers in my store, Y The Last Man, and Fables, sell in the upper 20s, and while even those numbers are way down from a couple of years ago, I still think they’re reasonable. Most first issues of VERTIGO titles sell under 10 copies, so people really aren’t even sampling these titles. And my store is in a town with two colleges in it.

And for those who think that it’s simply a matter of converting to all graphic novels, –with only a handful of exceptions (PRIDE OF BAGDAD), most VERTIGO OGNs sell less than 5 copies, often more in the 2-3 copies range. I really doubt that sales in B&N and Borders are all that much better either. I frequent several of the big chain bookstores on a near weekly basis, and at least here in JERSEY, they get no where near the number or the quantity of GNs I get. There is no strong VERTIGO presence in any of them. Rarely do they get any of the VERTIGO OGNs unless they’re proven winners.

The danger here, of course, is what many of us retailers have been saying all along. Don’t support the floppy, the floppy goes away, then there is no product to produce the trade. No new floppy product, then where will the next Sandman or Preacher, or Fables come from? No amount of B&N or Borders, or AMAZON sales are going to make up for getting this stuff into the hands of the comic selling professionals. We can sell this. The others only “carry” it.

I agree with what I think Hibbs was saying in his column. DC/VERTIGO (and Marvel, for that matter) needs to delay, or at least stagger, collecting many of their series. Publishing a trade should not be an automatic process. There are way too many trades coming out these days. Too many series that really don’t deserve collecting are being collected. Not every mini series needs to be collected. Too many series are getting hardcover/softcover collections. Too many minor series are being collected. My sales on the secondary titles collected by both MARVEL and DC have really dropped over the last few years. It seems to me that MARVEL and DC are playing the old rack space game where they really don’t care about sales of a particular book, only that by publishing so many titles they’re pushing some other titles off the rack. Retailers only have so much space. Marvel publishes 4 or 5 volumes, either hardcover or softcover, EACH WEEK! DC nearly as many. There is no way this market can support that number of trades each week.

BTW, I very much agree with those who miss the “extras” that floppies used to provide: a lively and robust letter column, interesting preview pages, and interaction with editorial made you feel like you were getting more than just a small portion of a larger story. You were being entertained, and that what you thought had value.

Radio Nowhere. Is there anybody out there?

Dan
Dewey’s Comic City
Madison, NJ

“THE *real* QUESTION is DO THEY then do that or not? And there’s enough evidence to suggest that, no, they don’t actually go and pick up the eventual collection in the end — at least not in great enough quantities to offset the loss of income from the serialization.”

Of course not.

They’ve read the reviews on Savage Critic, and now they know better.

NightShade is indeed an excellent publisher, probably because it’s a one man show, and Jeremy knows what he’s doing. But still, just because I like M. John Harrison is no guarantee I’ll like Kage Baker (I think Jeremy published Kage Baker). In fact, it’s almost certain that nobody has both on their shelves.

I don’t think it’s so much that I’d be loyal to NightShade as that nobody else will publish the short story collections because mainstream publishers suck big red rocks.

In any case, Vertigo’s far past that point. Everyone else wants the same creators — ooh, say, Avatar — and the creators probably won’t be messed around with as much by the parent company.

Using John Jackson Miller’s figure here (http://www.cbgxtra.com/Default.aspx?tabid=1857), we can calculate that Marvel, through Diamond US, sold $41.43 million in books and comics through DM channels in first quarter of 2007

(Jan 2007 Marvel took 39.78% of an estimated $33.71 million, or $13.41 million
Feb 2007 Marvel took 42.35% of an estimated $32.16 million, or $13.62 million
Mar 2007 Marvel took 43.09% of an estimated $33.43 million, or $14.40 million)

Problem is, the Q1 financials talk about net sales, and it is $27.5 million is Q1 2007.

If someone can either apply a reasonable calculation to the DM gross figures to get them to net (no idea on my part), or turn up the overall gross figures, then we could have a snapshot at at least one publisher.

$41.43 gross in the DM vs $27.5 net in Publishing, overall does seem to suggest that the name of the game is still the DM though, yes?

(for Marvel, obviously)

-B

Its probably worthwhile to separate behaviors into “What One Will Say” and “What One Will Do”, because there is often a gulf between them.

I have no doubt whatsoever that if you ask random people “OK, you have a choice of 1) making 4 trips to the store to get four different chapters, with ads, no extra features (not even a letter’s page), printed on cheaper paper, and, probably, slightly more expensive in the aggregate; or 2) Make 1 trip to the store to purchase a complete collection, no ads, extra features, better paper, and cheaper” and virtually any person is going to line up behind #2.

THE *real* QUESTION is DO THEY then do that or not? And there’s enough evidence to suggest that, no, they don’t actually go and pick up the eventual collection in the end — at least not in great enough quantities to offset the loss of income from the serialization.

I can relate it to my own behavior — I’ve stopped going to the movies almost completely. Why? Crowds, boorish behavior, sticky floors, 20 minutes of commercials before the feature, overpriced concessions, and so on. The fact of the matter is that if you have two adults going to the theater, once you calculate travel and parking and food and maybe money for the sitter and whatever, it is almost always cheaper to just buy the DVD, and then you OWN it, and can watch it 100 times if you like.

But do I actually buy more DVDs? If there’s some fancy-pants boxed set or something that I really want, then some years, sure, I approach the amount of money that I used to spend on going to the movies, but most years? Not even CLOSE. I “wait for the trade”, then I never actually “BUY the trade” when it is out.

“Agreed 100% — this is what must change if we ever want to see true growth and stability in comics as a business (not as an art form — the art form is cruising along quite nicely). But I think it’s up to publishers and their marketing teams to break that wall and get comics out into the world outside of the DM.”

Whereas I believe that publishers should invest more IN the DM, and encourage more stores to open, especially because the specialist will have more moxie and passion and loyalty then a generalist, in virtually all cases. Invest where your strengths are, not your weaknesses. May be a po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe kind of thing though.

“In my “Disney Adventures” days we were always very happy with sales (a below-100K month was VERY rare) and it seemed pretty clear that the numbers were so high because of placement.”

That supermarket rack placement cost many many thousands of dollars however, didn’t it? Further, there are a limited amount of “pockets” available in the first place, so this can’t be universally replicated across all publisher’s entire lines…

-B

Agreed 100% — this is what must change if we ever want to see true growth and stability in comics as a business (not as an art form — the art form is cruising along quite nicely). But I think it’s up to publishers and their marketing teams to break that wall and get comics out into the world outside of the DM. I agree with you — if people can find them, they will buy them. That’s kind of what I was saying with that 7-11 hypothesis above — I don’t know what the sales numbers are there but I bet they’re pretty high.

That kind of aggressive opening up of retail outlets is exactly how the newsstand will be brought back. It’s not dead and gone — newsstands are alive with product, just not so many comics.

In my “Disney Adventures” days we were always very happy with sales (a below-100K month was VERY rare) and it seemed pretty clear that the numbers were so high because of placement. Kids and their parents did buy our comics — thousands and thousands per month — because it was right there at the supermarket, where the audience actually spent significant time.

Ah yes, of course, I stand corrected — I should have said that that was a larger point I thought dovetailed with the main point about launching new characters. In other words, a sensible tangent might be, “But OF COURSE no new characters can be launched in this market — look at how low the sales numbers are across the board!” When established characters don’t sell much better than those new ones Heidi cited I think that’s the state we’re in.

I agree that there is no inherent reader bias against the form. Most people I know do read serialized comics, but only if that story makes sense in the form, meaning in the old sense of adventure/fantasy comics when the plot was wrapped up in that chapter but the larger story continued on in successive chapters. No one I know would ever buy all four issues of a limited series — they’ll buy the eventual trade collection three months later that has no ads, some nice “DVD extras” and is a few dollars cheaper, to boot.

In the ’70s and ’80s, the single issues themselves were full of “DVD extras” like letter columns, editorials, back-up stories, and pin-ups, all surrounding a story that was more or less “done-in-one.” Not so anymore. Publishers have changed tactics and stories are now designed to be longer, book-length, single-volume affairs. We should respond to that new state of affairs rather than keep trying and failing with the old way just because that’s how it always has been done.

Of course, I’m reading “failure” into those sales figures and I may be wrong. If those numbers are enough for DC and Marvel to keep those stories and their trade collections in print than nothing should change at all.

A low-cost (or free and ad-supported) subscription service for downloadable chapters may be the way to keep the benefits of serialization without the negatives. I’m sure many thousands more readers will pay $1 or less for “Metal Men #1″ online than the 30,000 who bought the hard copy for $3.

On the issue of Vertigo’s current line up, I think it’s as good as it’s ever been in terms of quality & diversity. DMZ, Exterminators, 100 Bullets, Fables, Loveless, Army@Love are all great reads. Exterminators in particular is fantastic and unique.

I’m completely mystified as to what’s up with Absolute editions. DC has more than enough high quality material to grow this line. A couple of selective House of Mystery etc. volumes reprinting stories by the masters, Kaluta, Wrightson, Toth, Adams, Nino, Kane, and Wood would surely sell to those of us with the disposable income. How about Marshall Roger’s Batman work or a Sienkiewicz volume?

I’d also like to see more artist based collections as has been done with Neil Adam’s work. A Walt Simonson collection would be great. Howard Chaykin’s work in the 70’s and 80’s was groundbreaking but his reputation suffers with nothing from his early career currently in print. Surely it shouldn’t be too hard to get rights to reprint his Cody Starbuck stories, or his work with Samuel Delaney? The Library and old farts market should be able to support these types of collections.

The recent The Question volume was a great start but why so thin?

Best,
Tim

It hasn’t been until really recently that the TP explosion has started to cause buying habits to change — for the first decade and a half of their rise those sales were additive, not subtractive (and I mean in terms of breadth of audience, not “someone buying it again”, though certainly that is an impact as well); and I absolutely believe that a significant chunk of that change in behavior is because the PUBLISHERS have made the format moot — not because of any inherent mass-audience bias against serialization.

“But all of this is beside the main point Heidi raises, which is that sales seem strikingly abysmal for pamphlet comics.”

I actually thought her point was that generating new IP is a really hard thing to do, and the Direct Market used to be an extremely easy way to do so, but it isn’t any longer.

And if that wasn’t her point, it should have been! Heh.

“or if another part of this is comparatively better trade paperback sales.”

Ace hinted there at the end that the answer may surprise you, and I hope she writes that follow-up piece, because my limited-to-what-people-leak-to-me understanding of BookScan sales data shows that really that isn’t the case. Something may have changed in the last 10 months since I’ve seen a report, of course, but I’d lay low odds on it.

“With only a few titles every month breaking the 100K mark, the industry clearly needs to be reaching out to more people in other places besides the Direct Market boutiques that serve us aficionados so well.”

As a DM retailer, I am absolutely supportive of anything that gets comics into more generalist venues. Because I know a specialty shop can service the audience much better. The problem isn’t, and has never been that comics can’t potentially reach a “truly” Mass Audience, it is that there aren’t enough venues to purchase comics in the first place. You have to actively look for them. Even in a bookstore.

So, yeah, if someone can figure out a way to bring back the Newstand, I’m ALL for it.

Ultimately I think that we should pro-actively find ways to help the serialized format (and especially try very hard not to actively work against it!), because its a great cheap testing bed to see what can work and what can’t when you’re talking about something other than A-List properties.

-B

It’s not in dispute that many comic book readers buy first issues, don’t like them, and stop. I certainly got rid of all my Image #1s real quick way back when.

My point is simply that the advent of the trade paperback explosion has to have changed the buying habits of comics book readers en masse, otherwise the experiment would not be a success. This effect should be measured by retailers and publishers if they want to keep up with the demands of their customers.

But all of this is beside the main point Heidi raises, which is that sales seem strikingly abysmal for pamphlet comics. I already wondered if part of this is poor/incomplete sales tracking, or if another part of this is comparatively better trade paperback sales. Another answer may be that comics are extraordinarily specialized. With only a few titles every month breaking the 100K mark, the industry clearly needs to be reaching out to more people in other places besides the Direct Market boutiques that serve us aficionados so well.

Put me on that list as well..

I bought every book in the “Vintage Crime” library, and I am inclined to check out anything by McSweeny’s, or Picador, and a few others…

“I wonder how many retailers take full advantage of it…really go in close to the cutoff date and cut or increase orders. I ask because the overall final order patterns don’t seem to have changed all that much since it was implemented at DC.”

I’d suggest that this is the best evidence that retailers HAVE been, historically, ordering “right” — that there IS a 2nd (and 3rd) issue drop off, and its not merely that retailers are a Cowardly and Superstitious Lot.

Given that this pattern can be observed going back as long as there have ever BEEN sales charts — which absolutely and emphatically predates even the CONCEPT of “waiting for the trade” — this would suggest that Jesse’s analysis is incorrect.

-B

Indeed. I just bought a book that I liked, noticed it was from Night Shade Books, realized that I’d tried and liked several Night Shade releases of late, so I went and checked their website, and it turns out they also published a book I just reserved at the library, because it looked interesting.

That’s enough to make me say, “Hmm, maybe the Night Shade editors buy and publish stuff I stand a good chance of liking.” And since they put the books out in really nice-looking packages, I’m going to keep an eye on them and what they bring out from here on, in hopes of finding more.

Call me a nerd, I guess. Imprints don’t guarantee a sale, but they can make me far more open to trying something — or far less, in the case of imprints where they seem to lean toward stuff I don’t care for.

kdb