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.