by Brian Hibbs
(#151 – November
2006)
You’ll remember
that last
month I was complaining a little bit about finding an appropriate
topic for the column (hey, you write 151 columns on retailing comic
books, and see how well you do, buddy), and though I’ve got
a “pressing issue of the moment” to discuss this month (see below),
I got a note from little Paulie Levitz (50) of Connecticut that
suggested that I might write about how you sell comics to
people.
This is simultaneously
a really good topic, and a really hard one to discuss. Really good
because it is absolutely true that barely a day goes by that I don’t
hear the phrase “I’ve never really read comics before, what do you
suggest?”; and really hard because that can just dissolve into a
big Venn diagram that would bore the socks off you, the average
reader.
Still, in a lot
of ways, this is the core of what a comics retailer does,
and why I always maintain that a specialist with specialized knowledge
will always do better in selling a specialized product that a generalist
with general (or no) knowledge.
“Back in the day”
this was a much easier question to answer, because there was only
a finite number of GNs or TPs on the market. Moving a reader from
one book to another only had a limited number of possible places
it could go. Today, of course, there are well past fifteen thousand
different options, which makes the complexity of the exercise much
harder.
Still, despite
the raw number of choices of tools that we have now, there are a
couple of fairly obvious paths that can still be taken, with the
easiest ones focusing on “creator” or “genre”. In a way, you’re
playing “six degrees of separation”
Let me give an
example so you understand what I’m talking about.
Girl walks into
a comics shop, “I don’t know what I’m doing, can you help?” Yes,
most assuredly. You start them with something obvious, like, say,
Sandman. It is smart, it is lyrical, it has a rich cast of
characters who, despite the fantastic trappings, are fairly relatable,
and Neil Gaiman is, perhaps, better known
outside comics than anyone within it these days.
(Your opening
gambit might be different – I like Sandman as an easy illustration
because in the 15 years [or so] since the trades were first released,
it has very seldom failed me as a “first taste” that gets people
coming back for more comics, the most important part of this
exercise)
So, two days later,
she comes back for the next one, and before the month is out she’s
blown through them all and wants to know: what’s next?
What’s next depends
on her, of course, and your ability to divine which of the aspects
of the book appealed to her most. You ask questions of her reading
experience. Did she like the characters or the relationships most?
Is she looking for something equally as long or does she want something
shorter? More from Neil, or someone new? And so on. The trick is
to conversationally interrogate the customer so you can figure
out which slot goes into which tab to build them into a lifelong
comics reader.
Sandman can lead several different places.
If it is the lyricism of the writing they liked, maybe you move
into Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run; if it is the humanity
of the characters and their relationships, maybe you laterally hand
off to the Hernandez Brother’s Love & Rockets. If it’s
the juxtapositioning of “today” with mythic events, may you swing
them towards Mike Mignola’s Hellboy. Maybe it is the characters
they liked, so you have some of the Sandman Presents: spinoffs,
or the Hellblazer books. Maybe it was the Horror of the first
parts they liked, so you steer them towards Preacher. Or
you could lead them deeper into Neil’s own library, with Murder
Mysteries or Books of Magic (which then creates its own
thread)
You can laugh
at some of those choices, I am sure, but each one of them has worked
at various points in my career of selling comic books. There are
two really important bits to this that have to be equally supported.
The first is listening to what the reader is saying (and, almost
as important, what they’re not); while the second is having
a deep knowledge and passion for the wares you’re selling.
It’s much much
more difficult for you as a salesman to sell someone [title] if
you don’t have a solid knowledge of it – its themes, tone, plot
and characters (amongst others). You don’t necessarily have to be
specifically passionate about the individual work – I, for example,
don’t personally care for Love & Rockets, but it doesn’t
stop me from strongly recommending it to the person that I believe
will care for it – but you do need to be passionate about
the form of comics, and the possibilities it holds.
The goal you’re
looking for is to chain together book-to-book that infects the customer
with your passion and love of the medium. And, ultimately, to get
them to the point where they don’t need the training wheels any
longer and they can walk around your store with a reasonable foundation
of “what next?” they can answer themselves.
Seriously, making
“civilians” into “comics readers” is one the greatest joys of the
job.
One easy way to
forge the links of that chain is to follow them through on creators.
Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore’s backlist catalogs have enough range and
breadth to keep a new reader busy for a while. And it is not hard
to make the hand-off to Warren Ellis, or Garth Ennis, or Frank Miller,
or Brian Bendis, or Daniel Clowes or Adrian Tomine. Or [whoever].
See, I told you this could devolve into list-making!
Another way to
lead the Civilian through is by “genre”. Some times there are really
obvious paths through Crime, or Horror, or Humor. Other times, you
can lead through publisher or imprint – if you like those Vertigo
titles, you’ll probably like these, and if you like these, then
you’ll probably like these Fantagraphics books, and then that leads
into these Drawn & Quarterly books – but that’s often harder
because the lazy among us will drop into the Marvel and DC superhero
universes too quickly. “Ah, you liked Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men,
here read Age of Apocalypse next,” isn’t going to work with
the majority of Civs. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns doesn’t
automatically imply an interest in Batman: A Death in the Family,
after all.
In fact, I’d strongly
resist pushing the Civilian towards open-ended, multiple-title characters
until they’ve well found their “sea legs” and have realized that
they are, in fact, a “comics reader”. If you’ve steered a customer
through Grant Morrison’s library, and they’ve devoured most of it, pointing
them to his current run on the monthly Batman title is a
fine idea, but doing that they day after they’ve come in and told
you they liked volume 1 of The Invisibles, and do you have
any more? is probably not going to get you the long-term sale. The
periodical is daunting to the civilian, and it, generally, doesn’t
fit into the normal pattern of their lives easily enough to make
that your opening pitch.
Lately, I’ve been
finding that one of the biggest “reader breeders” for us has been
our “Real Life” section of the store. Satrapi, Pekar, Spiegelman,
Sacco, et. al. really make an impact when racked together. Having
Palestine next to Maus next to
Persepolis next to American Born Chinese
next to Pyongyang makes them all sell much better.
A good question
to ask is “What is your favorite TV show or Movie?” A lot of times
this will lead to really obvious comic pairings. Some times you
have a licensed product from that property to sell them (though
I personally would generally give a Buffy the Vampire Slayer
fan a copy of Joss Whedon’s Fray over one of the BTVS
TPs), but other times you can make a good, if less obvious, lateral
move from, say, HBO’s The Wire to a procedural like Greg
Rucka’s Queen and Country.
Finally, you’ve
got one tool that’s always invaluable, and that’s the Personal Guarantee:
“I am so sure that you’re going to like this, that, if you don’t,
bring it back and we can freely swap it out for something else.”
Really, I can’t
sing its praises enough – it is much easier to close a sale if you’re
standing foursquare behind a title. A lot of time offering that
Personal Guarantee can make the difference between making the sale
and not. It shows that you truly believe in a work, that you’re
standing behind it.
In seventeen years
of selling comic books, we’ve never, not once, had a book come back
that we sold with a Personal Guarantee.
* * *
Onto the Pressing
Issue Of The Moment.
The observant
among you will have noticed that many of this month’s Marvel comics
have had a tremendous amount of advertisements. In fact, the ads
outweigh the story content, running 22 pages of story to 26 pages
of ads.
It isn’t just
Marvel, of course, there have also been a number of ad-packed DC
books (like Superman Confidential #1) that have heavy inserts, and
3-D glasses and all kinds of things packed into them.
There are three
problems here.
First off, these
packages make the comics not as solicited. We’re very clearly being
offered a “32 page” comic, and they’re just as clearly not. There
is a real and pressing legal issue here. The Uniform Commercial
Code says that you have to deliver what it is that you promised
to offer, and that you can not substitute something else for that
promise. If you solicit a “32 page” comic, you simply can not put
a “48 page” comic in its place because 32 != 48. This kind of playing
fast and loose with solicitation has already caused problems
for Marvel in the past, and you would think (really you would) that
they’d be more careful about things like that these days.
The second issue,
and related to the first, is that this directly, obviously, and
clearly causes a greater expense for comics retailers. Virtually
every comic retailer in the world (save those very very few who
live within driving distance of one of Diamond’s 3 warehouses –
Memphis, LA, and Plattsburgh) pays for
freight.
When a title has
50% more pages, we, rather obviously, pay for 50% more weight in
freight charges to get it here. So, my question is this: why are
we being forced to pay for Marvel’s advertising windfall?
In this week’s
New Joe Fridays, Joe Quesada suggests that not only is Marvel
gaining more advertisers, but that they’re making placement demands
for where the ads run. Now, I have no idea how things work
at Marvel, but every time I’ve ever advertised in my life,
and I asked for such considerations, I was told that “of course
we can do that…. for an extra fee.” I want to believe that Marvel
is at least that smart.
I have a suspicious
mind, and so this is pure conjecture, but Joe implies this is an
“November and December” thing. I suppose it could be. But the little
weasely part of my brain wonders if this is a way to make up for
publishing revenues in the wake of losing 2 months of Civil War
and its various tie-ins. Like I said: pure conjecture, but the timing
of it makes it at least a possibility.
Me, I don’t really
care if comics ship with a 2 pound brick attached to each one –
as long as I’m not paying for the shipping involved. It is
heinous and wrong to ask your retailers to pay for the extra shipping
and processing involved in shipping a non-standard package. At the
very least, freight credits are called for.
The third issue,
and absolutely the most important, is this kind of density-of-advertisement
makes the books less readable. It interrupts story flow,
it constantly pulls the reader out of the content. In the case of
all of the inserts in Superman Confidential #1, I had at
least one customer tell me he wasn’t interested in the comic because
of all of the ads. This implies to me that I have several more customers
who didn’t say anything, but felt the same, and that leads to long-term
lost sales.
As an industry,
we’re already providing too many reasons to “wait for the trade”
– pricing, speed, paper quality. It seems to me that this kind of
ads-outnumber-the-content schemes are just going to accelerate those
trends amongst the readership.
And, if you ask
me, that’s just plain dumb.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience in San Francisco since
1989. Feel free to e-mail
him with any comments. You can purchase a collection of the
first one hundred Tilting at Windmills (originally
serialized in Comics Retailer magazine) from IDW
Publishing. An index of Tilting at Windmills on Newsarama
can be found right here.
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