by Brian Hibbs
(#162 – October 2007)
So, first up, an apology.
Those of you with
longer memories will remember this column, where
I discussed Countdown. I talked about the lack of advance
solicitation material before the series began, and how I felt that
was one of the major reasons it was selling as poorly as it appeared
to be selling. The published sales charts at the time showed Countdown
selling below 75k.
I had written
this:
Obviously,
I have no idea if I’m at all typical (I’m probably not), but if
I am, then Countdown wouldn’t
even be a Top Fifty book in these early days, and history shows
this type of series does nothing but decline for the rest of its
run. It is, I think, conceivable that Countdown is going to drop under 50k during its year. 52 stayed more or less over 100k its entire run.
That column, and
a subsequent public comment from
Dan DiDio, which all parties I think understand was aimed at me,
led to a little flurry of emails back and forth. What happened was
that, because of the conditionally returnable nature of the first
twelve issues of Countdown, Diamond wasn’t reporting the
entirety of sales in the sales charts, on the assumption there would
be returns.
Now I don’t know
what the exact unreported percentage really was, but it would appear
to be between 20 and 25%. If we use the more flattering number,
that’d mean North American sales for the first issue (#51) weren’t
really 91,083, but, rather more
like 113k, and, in fact, all of the first four weeks were over 100k.
More importantly,
if you adjust the twelfth and final “returnable” issue (#40) upwards
by 25%, then the drop to “non-returnable” status is basically nothing
– all of about 2% -- which seems to indicate that Countdown
is resonating just fine with the national audience.
It would appear
that I am guilty of universalizing my specific experience (where
we lost half of the readership between 52 and Countdown),
and that I appear to be wrong that the lack of pre-Previews-ship-date
information had any impact on the greatest bulk of readers or retailers.
And, in fact, I think it would be safe to say that the overwhelming
majority of the marketplace has chosen to, at least saleswise,
treat Countdown as an extension of 52 – 104,
if you will.
So, there, I was
wrong.
* * *
But what I really
want to talk about this month is the relationship between the periodical
and the book, and what I think it means to the Direct Market.
I’m long on the
record that I think the book format is where we want to put our
efforts – none of the “original” (Comics Retailer) run of
Tilting at Windmills is on-line, so I can’t easily search
for the exact column (or link it, even if I could find it), but
I said, in the mid-90s, something like “You shouldn’t even publish
the periodical in the first place, if you’re not going to collect
it in a book”
Heh, be
careful for what you ask for, eh?
The funny thing
is, I still mostly believe that – given
the effort it takes to create a work, it is pretty inefficient to
only ever sell it once, as a periodical. Having a perennial version
is good for virtually everyone, as long as sales can sustain it.
Because that’s
the rub, and is the corollary of “don’t serialize if you’re not
going to collect” – Don’t serialize if it isn’t worth collecting!
There’s an awful
lot of material being created now that doesn’t have any lasting
or widespread interest, yet is being bound up just the same – does
the world really need three volumes of, say, the current Ms Marvel
series? In both hardcover and softcover?
Nothing against Ms. Marvel, of course, but this doesn’t strike
me as work people will still be seeking out in any appreciable quantities
in three years, five years, a decade from
now. To an extent, this simply makes it another kind of periodical,
albeit one with a slightly longer shelf-life.
One of the tests
that I think should be put into place is “When volume 1 (or 2 or
3) goes out of stock, will it be reprinted?” If not, then, most
likely, the work shouldn’t be collected in the first place, other
wise we’re just creating more “orphans” clogging up the system and
the shelves – and we have far too many of those as it already is.
But let’s say
that you’re a publisher and you’re willing to make a serious commitment
to keeping a work in print and available, what then? How do you
handle both the serialization and the eventual collection?
In my opinion,
the periodical serialization is tremendously important to both the
Direct Market in the micro, as well as the overall production of
comics work in the macro.
In the macro,
serialization helps underwrite the cost of production, and makes
it significantly more likely that a working artist can make a “living
wage” from the production of comics work – because publishers are
able to steadily recover costs of production, as a work is serialized,
it is a whole lot easier to pay competitive wages. If the “comic
book” disappeared tomorrow, you can just say goodbye to virtually
any property that isn’t an “A-Level” one – there’s hardly any way
to recover the costs in any kind of a reasonable time from on a
“B- (or C-) list” property. Moreover, a significant percentage of
creators need to have regular production of their work as a spur
to keep actually producing more, and to keep their names “on the
radar” of retailers and consumers.
In the micro,
the periodical comic book provides a tremendous amount of cash flow
to both publisher and retailer. Book publishing tends to be “burst”-y
– weeks will pass where nothing especially significant gets published,
then half a dozen major books will all drop at once. Without the
(relatively) steady week-in, week-out publication of serialized
comics, your friendly neighborhood comics store will never be able
to keep their doors open.
At Comix Experience, over half of our sales come from
book-format material (as opposed to comics-format), but I’d have
to shut tomorrow without the steady, and reliable cash-flow that
the periodical provides. Periodicals provide cash-flow, books
provide the profit.
The comics-only
reader has very different behaviors than the book-only one – a “typical”
comics reader might be shopping bi-weekly
or better, while the book reader typically comes in quarterly, or
so. The comics reader tends to be savvier about what they read, and
more informed about the product, and so on and so forth. One type
of customer isn’t “better” than the other (oh no no
no!) – both type’s money spends the same – but the more-regular
comics buyer is providing that crucial cash flow in a way that most
book-focused buyers just don’t.
There’s one other
factor at play here as well – and that’s the cost of entry. At (about)
$3-per, it is much easier to get someone to “sample” a work,
and thus to commit to it. When I look at the runaway sales success
of something like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight
(over 100K per issue), I can guarantee you that is a function of
the periodical format. If those first five Joss Whedon issues had
come out as an “OGN”, it would have sold amazingly, I have no doubt
– but 100k? Not a chance. To the best of my recollection (and maybe
10 minutes searching ICv2’s charts), I don’t think there’s any OGN
that’s sold over 30k in the DM during its first month, yet 100k
people (and many many of them are
“civilians” to comics) are coming in clamoring to read a serialization
of Buffy (or, say, Stephen King’s Dark Tower) – it
is much easier to drop $3 to see if you’re into something
(and discover, hey! You ARE!) then the $20+ an OGN is going to require on a high-profile
license like that.
Further that “cost
of entry” applies at least as much to retailers as it does to the
end consumers – without something “A-Level” behind an OGN, I’m less
likely to invest my purchasing power into something that’s going
to cost me $7-10, as opposed to $1.50-2.00.
Really, go take
a look at the charts – in the short-run, a serialization of something
of any viability is nearly always going to sell to an audience significantly
larger than the audience for the eventual collection. I believe
that’s just the wider audience’s natural tendency, unless something
is done to short-circuit that tendency.
Like what, you
ask?
Well, let’s start
from this premise: the collection is (usually) the “better” format
for reading a work. Typically on better paper,
usually priced cheaper than its component parts (because they’ve
amortized a great deal of the expense of production on the serialization
– but this wouldn’t likely to be true with an OGN), no advertising,
no “having to wait” for the rest of a storyline, and so on and so
forth.
And all of that
is fine, until you “rub it in the face of the consumer” by producing
the trades “too dependably”. Let’s look, for example, at Vertigo.
Of the last, mm,
let’s say twenty-five “ongoing monthly” titles that Vertigo has
introduced, each and every one of them has had at least one collection
produced within no more than 120 days of the publication of the
final chapter of the first “arc”. In fact, though I’m doing this
wholly from memory at this stage, I think you’d need to go all the
way back to something like The Minx to find an “ongoing”
Vertigo title that didn’t get at least one trade. Even material
as critically panned, and commercially
unviable as the most recent Deadman
series, got that initial $9.99 (for $15 “worth” of comics) trade
paperback.
So what happened
next? Vertigo stopped being able to launch “commercially viable”
monthlies. No? With the exception of Jack of Fables, a spinoff
of the “tried and tested” Fables, Vertigo hasn’t launched
a book in about the last three years that has managed to hold a
monthly audience of even 15k readers (at least, when looking at
the first-calendar-month sales among North American stores, he said,
predicting Brian Wood’s complaint). Even something perceived as
successful for the line (Wood’s DMZ) is, in the most
recent sales report, pegged at under
12k. And Un-Men, Exterminators, Scalped, American Virgin, Army
@ Love, Testament, and Crossing Midnight are all sitting
at under 10k. Heck that last one is sitting at under 6k,
probably below the point where it even is mathematically possible
for the comic to break even, let alone amortize the perennials as
it is meant to do.
Understand this
clearly: Vertigo has trained their audience to Wait For
The Trade. This isn’t accidental behavior at this point,
it is a learned behavior. You know you have a problem when Avatar
(of all outfits!) can launch new ongoing “Vertigo-like” titles at
better numbers than Vertigo can!
I don’t think
this is a matter of “quality”, at all, because I, for one, would
rank Crossing Midnight or Army @ Love at least as
high-in-quality as something like Fables. No, I think this
is a direct result of a marketing plan that says “Your trades are
100% guaranteed”.
Well but, if the
audience is “waiting for the trade”, those trades have to be racking
up big big sales, right? Um, no – Crossing
Midnight v1 had initial orders of a paltry 2510 – under half of what
the periodical sells. It seems to me that not only has this marketing
tactic utterly annihilated Vertigo’s periodical sales, but it has
gutted the confidence of both the retailer and consumer when it
comes to the trade finally arriving.
Were I in charge
of Vertigo, I’d immediately institute a policy that trades will
only be issued after the periodical “proves itself”, and
I’d promote that policy change at the actual point of solicitation
to encourage the customer base to actually support the serialization
in the first place. I’d also find a way to encourage the purchase
of the serialization by some form of “backmatter”
that won’t be reprinted, even if that’s something as basic
as a letter’s page. I think I’d also institute a policy that even
if a book will get TPed, the wait will
be pre-announced as being so long that you wouldn’t want
to wait, if you’re interested in the title. Say, a year, minimum.
Because the only
other path that can be rationally taken is to just skip the serialization
altogether, and simply do only OGNs.
The problem there is that the OGN doesn’t exactly lend itself to
“long form” work – because an OGN has to have an “end”, if
not a firm conclusion. And it isn’t really feasible, I don’t think,
at this point in Western comics, to have multiple volumes of OGN
series “in the pipeline” – what if v1 doesn’t take? So you’re looking
at more of a stop-and-start-again kind of production which can both
sap the life out of a work, as well as create a much longer wait
between volumes.
Clearly, I don’t
think this is purely a Vertigo problem – I’m at least as frustrated
by the legs being kicked out from beneath the “Prestige Format”
superhero-based mini-series (like the recent 90-days-after-#4 publication
of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil HC for one example)
– but at Vertigo, the problem has become codified into the very
DNA of “how they make comics”, and it’s very clearly having a deleterious
impact on their ability to bring goods to market, and for those
creations to find and keep their audience.
At the end of
the day, I think the serialization is utterly crucial for the comics
marketplace as it is constituted; and anything that works against
maximizing the amount of periodicals sold (even if there’s a long
term goal of having a strong-selling perennial product at the end
of it), is something to be strongly avoided. Yes, books are wonderful,
profitable things, but without a system to healthily feed the creation
of individual pages, production and profit has to dramatically tamp
down. Heck, even the steamroller that is manga is (nearly?) universally
serialized first in Japan
before being collected in a perennial format.
There’s a tremendous
amount of value in the periodical serialization of work – lets not
throw it away in our rush to a book format; regardless of how important
the book format is to the future of comics.
**************************
Brian Hibbs has owned and operated Comix Experience
in San Francisco since
1989, and is a founding member of the Board of Directors of ComicsPRO, the
Comics Professional Retailer Organization. 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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