December
2007
"Anything Done For The First Time Unleashes A Demon"
by Brian Hibbs
No matter what
you do, there are unintended consequences.
Take for example,
my Class
Action Suit against Marvel a few years ago - at the time, the
only goal was to get Marvel to adhere to their Terms of Sale which
stated that any book that was late, or had different contents (or
creators) than solicited. But, as a result of that, Marvel decided
to institute their Final Order Cutoff (FOC) program. Where the "real"
order you're placing for a title isn't finalized until hours before
the books are being printed - roughly three weeks before arrival
in stores for comic books.
Let's back up
a bit and talk about comics ordering, and how it works, so there's
some context for what follows.
Direct Market
retailers, as you know, order product on a non-returnable basis
- what we order is what we're obligated to buy, regardless of whether
we can sell it or not. We place our orders via Diamond's monthly
catalog, Previews, on an approximately three-month-ahead
cycle. For example, the Previews relating to comics (mainly)
scheduled to ship in February of 2008 arrived in stores the last
week of November, 2007. We normally have three weeks or so to consider
our orders (though, because of the holidays, this order for is actually
due in first week of January), then books that ship (or, at least,
ship on time), start arriving in February.
(Adding some complexity
to that is that while Previews generally ships the last week
of the month, solicitations start coming out much earlier.
For example, the Dark Horse solicitations for March are already
available as of this writing, while the February orders aren't due
for two more weeks. And some stores, like mine, who do newsletters
and have earlier submission dates, we're getting black-and-white
photocopies of Previews two weeks earlier - books and arrival dates
tend to blur when you're juggling multiple versions in your head
at one time!)
One of the largest
premises for most comics retailers is to have a working pre-order
system for the comics coming in - though certainly, there are some
stores, like Jim Hanley's Universe in
New York, which do just fine by not taking pre-orders - you try
to encourage as many of your regulars as you can to sign up in advance
for the material that they want, ensuring a certain amount of information
gathered in advance as to how a book is likely to perform.
You don't want
to solely depend on pre-orders to make your buying decisions, because
this tends to lead to a less diverse stock (as your more "fringy"
customers tend to be the people least interested in preordering),
but it becomes really helpful in helping gauge what the advance-of-publication
interest is in material that might be less-than-obvious. Which is,
of course, where we retailers need the most help. I've got a pretty
good idea of how to order a Batman comic book; I'm a whole lot less
sure with Bat-Lash, y'know?
Seeing advance
customer interest in a work, before we have to place our order,
thus, becomes fairly crucial in determining the "right" numbers
of copies to order of a work. After 18 years of owning my own store,
I've got a reasonably good handle on how to order enough-but-not-too-much
of most things. Having Too Much is really lousy for a DM store,
because, as I said, we can�t return what doesn't sell; but having
Not Enough is nearly as bad because that means customers are walking
out without finding books they might potentially want. I'm reasonably
good at this, but there's always going to be things where your instincts
get it wrong - there's not a month that goes by where I don't get
surprised by the demand for several things, and equally surprised
by the lack of demand for others. "Wait, six people want
this?" and "Wow, I can't believe only 1 person wants that!" are
pretty common thoughts at Order Time.
One really important
consideration in the entire process is that our customers aren't
machines, and most of them have many other interests other than
just comics, and not everyone is on top of promptly filling out
paperwork the moment it is presented to them. Further, a pretty
reasonable percentage of pre-order customers don't come in weekly
at all - that's why they've placed the pre-order, so they don't
have to be at the store the moment the books arrive!
I've no real idea
how it works for most stores, but I find that it generally takes
six weeks from the start of release of a new month's list of available
new projects until we receive enough of a percentage of orders in
(about 90%) to feel confident in really pinning down the
next month's orders. That is to say, when the order is initially
due, I'm typically only working from about 50-60% of the preorders-from-customers
being turned in - it isn't until that FOC that I've got the "full"
picture to be truly confident.
As I said, Marvel
came up with the idea of the FOC, and DC has now followed suit in
implementing it. I think it is everyone's hope that in 2008 we'll
at least add Dark Horse and Image into the mix, if not "every major
publisher."
FOC has a Dark
Side though, a real Unintended Consequence.
FOC started because
Marvel never wanted to take returns again. If a book is late, or
has a different creative team or some sort of content change, the
theory goes, we can use the FOC to cut our orders so books we can't
sell never arrive in the first place. And certainly, as a retailer,
I see a certain amount of logic in that.
And, in a lot
of cases, the problem probably doesn't have a lot of impact - if
Johnny Artist-with-no-particular-following is replaced by Jimmy
Artist-with-no-particular-following on a low-profile title, sales
will probably not be massively changed (unless Jimmy is a real hack)
in most circumstances. No real issues there, really.
Where we reach
a problem is places where the change is actually significant. For
example: in the aftermath of "World War Hulk," Incredible Hulk
is suddenly changing title and focus to Incredible Hercules.
There's no problem with that, in and of itself, except that, in
order to "keep the surprise" of the storyline, the first few issues
of Incredible Hercules weren't actually solicited as such
- instead being listed as "confidential information," or something
like that, but still under the Hulk name! And what that
means is that Direct Market retailers like myself took orders for
one thing, and will find ourselves delivering something else entirely.
What you have
to understand is that the time frame in which this title change
was announced was not one that I could poll the majority of our
subscribers within. Especially because the announcement came outside
of the regular solicitation process which would mean I'd have to
create a separate order form just for that one book, a less than
optimum solution with its own set of expenses.
Marvel's position,
as I understand it, is A) this was in the best interests of the
story, and B) because we have FOC that's more than sufficient. While
I can probably accept point A, I fall way down at point B.
Why? Because it
is my opinion that a solicitation in Previews, when "all
eyes" are paying attention, is a very, very different thing than
a sentence detailing a change buried in the middle of a weekly email
(normally filled with tons of utterly unessential information) that
not all retailers may be paying perfect attention to 100% of the
time.
Here's another
example of When-FOC-Goes-Bad: DC's publication of The League
of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier HC was using data
that was a year old. Black Dossier was supposed to have been
released in 2006, but took another year to finally come out. Instead
of resoliciting the book, DC just FOC-ed
it, so our first notification of it arriving was about 3 weeks before
it did so. I'm reasonably sure that this is one of the contributing
factors of the book selling out before release - any store that
opened in 2007, for example, had no orders in for
the book, nor any obvious way to poll their customers before it
arrived. Even stores like mine who had their 2006 orders in may
have found that situations have changed significantly since they
placed that order. Thus everyone needed more, but couldn't get them
because the baseline prediction was generated from year-old data.
To give DC proper
points, DC does what DC always does in situations like this,
and made the book fully returnable. Certainly they won't get many
(if any) returns back, but I appreciate that they do always and
uniformly step up to the plate and make sure that no retailer is
holding the bag.
The point is that
FOC (or its poorer hillbilly cousin, "Order Adjustments," for all
of the publisher that aren't the "big two") aren't the
same thing as a correct normal solicitation. It takes time and
effort to gather information from our customers so we can place
our orders accurately. Short-circuit that time and process, and
so you short-circuit the accuracy of our orders. Sometimes that
can work to a publisher's short-term benefit, sure, as they ship
more books that the market has interest in - but in the long run,
it creates uncertainty within the marketplace, and asks others to
pay for your mistakes. That simply isn't good for the Direct Market,
or any participant in it. On the flip side, like in the Black
Dossier example, you're not selling as many books as you could
be, which also sounds to me like a huge mistake for all concerned.
Changing solicitation
information from what is listed through the regular monthly cycle
of Previews, be it for Marvel and DC, all the way down to
the smallest one-title-a-year publisher, should only be left to
the most absolutely extreme circumstances, because virtually all
of the time cancel-and-resolicit is the
most fair and honest way to deal with the market. In those very,
very few cases where time is of the absolute importance, any adjustment
in orders must also be accompanied by full 100% global returnability.
That's what is both fair and morally right.
More than a few
of you will remember that I've recently put in a Point-Of-Sale computerized
inventory system (I'm using MOBY),
and I really couldn't be happier with the results. Reordering books
and comics is a breeze, and the ease of tracking subscriber data
and seeing trends is really amazing and powerful.
I've had the system
for nearly four months now, and I have absolutely zero hesitation
to say it was the single best investment I've ever made in my business,
giving me a lot of really powerful data analysis tools.
One of the reports
I've been running a lot is the "dead items" one, where you can set
a time period to look for how often an item turns, and I've been
pretty shocked and mortified to see how poorly some things move.
There was no easy way to get to this information in a pen-and-paper
world, and it is just a few mouse clicks away now.
What kind of flat-out
shocked me is that something approaching half of the trade paperbacks
we carry have not sold a single copy since we've installed the system.
Now, admittedly, I've been telling myself that my goal was "two
turns a year" as a minimum for anything to stay on my rack, and
we've only got four months of solid hard data (so, two months to
go!), but I'm really starting to see just how big the anchor is
that�s slowing us down. Come February, I'm probably going to get
extremely ruthless about what to start cutting away before we drown
in the sea of SKUs being unleashed upon us.
I had already
sensed that the market for books was starting to change - the sharp
increase in the number of trades and GNs
means it isn't really practical to try and carry everything
any longer; and I'd already started making the shift to zeroing
out rack copies of some of the more marginal new releases (and there�s
something really extremely liberating about not automatically stocking
at least one copy of every "big four" release) - but it is looking
to me that the computer is telling me that I need to be even harsher
than my natural instincts told me.
I have absolutely
no problem with stocking something that turns very slowly, but is
something that is either important to the medium, or important to
our identity as a store, but it is quickly becoming clear to me
that there's a huge swath of material that is not important to either
case, in any fashion, which doesn't turn fast enough to keep in
stock. And that stuff has to go.
There are two
key areas where I am seeing non-existent turns:
1) "indy" books that have neither any significant word-of-mouth,
known or established creator, or clear and specific concept which
"sells itself" to the customers. I have no problem moving copies
of volumes as diverse as Walking Dead, Blankets, or
Action Philosophers. But there are hundreds, if not thousands
of titles which don't have 1% of the market awareness of those books,
and they just sit there. Given that, in most cases, these books
are sold to me at a lower discount than material from "the big four,"
it makes it that much harder to justify the rack space for these
books if they're not turning.
I've always prided
myself on keeping a diverse and eclectic stock of material that
will be embraced by a wide variety of customers, but the cold hard
fact is that if there�s not serious and active marketing for a work
that doesn't already have a pre-existing audience (be it via character,
genre, or creator) rack turns are essentially nil.
And that's not
economically viable to have stock-on-hand.
As POS systems
start to become a standard feature of comic shops in 2008, I think
the options for unmarketed work directly
published in a book format are going to start to shrink - when we're
risking $7-12 to stock a work with no measurable audience in a non-returnable
environment, that becomes a bad risk in far too many cases.
Ultimately I think
that the "cost of entry" into the field, as a new creator, is going
to become drastically greater because of the proliferation of book
format material, and the limits of rack space. Spine-out material
that no one is actively looking for is material that's just going
to sit there.
2) Mainstream
Superhero B-list-or-less material.
That doesn't just
mean B-list as a character, it applies to the basic quality of the
work. I mean, look, DC's backlist page for Batman lists nearly
200 volumes available. How many of those actually turn on a steady
basis? 10%? If that?
Sure, Dark
Knight and Year One and Hush all turn like monsters,
but I think my copy of the Batman: Detective #27 GN has been
sitting on my shelf for over two years and no one seems very interested.
As a reader, I
really approve of those scores of Marvel Essential and DC
Showcase Presents cheap reprints, but man most of those babies
barely turn, and they take up a massive amount of rack space.
And so on, and
so forth.
I strongly suspect
that I could make half of the Marvel and DC superhero TPs that we stock disappear and not only would no one notice,
but sales would go up on the remainder because it could be displayed
properly
Cutting the clutter,
and focusing on the both the obvious successes and the works that
present the medium (or the store), at its best are my goals in 2008.
And this may mean that my stock balance in 2009 looks really different
than it does today.
There are too
many books on the market, and separating the wheat from the chaff
is probably going to be one of 2008�s biggest challenges.
**************************
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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