(#167/#50 – March 2008)

Hey, look, it’s the fiftieth Tilting at Windmills at Newsarama! (#167 overall!) Pretty cool!

It is also a week late, as last week’s original deadline coincided with the second annual ComicsPRO meeting in Las Vegas, and I wanted to hold off until the meeting was done in order to write about it.

Vegas is such a crazy town to me – so much of it designed around excess and vice; and there’s a slightly desperate quality to it all; but it is a good location for a meeting with an amazing amount of cheap convention space, easy travel access for most of the country, and a place that people like to go (probably because of the excess and vice!)

Our meeting was held at a hotel called Texas Station, which was way way off The Strip. On one level that was good, because there were fewer distractions, but on the other hand, it was nearly a forty dollar cab ride out there (at least $10 of that was just getting out of the airport – when I arrived after 11 PM on a Wednesday night, there was a Disneyland-sized queue just to get to the cab stand, utterly insane!) and I had the joy of getting a cabbie whose first question was “do you know where that is?” Always love that.

Anyway, let’s talk about ComicsPRO for a bit…

ComicsPRO is the Comics Professional Retailers Organization – a trade organization for comics retailers, set up to promote and support the Direct Market retailer through education, opportunity and advocacy. There have been many attempts to set up such an organization over the years, and ComicsPRO is the first truly successful iteration – previous attempts have topped out at something on the order of fifty to sixty members, and ComicsPRO is currently sitting at about the 115 range – nearly twice the size of previous attempts! And we’re still growing at a rapid clip.

ComicsPRO also has a mentoring program for prospective new retailers, to answer the basic types of questions (“How do I set up a distribution account? How do I negotiate a lease? What should my business plan look like?” and things of that nature), which currently has about a dozen participants.

ComicsPRO is dedicated to growing the market, to providing professional standards of conduct and business, and to advocate for the DM. The organization also provides access to better deals, as a collective, than individual retailers would be able to gain individually. For example, ComicsPRO offers a discounted credit card processing rate that uses the gross volume of our entire membership, saving me, as a solitary mid-volume store, several multiples of my annual membership fee in credit card fees alone.

There’s a health insurance program, savings on payroll processing, discounts on POS systems, legal forms, web-based postage and a lot more. ComicsPRO has also taken over the administration of 24-hour Comics Day, and has many similar plans and programs in the works.

I’m front-loading all of the fiscal stuff here because I really believe that there’s not a retailer out there that can’t save money by joining ComicsPRO – usually in multiples of the annual membership fees.

But, for me, that’s not even the most important strength of the organization. I’m one of the original founders of ComicsPRO, and the reason I stumped for the formation was a direct outgrowth of my class action case against Marvel comics. It was pretty clear to me, coming out of that, that the reason that situation had devolved to the point that we had to sue one of our key suppliers was because publishers and distributors were dealing with Direct Market retailers as individuals. It is pretty easy to blow off an individual – “Oh, that’s just you” is the common refrain – but it is much harder to dismiss concerns that are coming from an organized, focused group. I absolutely believe that if ComicsPRO had existed in 2001, the problems with Marvel would have been solved long before hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees were spent.

ComicsPRO members include some of the largest and best retailers in the country – we believe that ComicsPRO members represent at least 5%, if not closer to 10% of the gross annual sales of the Direct Market – and as we continue to grow and expand that number is going to become something truly significant.

See, I perceive a real sea-change in the way our suppliers are beginning to deal with us. This was really underscored to me at February’s DC RRP meeting in Texas – this was the first publisher meeting that I can recall where the retailers were approached as proper partners. Usually publishers tend to dictate to us, rather than try to work with us. Even DC, which has historically been the most “retailer friendly” publisher (hell, they pay for concentrated events like their RRP meetings at no small expense) has often presented new plans and programs as fait accompli – willing to entertain discussion certainly, but largely locked down and hard to impact. But at this year’s RRP, both DC and Diamond approached us as actual partners – “Here’s what we’re thinking about doing, what’s your input before we lock it down?”

I can’t even begin to describe to you what a difference this is, and how it empowers us.

I’m firmly of the opinion that this is a direct result of ComicsPRO. When disparate retailers with different wants and needs can bond together for the common good, when we can overcome our difference for a common future, when we can put aside our provincial attitudes for things that benefit all participants in the Direct Market, well that’s an astonishingly powerful thing. And it is something that our partners are going to pay attention to. How could they not?

I mean, when two retailers that couldn’t be more different than, say, myself and Phil Boyle of Coliseum of Comics in Florida are able to agree on a path that benefits all retailers (and, really, I’m not trying to be disingenuous here, Phil and I have essentially diametrically-opposed business models), then you kind of have to pay attention to what we’re saying.

I have a slightly skewed perspective here, because I’m a member of the Board of Directors of ComicsPRO, so I’m sitting up at the head of the table helping conduct the meetings – but my “sense of the room” was that things were getting done. The meetings with our vendors were productive. That publishers were actively listening to what we were saying, and were adjusting plans and programs accordingly.

Here’s a really, really minor example of the kind of thing I’m talking about – Marvel didn’t have any “programming time” at the meeting, but David Gabriel (Senior VP of Sales at Marvel) attended. In one of the innumerable bull sessions in the halls between official programming, several retailers said to David that we really wanted to see the fourth volume of Alias come back into print. David suggested that inventory levels and sales velocity wouldn’t seem to support that. Retailers said “Well, look, announce your intentions to go back to press if we can meet some certain sales target, because as it stands, Alias #1-3 are completely dead items because we don’t have the end of the story to sell people. Volume 4 sells for like $75 on Amazon, which suggests there’s a bunch of demand for this book. If we can’t come up with a large enough order, then you don’t have to go back to press, no harm no foul, but at least give us a chance to try and meet the demand that we can perceive”

Two days later Marvel announced that they were taking provisional orders for Alias volume 4 starting this week. (So, if you, as a consumer, want a copy of this book, tell your local retailer, and make sure that they backorder it for you, because I really want my order to fill!)

Like I said, minor example, but I could come up with another two dozen minor examples just like that one, without even thinking very hard. Examples that suddenly start to add up to something significant and meaningful that will make more money for all participants in the Direct Market.