by Brian Hibbs

#127 – November 2004 – “Below the Radar”

So, I’ve been trying to think of some way to approach the “back of Previews” catalog review (since so many of you asked for it after last month’s “front of Previews” column), and I’ve had a bitch of a time sorting out any real way to do it that doesn’t 1) take way, way too many words; and 2) needlessly piss a lot of people off who can’t separate business and personal issues.

See, the “back of Previews” is mostly filled with dreamers, and iconoclasts, and men and women of utter passion and devotion, and doing the monthly order form is mostly a lot of business calculations. The two worlds exist in uneasy balance, at best. I don’t especially want to wade into the quagmire that honest item-by-item public evaluation will bring.

But then I started to think, it’s not so much that creators and publishers need a specific critique, it is that they need to understand just how it is that retailers (or, at least, this specific retailer) approaches the ordering process.

So, I’m going to try to simplify some of this down to the basics, and see if I can get everyone to understand just how and why the process works the way it does. Again, this is about how I do things, how I think of things – while I assume that most other long-time retailers have come, largely, to the same conclusions that I have, in no way should you assume that just because I’m saying it, it is universally true.

The first thing you need to realize is that only a fraction of what we call “comic book stores” are anything approaching “full line” comic book stores. Diamond claims some 3800 accounts. But there’s nothing like 3800 stores ordering from out of the “back of Previews” comics section. How many is it, really? Only Diamond actually knows, but I suspect it is something like 1000 stores who are ordering any breadth from there. The rest of the “stores” appear to order almost nothing that isn’t a Top 100 title.

There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth about this. How stores have an “obligation” of some sort to support x, y, or z.  And that, I’m here to tell you, is horseshit.

I’ve said a couple of times that, compared to other creative media, the barriers to entry in the comic book market are low. It doesn’t cost a lot of money to publish a comic – certainly less than it costs to make a film or an album – and it’s also amazingly easy to get your work in front of buyers. Unlike any other media, there isn’t very much stigma attached to being “self published”. In fact, some of the most amazing success stories in comics have come from independent creators controlling and selling their own work. But there is simply no obligation that the market has to you. In fact, I would say that because the entry costs are so low, there’s even more obligation upon you as a creator.

Here’s the thing: most creators delude themselves. I don’t say this with rancor or frustration, but with admiration of sorts. If you have the raw stones to create a dream, to express it fully, to spend your own money in promoting and presenting that dream – well, you’re a strong-willed human being, pal. That puts you well above the curve of other people. But that doesn’t, in and of itself, mean that your work is necessarily any good.

It’s super-easy to blame other people for lack of success. Sure, it must be Diamond’s fault for being a rigid, uncaring monopoly; it must be the fault of the damn fans, who wear blinders and bask in ill-conceived company loyalty; it’s definitely the fault of those stupid comic retailers, they’re all like the guy on The Simpsons, aren’t they?

Um, no.

The overwhelming majority of work fails on the market for one of three reasons:

1) The work isn’t good enough.

2) The publisher isn’t capitalized well enough to get past the initial “getting to know you” stage.

3) The creators don’t produce work consistently.

Diamond keeps a really, really low barrier for distribution through Previews. Sure, there are some creators and publishers who will rail about Diamond’s monopolistic practices, but seriously, look at Previews and the crap they do list and tell me straight-facedly that the bar is set high at all? Yeah, thought so.

I’m telling you, as a working retailer, that Previews could drop half of the “back of Previews” publishers, and the industry wouldn’t be in a worse place. The amount of sub-par material that is offered to me is astonishing. Hell, I try to keep a pretty high bar for what I support, and we’re well known as an “indy friendly” store, and I could easily cut 10% of my inventory tomorrow, and no one would even notice. There are a lot of bad and/or bad-selling comics out there.

We’ve reached a stage in the production of the trade paperback where it is beginning to raise the bar on quality. There was a time where you could slap a spine on almost anything, and it would sell well enough because “books with spines” were relative novelties. Now, however, there are growing to be more of them than the market can properly support. This means that in order to make it out on the racks, in order to get your inch or two of shelf space, you’ve got to be better than what is already on the market. Not “as good as”, but “better”.

I have thousands upon thousands of SKUs in stock. (SKU = “Stock Keeping Units”, i.e., one unique physical product)  -- I have more SKUs than I can adequately display, to be certain. There are few successful retailers that don’t think they need more space. So, in order for you to succeed, you’ve got to break a sort of psychological heat barrier, and get on a retailer’s “radar”.

One of the reasons that established properties and publishers generally get better orders is that retailers have a certain degree of familiarity – if a new, say, Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. comic was offered tomorrow, I know what Nick is, I know the general tone such a comic should have, I have a general sense of the audience for such a title. Without any consideration of who is doing the book, I’m going to sell between 10 and 20 copies of NF,AoS #1. That’s because there’s some inherent (commercial) value in the property, and some inherent value to the Marvel brand name. You start adding creators to that base, and that number bumps up or down. Neil Gaiman writing it? 125-150. Bendis? 40-70. Chuck Dixon? 15-30. Brand new untested writer? 8-15. And so on, through all of the possible permutations.

However, for your new self-published title, by new artist and new writer, with no obvious or apparent hook… well, I’m not going to go out on a limb for you, am I?

I almost am tired of repeating this every month, but never forget that comics are non-returnable: What retailers don’t sell, we eat. And there are far more comics than there are customers for, so, largely, the retailer’s job becomes minimizing losses, rather than maximizing sales. “No one ever went out of business by selling out,” the old DM saw goes – while most of the stores that I know that are shaky or on the edge are there because of over stock.

So how do you get on a retailer’s “radar”?

There are a couple of ways, some applying more to writers than artists, some the reverse, all of which sound much easier than they are. This list is by no means complete

1)     Come up with the best idea ever. That’s an obvious one, I know, and such things can’t be created as much as found, but a “holy crap, I wish I had thought of that!” one sentence pitch will almost always be successful, if the creative execution behind it is strong.

2)     Be unspeakably talented. I can tell from looking at 2-3 pages of comics storytelling whether you’re “ready for the prime time” or not. Retailers want to see pages from your work, not just the cover (which may or may not – usually not – be reflective of the interior content). To pick a very old example, when Jason Lutes’ Jar of Fools was solicited, there was an ad with it that showed several of the pages from the book. Just looking at those pages, I was able to quickly see that he was massively talented, and this was something I wanted to sell. We ordered 40 copies of the book. Conversely, and this is very important, I can not begin to tell you the number of books that I’ve decided not to order because I saw pages. You actually have to be good for this to work! If not, you can potentially gut your sales potential.

3)     Get a plug from someone already on our radar. This works a lot less than you think it might because there’s a lot of “log-rolling” in comics – people giving recommendations to their friends, sorta regardless of the actual skill of the work involved. The amount of “bounce” you can get from this also varies on the profile of the person giving the recommendation. There are names I trust more than others, and, again, sometimes this can have a negative impact.

4)     Be unique and refreshing. If you’re launching a new line of superhero comics that all tie in to one another, you’re not going to get a lot of play from me. There are scores of those already. Almost the last thing the market needs is another “universe”. Yet new publishers often try to “reinvent the wheel” by trying to compete with Marvel and DC out of the box. I certainly think that one of the most fundamental reasons that CrossGen failed was because they were trying to be a “universe” from the get go, rather than pitching themselves as a line of individually strong books.

5)     Understand who your consumer audience could be, then communicate that clearly to the retailer. Who am I selling your comics to? If you say “people who like comics!” I am going to slug you. What other comics does your audience like? What films? What shows? Be specific. If you say “it is a fantasy comic” that tells me very little, because that covers Elfquest to Bone to Cerebus to Hedge Knight – all titles with largely different audiences and largely different tones.

6)     Produce quality work on a regular schedule, and keep it up.

That last one is almost certainly the best way to get on our “radar” – clawing yourself there one comic at a time, until retailers finally figure out what they’ve got.

Ask Jeff Smith about the beginnings of Bone – if I recall correctly, there was a point around Bone #5 or 6 where the orders were so pathetically low that he almost threw in the towel. But he knew he had a good comic, and it was a labor of love, and he stuck it out until all of us slow guys finally figured out what the heck we were selling.

This takes time.

Depending on your production schedule, it’s going to take somewhere between 6 and 18 issues before we actually realize what’s going on. Why? There are thousands of other comics out there. There are thousands of creators, most of which who don’t have any staying power. Without some sort of track record, there’s no way for us to differentiate between you and Billy Bob Hack who will put out two lousy issues and quit.

There are several stages to “getting on the radar” – the first, obviously, is getting on the racks at all. Honestly, a lot of people don’t seem to understand just how important that those first initial single copies are. That’s a foot in the door, that’s “OK, I saw something in your initial solicit, here is $1.77, show me what it is” – it is most emphatically not “Those damn retailers being cheap” or stuff like that.

The second stage is the slow build. We think there might be an audience, but we don’t know how large – we’ll bump our orders by a copy or two, see what happens, the next cycle through raise it a bit more maybe until we see what level it might find. Only a small handful of the “initial chance” titles will make it to this stage, however – without market awareness, without promotion, without raw talent, without consumer reaction, you’re far more likely to be ascribed to the “Whew, thank God it sold!” pile.

Hopefully, however, we let the slow build through, and that brings you to the final stage when you’re fully on the radar – your name means something to us when we order, we’re talking the book up, we’re fully behind it. Not all books (regardless of quality) will get to stage three in all stores, of course.

All of this happens because of the natural fiscal conservatism brought on by a non-returnable market – if it doesn’t sell, we eat it, and at $1.77+ wholesale a copy, there’s only so much of a commitment that retailers can make up front for untested material or talent.

Because of this market force, I think it’s extremely foolish for a new creator or publisher to launch initially in OGN. Having a new 22 page comic book on the stands every 3 months is better for building your “brand” as a creator than having a 96 page OGN released once a year. Not only is the OGN more of an investment (and therefore, risk) to the retailer because of the higher price, but you’re not regularly reminding your customers who you are. If there is not a perceived market for your work, you’re not going to get the steady flow of reorders you need to make a perennial work.

There are exceptions, of course – usually relating to raw talent, or “right place, right time” – but hoping for an exception isn’t really the best business model to follow. Because, seriously, once your comic has a spine, you’re then competing for rack-space against the best comics ever produced. You’re fighting against Watchmen and Dark Knight and Sandman and Cerebus and Maus and and and… Why? Because, spine out, those books take up as much room as yours, but they sell much much better. Spine out, those books sell themselves because people (even in most cases, the Civilian World) know what they are, and so they turn quickly.

“Floppy” comic books, believe it or not, actually tend to get better and longer display than books. Generally speaking you’re guaranteed for your cover or at least part of it, to be displayed for six to twelve weeks, depending on how the store conducts its cycles

Conversely, if you launch as a book with a spine, after the first week of release you’re probably reduced to being spine out in a sea of other spine out books – someone has to know about you to find you, and if you haven’t created enough market awareness of yourself, the book will sit long enough that if it does eventually sell, it probably won’t be reordered.

You avoid this through serialization, through building an audience for your work, by showing that you’re reliable and that you’re talented, and, generally speaking, those that can show these two things, those that can produce regularly and build their name and the value of their wares, find the success they deserve on the racks.

Do they all? No, of course not. But, in the stores that care, that are passionate, that are focused, your odds of being treated equally to “front of Previews” material are pretty good if you have the base talent and work ethic. Ultimately, I sell as nearly as many dollars of Daniel Clowes’ or Adrian Tomine’s work over the course of a year as I do of the combined sales of every Superman periodical that is released – I can easily name 20 creators who are more important to Comix Experience than a corporate icon. Comics retailers want new voices, new visions, fresh creators that they can widely share with their customers – that’s how we grow our businesses, after all. However, you can’t expect the retailer to do your work for you. You’re just one comic out of the ten thousand or so released every year.

In the end it comes down to the work and your ability to produce and market that work – whether you’re in the “front” of the catalog or the “back”. Those that can hit those basic points will find their audience, given time. And those that can’t will probably find a message board to complain upon.

I wish you luck!

**************************

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.