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| Tilting at Windmills v2 #6 |
[#122 – June 2004 – “The Order of Things”] One thing I realized after reading some of the talk-backs to Patrick Neighly’s most recent Paper Curtain is that an awful lot of the data and reality that I take for granted is actually obscure and arcane to most of you. There are things comic retailers take for granted – basic informational and procedural tasks – that are just mysterious and esoteric to everyone else. In some ways it is like watching my 8-month old son, Benjamin, try to crawl. Everyone knows how to crawl, right? And there’s not really any thought given to trying to explain how it is done because that’s just unconscious knowledge, right? Except Ben doesn’t exactly crawl like any other child I’ve personally seen – he doesn’t use his legs, and, instead, he kinda drags himself along by his arms like a wounded soldier on the battlefield looking for a medic. He hauls ass too, doing it that way – way faster than any of us might move in such a manner. He’s found something that works for him, and does it with all of his gusto. When we talk to our pediatrician about Ben not doing something the way (or within the same time frame) the baby books describe, he always gets this smile and says “Everybody finds a way that works for themselves, and moves at their own pace.” I use that as a metaphor, not just because with an infant in the house it’s hard to avoid baby-on-the-brain (though it is – I see babies everywhere I go now... how did I tune them out before?), but because while the broad strokes of ordering comic books in the Direct Market are roughly the same for any individual participant, the specifics are different depending on the store. So, as you read the rest of this column, please keep bearing in mind that this is how I do things, not the way others do them. Nor even (necessarily) the best way to do things. But this is what works for me after 15 years of running Comix Experience. Still, with any luck you’ll begin to see at least the broad shape of how ordering comics works. For
me, it all begins with the Cycle Sheet. Other than my intuition and
15 years of (you’ll forgive me) experience, there’s not a more valuable
tool in my toolbox. As they say, click the image for a larger version.
The cycle sheet has room for 13 listings. When I designed these fifteen years ago this was to fit one year’s worth of a title, plus the annual. Things were oh so much simpler back in 1989: faster-than-monthly publication was almost unheard of, and spinoffs were a rarity rather than the rule. Now-a-days it’s entirely normal for me to have sheets with only 4-6 issues of an ongoing title listed: six issues of Foozleman, 4 issues of the Foozleman versus the Troublebots mini-series, a Foozleman TP, the Handbook to the Foozleman Universe, and the Foozleman Archives. Going left-to-right you see columns for the issue number and the date it arrived, as well as how many copies we received, and the number of subscription customers we have for the issue. All self-explanatory enough, I hope? Then follows four sets of three columns that represent the 4 weeks of a book’s sales “cycle” (that’s why they’re called cycle sheets). The first column of each set is that week’s sales, the second column is any inventory adjustment (usually reorders), and the last is that week’s remaining inventory. This repeats for each of the four weeks. The final two columns are end-of-month summaries of total sold and unsold. So this isn’t just a theoretical exercise, let’s show you a filled out sheet, this one for Fables. Click again for a larger version.
There’s a ton of useful data in a cycle sheet, and most comic shops are tracking this, or something very close to it. Some stores, for example, track for six weeks of sales, while I know of at least one that tracks for twelve. Some stores have Point-of-Sale systems which does this same type of work transparently. I think it is absolutely essential to track this type of information because it often demonstrates that what you think you know about what sells what is, actually, wrong. (The clearest demonstration of this principle in action was the saturation test that DC ran in ’02, especially in regards to the “kids” books. It turned out that there was a substantially larger audience for those titles than the retailers in the test were aware of) (Not that, mind you, DC really did much to capitalize on this knowledge) I don’t think there’s any real clarity on what percentage of retailers use the “eyeball” method to order (Where you order based on what you ordered last time, compared to eyeballing the rack to see what stock you have have too little or too much of) – but the lack of cycling in some form or another is probably in the top 3 reasons stores go out of business. Eyeballing leads to way too much stock on some books, and absurdly too little on others. Still, even I don’t cycle everything that comes through – there’s a certain percentage of stock which is simply “fire and forget”, where you’re ordering in 1s and 2s. I generally don’t find that the return on time-spent makes it practical to cycle on books you’re ordering at less than 3 copies. Nor do I find it valuable to cycle many one-shots, or mini-series under four-issues, that aren’t directly tied to another book, because you’re not gathering information that you’re actually going to use. Same goes with original GNs or TPs that aren’t connected to an ongoing series – if there’s no ordering continuity, it probably isn’t worth tracking the data on. Individually, cycle sheets should be easy enough to understand – one quickly picks up the ability to look at one and see which probable direction books are going, up or down or flat. But cycles don’t exist in a vacuum. The amount of data collected can quickly become overwhelming. To demonstrate this, here is Comix Experience’s stack of cycle sheets, compared to the San Francisco phone book:
And here is the SF phone book compared with a recent issue of Previews. A little better, but not by much!
Each and every month, I have to compare the stack of cycle sheets to the listings in Previews. Each and every month, without fail, or we don’t get new comics. And, remember, that stack of cycle sheets is not every comic that comes through our door! Starting to grasp the challenges that face a retailer now? As I said, everything begins with the cycle sheets. Ordering comics is far more of an art than a science. What you’re trying to do is to anticipate your future supply and demand, based upon your understanding of current supply and demand. Largely, you’re “guessing”. Although some lucky books are rock solid in their sales patterns, many, however, aren’t. For example, here’s my actual final sales for the most recent six issues of Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Empire: Issue # Sold Unsold 15 4 0 16 1 2 17 2 1 18 0 3 19 5 0 20 1 1 Based upon these, how would you order the next issue? Now, sure, I picked the single most extreme example that I could find – most books don’t have this kind of wild, wicked swing, but most books swing enough that you have to make a large series of “best guesses”. Couple of other things to bear in mind when looking at this: orders for comics are non-returnable. Orders, except for the sole exception of Marvel up to 6 weeks before the shipping date, are not reducible. And thanks to the relative “collapse” of the individual store’s back issue market (TPs and eBay serve most of the same function back issue bins used to), once you take those copies off your shelf, they’re effectively garbage. Therefore, the name of the game is all about sell-through. You want to get as close as possible to 100% sell-through as you can, because otherwise you’ll have dead stock. Yet, you don’t actually want 100% sell-through because that suggests that you’re missing sales to interested customers, which is nearly as bad as having too many copies left over. Scylla on one side, Charybdis on the other. Every store is going to be different as fixed costs vary based on size and location and a whole myriad of small factors, but as a real general rule, if you can’t hit an 80% sell-through on average, you’re not going to be in business long. You don’t usually start to make a profit until you get close to 90%. In the case of Star Wars: Empire above, I only sold 13 out of 20 copies received. That’s 65%. I’m not making money on Star Wars: Empire. I am, when it comes down to it, probably losing money at 65%. It is, in fact, almost not even worth carrying the book past minimal support – certainly given that at least one issue sold no copies, risking the money to buy 4 or 5 just in case someone comes to buy them, doesn’t seem to make much sense. When I order my next issue of Star Wars: Empire, I’m going to be ordering 2 copies, and I’ll keep that order there for some time. So, if you want to understand what the retailer is thinking when they order, why many new ideas seem poorly supported, why “small press” books don’t get the sales they “should”, almost all of it comes down to ordering non-returnably and the retailer being the real customer. [Here is where someone says “Yeah, so we should get rid of the DM! What a crappy, archaic, and limiting system!” to which, let me reply, “You’re insane.” The DM has its faults, yes, but it has one resounding, overwhelming and unassailable strength that trumps everything else: the low cost of entry into distribution is what allows experimentation and new voices to come into the industry. You think big players like DC and Marvel give poor support now to “fringe” titles like, say, Fallen Angel? If comics didn’t have the non-returnable base it has now, books like that wouldn’t even be green-lit in the first place! And that’s from the “big boys”. For the small press it would be much worse. The Direct Market ordering method allows access to the artistic marketplace in a way that no other media does!] Anyway, that’s a tangent, let’s get back to ordering process. Like I said, everything starts with the cycles. The first thing I do with each month’s order is I write in the cycle numbers for the books I have them for into the order booklet, without looking at Previews. This is a straight pragmatic pass where I’m assessing the current sales trend of a title without being influenced by any editorial hype. This will cover 90% of the output of the big four, and maybe a third of the “back” of Previews. Once the base numbers are in, I run through Previews, starting at the beginning, and begin to order the books I don’t have cycles of any kind for, as well as “tweaking” the base numbers as I read the catalog and see who is doing what in any specific issue. “Oooh! P. Craig Russell is illustrating Lucifer #50? Better add 20 copies to that one!” That kind of thing. Still, the operating credo is largely “better too little than too many”, because it’s astonishingly easy to be like a kid in a candy store and overorder wildly. Much much easier than you think. Also, you hope for reorder availability to cover your too-conservative mistakes. Believe me, even if you order to the hardcore bone you’re going to have some percentage of things left over. It is inevitable. During this second pass, I’m doing the most alchemical work of all: ordering brand new titles. While a certain percentage of new books are spin-offs from something or another enough so that you can conjure some sort of a base number, most really aren’t. How do you really order something like a Firestorm #1? Character hasn’t had a book in 14 years after all. At least there you can count on a certain base of “DC Fans” who will try out almost any revival (though that can be a pretty wide range – probably from 10-50 here at CE) – what do you do about something totally new like Monolith #1? You guess, and you try to guess conservatively without turning away customers. Like I said, ordering comics is an art – and you very quickly learn how to do it, or you very quickly go out of business. I like to think I’m pretty good at it, for my store, but I’m pretty sure if you transplanted me to another store, I’d have a rough couple of months because I wouldn’t understand the “shape” of their customer base. I take one last pass through Previews with my current subscription customers requests in hand. We do a store newsletter and sub form every month, and it gives me a decent barometer to compare against my initial instincts. “Huh. 14 people signed up for Firestorm #1, better bump that 5 copies. Ooh, only 1 marked Monolith #1, I should cut that by 2” All of these calculations, however, are done lightning-fast. They have to be. Previews is the size of a phone book, after all. 560 pages this month (not counting the separate 96 page Marvel catalog) and there are 4375 different line-items. Each item gets 5-10 seconds, maybe as much as 30 seconds if you’re really agonizing over it, but that’s it. And if you’re not in the front of the book, you get 30 words and a postage stamp to make your case. There’s 4374 other items vying for my attention! There’s a lot of things I look at in a new book – who is the creative team almost certainly being the primary one. If the answer is “Nobody yet” then you get a lot less rope. The next most important thing is that postage stamp of art (or a clean, well-designed ad. However, nothing will kill you faster than an amateurish ugly ad.) If that postage stamp looks nice you’ll often get an order, unless it’s your cover, and the cover artist is different than the interior artist. That gets you even less rope. Then we look at the concept. Any cliché of any kind gets you progressively less rope, as does boob-marketing. I’m also looking at price and format, and to a lesser but deadly serious manner, discount. Finally come “the intangibles” – past shipping patterns, value of the publisher or lack thereof (there are several publishers I simply won’t order rack copies from because I find their policies anti-retailer), that kind of thing -- places where I’m judging both intent and professionalism and ability to deliver. When ordering new unknown books I’m generally thinking in terms of 1-3 copies, if it makes it past all of the filters I listed above. Of course, books can grow wildly from that. We ordered 2 copies of Bone #1, and by its high point it grew past 60 copies. The “advantage” that a Marvel or a DC or an Image brings to things is that their “initial base” is generally higher than another publisher – though, it can drop precipitously to below an equivalent small press book. For example, I don’t think there’s a Marvel book that I’d order the first issue below 8 copies. 5 for DC, and 1 for Image. That sounds like chump change, yes – but it is important to note that a “guarantee” of 1 copy for an Image book is way better than the “base” of zero copies for the same book without an “I” on the cover. Of course, 2 years ago that Image base was probably 3 copies, so not all is well in Mudville. On the other hand, the potential “top” of the orders is completely the same for a title, regardless of publisher. I mentioned Bone a few paragraphs back which hit a high point equivalent to our Uncanny X-Men sales, and we’ve ordered the new Eightball at 125 copies which is within spitting distance to the biggest corporate hits like Identity Crisis #1. Comics and creators not from the front of the catalog often start from a lower base, but they can (and do!) consistently get as high or higher than even the biggest “big 4” comic. That’s
really the process in a nutshell. I hope it gave a little clarity
into the thinking and challenges of at least one retailer. ******* 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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By
Brian Hibbs
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