Looking at more news on today’s sales figures, including this Tilting at Windmills article (via The Beat blog), I discovered that Vertigo’s sales have dropped considerably in the past three years. The observation that the editors of this line ended u…

Yeah, but you’re assuming that MOST customers will buy the same book, and that’s not really a supportable assumption.

>> If the total regular readership of pamphlet comics is in the area of a million as Brian suggests, then the top-selling comics with mainstream appeal like “Civil War” or “Sandman” or “Buffy” should sell more than 100K or 200K, yes? >>

Not necessarily, no.

The movie audience is way larger than the attendance of the top hits. The TV audience is way larger than the audience for the top shows. And so on through books, magazines and more. There’s no reason to assume comics are unusual in that respect, and that the people out there buying NARUTO and SANDMAN are FABLES and ACME NOVELTY LIBRARY are predominantly also buying WORLD WAR HULK.

>> Or maybe not, but the fact that no comic can ever break that mark is impressive to me>>

Comics have broken that mark before and will doubtless do so again. But the aggregate comics-buying audience simply isn’t all (or event mostly) made up of people who want to read a BUFFY comic any more than the aggregate book-buying audience are mostly out this week buying PLAYING FOR PIZZA by John Grisham (to pick the current NYT bestseller).

Audiences just aren’t that monolithic in their tastes.

kdb

Well, I was estimating UP from those top-selling numbers, since it’s clear that not every single customer will ever buy the same book.

My point is more along the lines of some mathematical probability (which I’m crap at by the way!). If the total regular readership of pamphlet comics is in the area of a million as Brian suggests, then the top-selling comics with mainstream appeal like “Civil War” or “Sandman” or “Buffy” should sell more than 100K or 200K, yes?

Or maybe not, but the fact that no comic can ever break that mark is impressive to me and I think it says something about the size of that audience — an audience that needs serving with the same focus and attention it is now, but not at the expense of customers outside the DM.

You can be replaced, sir.

By a small, underinflated bladder stapled to a long but splintery stick.

Watch how you go.

kdb

Of course not.

Because Stephen King fans have no taste.

HA HA HA Ha Ha Ha ha ha eugh.

Sorry.

“It seems to me we’re zeroing in on something: This is a weird area where the interests of the retailer and the interests of the reader don’t necessarily match up. (There aren’t really all that many in this field.) Of course the retailer wants time to sell through single issues before a trade comes out; and of course a reader who prefers the trade paperback format wants that book to come out as soon as possible. Both parties (rightly) express their preferences and concerns to the publisher, and the publisher has to balance out the needs of each as they apply to each specific project.”

I’m not sure how true that is. I mean, sure, the retailer doesn’t want to be left holding the bag; then again, the retailer gets to sell a copy of Watchmen a week. And a bloody great Absolute Sandman. And so on.

If Brian’s right, and there are significant cash flow problems associated with the death of pamphlets, then the direct market’s just going to die, and that’s that.

But delaying the trade just means putting off the day you’ll get my money. And I’m not sure how that helps the cash flow any.

“I only used Vertigo as an example because they’re the most visible publisher with an (albeit unstated) ‘We WILL do a TP’ process.”

Unstated because it’s not true. TPs of “The Dreaming” just stopped, and there is still no trade of “The Girl Who Would Be Death.” I’m sure there are others that have fallen through the cracks.

No, it doesn’t. That assumes that the entire audience is all interested enough in the same thing to buy whatever the top-selling book is.

But there’s a large section of the audience that isn’t going to buy a mainstream superhero event, whatever it is, just as there’s a large segment that isn’t going to buy PERSEPOLIS, regardless of how it does beyond the Direct Market.

And then there’s people like me, who buy a ton of superhero stuff, but are nonetheless more likely to buy PERSEPOLIS than CIVIL WAR.

There’s a huge audience out there for SANDMAN. They don’t all buy WORLD WAR HULK, so they’re not a subset of the WWH audience. There’s some overlap, but not to the point that you can assume the entire market is about the size of the audience for the bestselling books.

It works that way in other bookstores, too. The audience for Stephen King is not a subset of the audience for Christian self-help books, and vice versa. And the overlap of either of those groups with the audience for cookbooks will not be a majority, either.

kdb

“Today, I’d say something approaching half of my “book” sales are to people who come into a DM once a year or less. That’s a guess, however, I haven’t done any rigorous analysis of it!”

For the other half, the regular customers, I wonder if they have “rules” about trades vs. floppies.

“There HAVE to be way more than 300k DM customers. In my estimation, even something as widely popular as CIVIL WAR only sold to a small percentage (10-25%-ish) of the DM readership; I’d put the DM client base at no less than a million readers, personally.”

Yes! Now we’re talking turkey. See, my thinking on the total readership was that if sales on something like “Civil War” represented a book that almost all regular customers wanted to buy, and it sold 200,000, than estimating up to 300,000 is more than fair (since it’s silly to think that EVERY comic book fan bought “Civil War”).

I’m still guessing, just like you are, but if no comic ever breaks that sales point then the ceiling has to be hovering around there. “Regular books” have sales ceilings as well, which is what makes something like “Harry Potter” so impressive (since those books MUST be bringing in people that don’t regularly visit book stores).

Lest it seem like thread drift, I should say that my reason for lingering on this point is that I feel the Direct Market, though vital and necessary, is but a small percentage of the potential customers comics COULD be reaching, and that floppy buyers may represent a small percentage of the customers comics are ALREADY reaching.

“Jesse, I’m glad to see the lesson of Disney Adventures have been impressed on another generation. If I’m reading your posts correctly, the comics-only specials also sold around 100Km meaning they would have charted well on the periodical lists.”

Yes — many lessons to be gleaned from that, indeed! “Comic Zone” (the comics-only quarterly) actually sold much more than that — the average was around 200,000, give or take 20,000. Regular “Disney Adventures,” which had a comics section, ranged between 100K and 200K. If our comics were ballyhooed on the cover than sales went up, as they did if Zac Effron or Johnny Depp were on the cover (yes — 75% of the readership were girls!). And none of that includes the 1.3 million subscribers.

“Of course that front of the store pocket was very expensive. I’m not sure that this can be applied to any other mags — do Archie’s digests ever have postal circ figures?”

Yeah, they must — all subscription magazines have to have a Statement of Ownership once a year. I think they also lump all the titles under one code so you can’t distinguish between sales of “Betty and Veronica” or “Jughead.” Maybe if Fred Mausser is reading this he can chime in!

But I don’t think the pockets themselves are the whole of the point. Granted, this certainly provides an “impulse buy” boost to sales, but the point is that the comics are there — right out in the open, where regular people shop. They can be on the mainline newsstands, spinner racks, whatever.

“My gut level feeling is that a digest of kid friendly Spider-man or Batman comics racked next to the candy bars and recipe books would sell well”

That’s been my secret wish for many years now! ;) I can’t think of anything else that would make more of an immediate, positive impact on the comics business.

Of course. But there’s a large gulf between “imprints mean nothing,” which was the original claim, and “imprints aren’t a guarantee.”

The usefulness of imprints can comfortably fall between the two, with varying results depending on how strong the imprint identity is, and how well it matches a reader’s tastes.

kdb

There was a point, roughly 5 years ago or so, where yeah, that was pretty much true — “trade waiting” in a phenomenon of the last half decade, really.

Today, I’d say something approaching half of my “book” sales are to people who come into a DM once a year or less. That’s a guess, however, I haven’t done any rigorous analysis of it!

(and half of my sales in general are books — thus about a quarter of my sales are from “civilians”)

“I always assumed that the same 300,000 or so (high estimate!) DM customers throughout the country were accounting for all sales, regardless of format, every month.”

There HAVE to be way more than 300k DM customers. In my estimation, even something as widely popular as CIVIL WAR only sold to a small percentage (10-25%-ish) of the DM readership; I’d put the DM client base at no less than a million readers, personally.

-B