Retailing & Marketing

A few months ago, as I was running a deposit to the bank, I ran into the store’s landlord at the terminal next to mine. As we both waited on our tellers to process...

  Force Friday is here! A brand new holiday established to make people line up and buy toys.  If you can find one, Hasbro's magnetic BB-8 droid is probably the most desired. My inbox tells me that...

Greetings, sales charts fans! It's time once again to look at DC's sales figures. (Warning: This month's column contains a higher amount of ranting than usual...) July was not a good month, sales-wise, for DC Entertainment. Compared to June, the average sales per title dropped by over 8K, and they sold 300K fewer total units in the NA direct market, despite offering nine more titles. Sales were down across the board, in many cases significantly, except for one title: Batgirl. Why did things drop so significantly? Three main reasons:

We've already seen today that just jumping on a new, fresh direction isn't enough to make a sales success, but what about over at Marvel? As I've noted their whopping sales have been led by the astonishing success of their Star Wars comics, but variant covers are also strong in this one. Star Wars #1 had over 100 variants, for instance. The upcoming hip hop variant program wasn't just problematic from a creator standpoint, however, it's also set new levels of frustration for retailers who have to order high on other books just to be able to ORDER copies of the variants, as revealed on Reddit by retailer Calum Johnston and explained at the Outhouse. Apparently a frustrated retailers posted the above annotated order sheet for the variants, showing how high order would have to be.

Here's a story I never hoped to write: Bergen Street Comics, the lovely and much loved comics shop right up the street from Brooklyn's Barclay's Center is closing, according to a blog post by...

by Xavier Lancel Welcome to a new analysis of the Marvel sales. Reminder: I'm French, and that's why I'm talking funny. Please address your complaints to my French-people-are-never-happy country. Reminder: the sales data referenced below is  an...

Over the last year or so, there’s been an increasing amount of talk in creator circles about the low page rates being given out by independent publishers for some of the smaller books.  The...

We've quoted Blerdgurl (formerly Derpygurl) before on promoting at cons, and she has a new post out called 10 Ways to Promote Your Project for Free With Bloggers, Journalists and Podcasters with the subtext...

A little while back, Brian Hibbs wrote a piece involving the place of Kickstarters in the comics world that still seems to be making the rounds online.  It comes at it from the retailer...

And with another "where are we at now" the revamped Trouble with Comics (or "Middle Aged White (mostly) Men on Comics") looks at the state of the pamphlet, or periodical comic, as we like to call it here at Stately Beat Manner. The question, McLaughlin Group style, is

As I'm probably too fond of saying, each year's San Diego Comic-Con represents the end of comics' fiscal year, and we're now in a new cycle of sales, renewal and looking forward to the next thing. Although the con was not that memorable on its own, it did mark a new plateau in the direct sales era for comics penetration into the mass media, and for having a variety of voices and genres that the medium has probably has never been seen before. This situation, while far from ideal, still represents a dream come true for a lot of us who have been toiling in the comics industry for a while. I remember as if it were yesterday sitting in various comics industry think tanks in the 90s wondering WHAT could be done to expand the audience for comics, how to bring in genres that weren't superheroes, and how to overcome the tyranny of the "32 page pamphlet" as it was dubbed by either Kurt Busiek or Marv Wolfman, depending on who you ask. These tasks seemed daunting at the time, and it actually took 25 years to get to a place where it could be argued that its true, and everyone at those meetings is a certified old timer now.

David Harper of Sktchd is at it again with the survey! This time it's comics retailers. The respondent base is only 25, so a high margin of error, but it does provide a useful...