I will admit that I chuckled when I read the fine print on Image’s current Comixology sale.
“Excludes titles released after 2/10/18.”
I don’t know if that’s a dig at Marvel’s new releases being offered for 99¢ (and we still don’t know exactly who initiated that promotion), but after the last week I’m sure a few people will take it that way.
But this sale does raise a couple of questions in the current landscape:
- Should publishers attempt to respect an informally agreed upon period of time before deep discounting (digital or otherwise)?
- After so many 99¢ tpbs being thrown at the consumer in the last couple months, what kind of a discount does it take to get attention? Two months ago, a 60% off sale would sound like extreme discounting. Today? It’s not as eye-catching.
And for you consumers, that’s 60% off the already marked down price. I put Black Magic Vol. 1 into my cart and added the code. The price went down to $2.40. That’s not quite 99¢, but that’s still dirt cheap for a tpb.
Remember, when extreme discounting starts, it pays for everyone – consumer, retailer and publisher alike – to start watching the prices and see what sticks.
Want to learn more about how comics publishing and digital comics work? Try Todd’s book, Economics of Digital Comics
That date limit isn’t anything new, whenever Image (or Boom and other pubs) run one of these promocode sales, there’s always a bit of text that says the code/sale only applies to.
Exactly as jazzy stated. If anything it’s news because the exclusion only goes back two months. From recall, I feel like it was previously six months and earlier.
PS. Comic retailers can suck an egg. InStockTrades and DCBS are more of a threat to them than digital.
Autocorrect on mazzm to jazzy. Lol
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