(Comics Retailing) Last week I engaged in an online exchange of views with San Francisco retailer Brian Hibbs and Dark Horse Comics' retailer service manager Jeff Macey, on the relative merits of the Direct Market -- the distribution network which services comic-book shops in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, in one permutation or another -- versus the bookstore market, which has been growing increasingly friendly towards graphic novels. The exchange provoked a fair amount of reader mail, and I thought I'd share some of it with you. I pretty much exhausted what I had to say in my essay, so rather than offering further commentary I'll instead be letting my correspondents have the last word.
First and foremost, of course, is Brian Hibbs himself, who responds:
"I wrote this after part two, but I thought I should wait until you wrapped up before I actually sent it in. Really, after reading Macey's piece, I should just wad this up and say 'Yah, what he said', but I wrote it, so here it is.
"It strikes me that we're like two blind men trying to describe an elephant -- we're looking at discrete parts of the data set we hold and drawing out some wildly different conclusions therefrom.
The place I feel like I need to 'correct' you the most is from taking Diamond figures as indicative as anything other than what they are presented as -- a ranked look within a narrow subset of figures representing 'the top' of sales for a specific month.... and insofar as the change to 'actual sales' went, it is, quite often, a look based upon far less than a full 30 day period.
"(I would guess, for example, that ENDLESS NIGHTS would have had a number immediately, say, 6-10% higher had Diamond been reporting 'first 30 days of sales' rather than what it sold from 9/17 [release] to 9/30 [end of period] -- 13 days)
"What this means is that it is theoretically possible that, to pick one example, that BLANKETS, while only 'initialling' 1862 copies in July, could have sold on reorder anything up to 1411 copies in August, and 1519 copies in Septemeber and been PURELY INVISIBLE ON DIAMOND'S CHARTS by being book #51. Anything up to 2930 copies, or, that is, 150% of initials, could have been sold by Diamond and you and I would never ever know it. Only Staros and Diamond would know.
"Now, do I think it's likely that this is the actual circumstance in BLANKETS case? Nah, not really -- but the point is that it could be, and we'd never ever know because Diamond only tracks 50 items a month, and it is virtually inevitible that 'old' books will never show because we're not seeing the aggregation of sales.
"Further, basing any and all DM analysis purely on Diamond's charts ignores the fact that a substantial amount of 'independent' and/or 'art' books just AREN'T sold by Diamond into the DM. While Diamond does and almost certainly always will have the leg up on those initial orders, I have to beleive that most of the reorder volume is flowing through Cold Cut or Last Gasp or FMI. Or, heck, direct from the publishers themselves.
"The simple fact is that Diamond's discounts are generally 5-10% worse for most non-brokered publishers, and that's not even counting the 3% 'reorder fee' they assess -- as a very general rule those stores which are selling the overwhelming majority of 'indy' books are smart enough to not buy them on reorder through Diamond.
"Case in point: I've sold nearly 700% more copies of BLANKETS via reorders from Cold Cut and Last Gasp as I initialed from Diamond in the first place.
"I agree that the convential wisdom has never really been challenged that 10% of the stores sell 90% of the comics in the Direct Market -- I think we can take this as gospel. But, and maybe I'm insane here, but I see this as a huge ray of hope rather than a horrific hand-wringing affair. Why? Because it's much easier to encourage or grow or birth 'Good Direct Market Store #251' than it is to get an equivalant presence into a book store where they largely don't understand the product and have no real interest in moving anything but the top.
"This may well be a glass half-full/half-empty kind of split on our parts, though.
"My basic belief is that if you walk into a random comic book store and a random prose book store and you asked them for the same random 'art comic' title... well, you're probably going to get blank stares from both, actually. But, when you DO get the hit, you're far Far FAR more likely to get it from the specialist, rather than the generalist.
"Yes, sure, it may be easier to find a copy of MAUS or ENDLESS NIGHTS or GHOST WORLD at the generalist because there are more generalist bookstores than speciality comic stores, but once you pull out of the 'household name' type titles that situation rapidly reverses. How could it not? If anything, the large corporate bookstore chains are far FAR more profit-per-square-foot oriented than even the most avarice-driven comic shops. They're only going to sell that which SELLS, whereas our 'good 10%' are going to stock what's good for the medium (as it were... I'm really not trying to pat us on the back, man!) itself.
"There's one other bit of 'art comics' publishing that we really should face: a lot of it simply doesn't sell. I don't mean that in the general fist-shaking 'If Only The Man Wouldn't Put Us Down!' kind of way, but in the 'No, actually, there's a terribly small audience for this, and that isn't related to distribution' sense.
"Without naming names and whatnot, there's clearly a large amount of material that even publishers don't beleive will do more than break-even five-years-from-now. I mean, you work for FBI, Dirk, you MUST know that!
"One point I'm willing to concede is that on those rare occassions that a book 'hits' like GHOST WORLD, the 'book' market will almost certainly sell more of them during it's window of 'hotness' -- one'd have to be a fool to think otherwise. Hell, I saw GHOST WORLD in an airport book store! But I'd absolutely put same-store average sales of the DM up against the same for the book market any day. I suspect my 500 aggregate copies is on the lower end of the scale amongst the 'good 10%' -- Comic Relief probably doubled or trebeled that, and Jim Hanley's Universe doubled it again... I doubt many individual B&N or Border's locations did sales on that level.
"And while the pattern is strongly skewed in the bookstores direction for GHOST WORLD, I suspect you could find any number of titles where it skews quite the opposite direction just by going over to the FBI warehouse, Dirk!
"I'll be convinced that book stores are the grail for comics when the split is 80:20 against the DM for the entirety of a publisher's backlist -- and even that might be too low. Book stores outnumber comic shops something like 14:1. They outnumber the 'good 10%' at 140:1!! Those kind of numbers against us, and we still sold 1/4 of the copies of GHOST WORLD on the market during the film's release? And you don't think this is a powerful economic engine?
"My point is and has been this: pound-for-pound a specialty Direct Market comic retailer is infinitely more valuable than virtually any individual bookstore to both publisher and creator. I think the wisest long-term course is to grow and expand the strongest stores -- that is the Direct Market. Even setting aside the less-favorable terms (returnability), the DM are taste-makers, crucial early advocates, and a firm sale. The DM is committed, and will still be here in five years if the book markets proves to be a fad again (like it did during the post-MAUS phase), or if the steam runs out of the manga movement, or manga totally and completely gluts itself, like it looks like it is going to.
"(The old rule applies here, I think: when you hear that DC is jumping on a bandwagon, that's about the time to jump off because it's played out.)
"Again, for every 'Bookstore success' you can rightly point to, it's pretty easy to find a hundred? a Thousand? titles where the DM is not only the only real sales venue, but it likely to stay that way until the end of time."
An argument used by Jeff Macey in his email produced the following response by Fantagraphics' marketing director, Eric Reynolds:
"I'd be surprised if alternative musicians or film makers are arguing for greater power to be placed in the hands of the big box retail outlets, and I'm surprised that you (as a voice for greater diversity in our medium) are arguing for the same. Most non-wealthy musicians and authors would beg for a system of non-returnable sales to independent retailers."
"I have to comment on the above statement from Jeff Macey and your ongoing dialogue with Hibbs. I think Hibbs and Macey make very good arguments for why we would love to see continued growth and health for the direct market. But the above statement is where things take a left turn, because issues of returnability aside, it implies that one's only options are soulless, corporate 'big box' retail outlets in the book market (i.e., chains) or 'independent retailers' in the direct market, the further implication being that comic shop retailers are the moral choice, vis a vis their 'independence'. Talk about stacking the deck! This is hogwash, the book market includes a huge infrastructure of booksellers that are every bit as independent as the direct market, and to imply that one has our best interests at heart more than the other is just hooey. The book market isn't better than the direct market, and vice-versa.
"What the future of quality comics all boils down to are progressive retailers in BOTH markets: that's what we need more of. Fantagraphics NEEDS the book market AND the direct market. Period. And there's no need for them to be at odds with each other. The cherry picking that Hibbs describes I would argue is a good thing, because for every Ghost World sold to a new graphic novel reader in Barnes & Noble, there's a chance that it will drive he or she to Comix Experience when they want to buy more of Clowes' books. It would have taken us 20 years to sell 100K Ghost Worlds in the direct market. By selling that many in the book trade, how many consumers have we funnelled into direct market as they sought out more Clowes books? We may not have sold as many Velvet Gloves to the book trade as Ghost World, but Velvet Glove does remain an extremely solid seller in the direct market and I would like to believe that we've created some new direct market customers through our book trade success.
"Basically, what comic books need are more booksellers who care about quality graphic novels, whether they buy from Diamond or Norton or Last Gasp or Cold Cut or whatever. The distribution channels a progressive bookseller chooses is his or her choice, and the lines are ever-blurring between what is a comic shop, book shop, pop culture shop, etc. There are many comic shops that have no alternative comics, just as there are many bookstores that do. Graphic novels like those published by Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly can sit rather naturally in a progressive, independent bookstore every bit as well as a progressive comic shop, just as they can look like fish out of water in a huge chain environment or a shitty, superhero-only comic shop.
"Non-returnability is a wonderful thing, but there are advantages to being able to sell to a market that's many times larger as well. Both are perfectly valid avenues. Any publisher not looking to make the best of both is foolish. Many of the more progressive comic book retailers that I know of, like say The Million Year Picnic or Meltdown Comics, have accounts with returnable book wholesalers like Ingram or Baker & Taylor, in addition to Diamond, because it makes sense, an they don't seem threatened by our book trade business because they know how to play to their strengths and know that for true afficianados of the form, they will ALWAYS offer a more appealing product line than their local indie bookstore or chain (I think Brian said as much himself).
"Basically, these endless 'either/or' debates about the direct market vs. the book trade are somewhat pointless."
Christopher Norris offers the following commentary:
"I keep following you more and more about the need to shift sequential art focus into more traditional book sales. I have been preaching what you have for the past 10 years of my life. From the need to put comics aimed at housewives and teen girls in grocery market isles to the fact every 4th book on the shelves at a book store needs to be a sequential story.
"I think it's funny that these people want to go ahead and kill something as it starts to crack the shell that confines it from within. It reminds me much of when MP3s were first starting to surface, and the record industry scoffed due to lack of power in machines to do anything more than decode a song and push it out into it's true form, and now 8 years later the same industry is scrambling to find anyway to destroy the beast they once had a chance to control in the very beginning.
" 'Only geeks will be talking MP3s in the years to come' are the words that ring through my as I look back.
"The direct market has to realize that the muscle machines known as the super chains are concerned about one thing: Money. If there is any money to be made in selling graphic novels, then those bookstores will be doing it. That is why the Barnes and Nobles and Books a Million(s) here in backwards, hick of a town of Montgomery, Alabama have a majority of the trades for Sandman, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, Akira and many other great books on their shelves. They might not have all of them at one time, but that is a beauty of marketting and making sure a person will return within the next few weeks.
"Also they have tons of manga collections on the shelves.
"Here is the kicker, these books move. Maybe not in lightning speed, but they do move, and yes, here in little Montgomery, Alabama.
"We have two direct market stores. Capitol City Comics Shop, and Comics! and Cards! Trading Post. Both do respectable business, but the three major bookstores, Two BAMs and one BaNs, sell these books to a city of 300,000+ people, and an area of maybe 750,000, which overall has a population of 50% in poverty.
"Plus, to have those books move is amazing since this is an overly ultra conservative town, where Oprah books, Tom Clancey and Bibles are the top sellers by far. So for these stores, on top of the direct market stores to sell the books on a regular basis is purely amazing.
"Then to realize, that these stores have the power to undercut even Diamond on the sheer volume they move, it's a scary thought.
"To think, in backwards ol'Montgomery that book stores that have problems moving Irving Welsh and Chuck Paliniuk books at times have entire sections devoted to graphic novels and manga books, maybe two three shelves max, is an amazing thing.
"I honestly get excited to think the market drowning monster known as Diamond Distribution might feel some push from the major retailers who are selling indie books directly and finally be force to play fair game, or face the fact that these super retailers can crush them with their buying power.
"The most important thing is, that this is the beginning of selling comics, as books. Something that has been an issue for the past 25+ years. Quite a few of my friends use to scoff at comics as something for geeks and horney boys, but now, after reading League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen, Sandman and even Small Stories from Derek Kirk Kim, they look at my paintings and the comics I do in the same light, and actually call my comic work that I have been trying to work on for the past 5 years, art.
"But they still have their biases towards the men in tights, the juggernauts in amazing stretched jeans, and fems with breast of pure magic. But, they now see it as more literary...
"And that, is saving the medium as an art form. What these other jokers preach is saving SUPER HEROES, their Alan Scotts, their Bruce Waynes, their Peter Parkers. They have confused their love of super heroes for the medium that drives their heroes. That, there is the problem. For all I can say, the Direct Market can keep them super heroes. But let the book stores sell the sequential works of art."
Our next correspondent signs himself "concerned recovering fanboy", and writes as follows:
"I manage the inventory at one of the major chain bookstores. Not the whole chain, just one small store. I also have friends who own and or work at comic book shops so I frequent at least five different comic book shops in the Atlanta, GA area if not weekly, at least monthly. (There are at least seven decent shops in the area and another five or six I don't bother with.) The store I'm a manager at is a small one. Not a whole lot bigger than the average mall bookstore. I guarantee, right now, there is more manga, independent and mainstream graphic novels in my store than in any of the comic book shops except for one. (Oxford comics in Atlanta is a pretty good store. They have us beat.) Kids buy the stuff, adults buy the stuff. It does pretty well. And the monthlies? I've got them too. Two days after the comic shops and guess what, I get to return what does not sell.
"We sell a lot of manga. A ton. Marvel and DC are not even close. The kids love it. Marvel does not have a clue. They want to make manga in color. The kids don't care about color. They want real black and white manga. We sell more Love Hina and Mars to little girls than we sell Marvel's and DC's entire product line combined.
"The most beautiful thing about it all is this, Diamond never sees a penny. We don't get anything from them, never will. Our monthly comics don't even come from Diamond. Diamond's sales charts are nonsense. Its just a list of which comics suckered the poor comic shop owners that week. Its just a list of who got stuck with what book that may or may not sell. I feel sorry for the comic shop owner but they let it happen. They could order from Ingram, Baker and Taylor, anyone they want but they hitched their wagon to Diamond and Marvel and DC are taking them for everything they are worth. All to have the comics on Wednesday. I'll tell you what, they sell just the same on Friday and the little girls that are buying manga faster than I can put it on the shelf? They don't even know what a comic book shop is.
"I could be wrong. I don't know what the company's numbers are like. All I know is what I see in my store and what I see in the comic shops around Atlanta. But the way I see it, a retailer, of any size, specialty shop or chain bookstore, would have to be a fool to buy from Diamond. When you sign on to deal with companies you know are going to screw you, don't cry when you get screwed. And most of these comic book shops don't bother to carry anything but the superhero crap. If I want a Top Shelf or Fantagraphic book, I never bother to visit a comic book shop (well, maybe Oxford) I know the chain bookstores will either have it or order it for me. They also tend to have this other thing the comic shops don't participate in, customer service.
"I know I'm being harsh on the small comic book retailer but its out of love. I want them to survive but tell me this, in what other business would a small mom and pop retailer allow one distributor and two publishers to dictate their entire business?
"Anyway, like I said, I'm just one guy in one town. I don't have any numbers or stats. Just what I see happening."
Our next corespondent writes:
"Here in Roanoke, I go to both the indie bookseller and the comics shop down the street from my house. Comics (& that term includes graphic novels) make up about a fifth of my reading, if you count periodicals. Most prose & non-fiction comes from the library.
"I tend to get Fantagraphics, newspaper comics collections (ie the new Boondocks treasury) & straight-up alt-comix from the bookstore, usually because they have it in stock (put in the 'Loose Cannons' section, along with books by Eric Schlosser, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and non-fiction about non-mainstream topics). I go to the comics shop for manga, the occasional superhero book, alt-comics single issues (i.e. Rubber Necker) and borderline mainstream (Oni Press), both because they often have that stuff in stock but also because I feel more comfortable ordering there.
"For some reason I would never order Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly material from the comics shop, and on the flipside would never order Oni, Marvel or Vertigo from the bookstore. I can't explain this but it's firmly entrenched in my norms.
"The two exceptions to all of this are Mad and Shonen Jump, which I get from the grocery store and budget in with my groceries.
"Just one perspective. Hope it helps."
Finally, my essay included some dismissive comments on the miserable pickings for comics shops in my native Phoenix, Arizona, including the following:
"(When I first heard that All About Books and Comics had won the retailer's Eisner Award this year, I called around to various friends back in the old town and asked if the shop had undergone some kind of rennovation after I'd left; they informed me that it had not, and we sat on the phone for a while and wondered at the inexplicable nature of the selection. Goddamn, what a mediocre fucking comics shop.)"
This statement compelled Phil Mateer to write:
"OK, leaping to the defense of All About here...
"I'm biased, because I've worked there part-time since 1988, but I've also been a full-time college professor since 1989, so I know something about empirical evidence. I went to the store about an hour ago, and here's what I found:
"A few steps inside the front door, on the 'Alternative/Good Stuff' rack, were these trades/graphic novels/whatever:
"Jetcat Clubhouse, Grrl Scouts, Blue Monday, Stray Bullets, Subway Series, Can of Worms, Days Like This, The Iron Wagon, Fantastic Butterflies, Goodbye Chunky Rice, Blankets, Palookaville, Louis Riel, Barry Ween, My Monkey's Name is Jennifer, Three Fingers, Electric Girl, Blab #13, Rebel Visions.
"Further into the store, on a set of shelves labeled 'Recommended Reading', were, among others:
"Maus, King Vol. 3, Monkey vs Robot, Pop Gun War, Bone, Whoa Nellie, Goldfish, From Hell.
"And, even further back, on a big bookshelf with hardcovers, misc. trades, etc., were Quimby the Mouse, Jimmy Corrigan, Stuck Rubber Baby, Krazy and Ignatz, and various things by Caniff, Foster, Hogarth, Gaiman and Scott McCloud. Mind you, that's just the stuff I scribbled down -- there were others, and none of that is counting the regular independent comics racks, with recent issues of the various small-press 32-page pamphlets, or the regular trade pb racks, or all the back issues in, well, the back -- or the kids' section up front, with Archie/Disney/Amelia Rules/Asterix and lots of cheap older kids' stuff, OR the manga section with all the manga trades, etc.
"The store is spacious, well-lit, clean, has lots of parking, has a significant percentage of kids and female customers, tries to carry
every new comic published, has, literally, a million back issues, does community outreach to libraries and schools, and has enough special events each year to get favorable mentions of comics into the evening news on TV and radio -- and it's been doing all of that under the same ownership for over 25 years. Maybe all of that was what the Eisner committee was basing its decision on.
"I mean, geez, Dirk, I'm sorry Phoenix didn't work out for you, but does 'mediocre fucking comics shop' really fit? Maybe it wasn't as bad as you thought? The only thing I can figure is that you were going to one of the branch stores that All About had for a while -- which were a lot smaller and nowhere near as well stocked -- but the main store, in central Phoenix, has always been about selection. Even ten years ago, it would have been easy to get Hate, Love and Rockets, American Splendor, Eightball, etc. If you wanted 'good stuff', it was there.
"Now, it is true that there's a ton of superhero stuff there too -- and that a lot of the non-genre books aren't stocked in depth; the
store's pattern with, say, Blankets would be to order two, sell them, order two more, sell them, etc. That tries to keep everything in stock, but means you're sometimes out of things, too -- someone last weekend wanted some of the Love and Rockets trades, and I was startled to find we only had #15; the others had sold. We did have about 30 of the original mags, so he was able to get some things he wanted, but now the store needs to back-order lots of Los Bros Hernandez. That's not quite the Brian Hibbs model (what I also think of as the Dave Sim model, from a decade ago), where you have a really cool independent bookstore with 10-20 copies each of /everything/ ever done by Los Bros., Seth, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco, etc., all on permanent display.
"The disadvantage of that model, though, is that you have so much income tied up in recent inventory that there's little left for anything else. That's not the store's business model. In fact, the model is one that I don't often see mentioned in discussions of How to Survive in the Comics Retailer Market -- but it used to be the most common one: sell comics both as new issues and as collectibles, with a significant percentage of sales being back-issue sales of comics from the '70s or earlier. Retailers like Hibbs have moved almost completely away from that (freeing up money for all the new graphic novels and so on), but there are advantages to the more traditional way, too. First, you can make a lot of money selling older comics too, and that money can be
applied to purchases of new stuff. Second, comics aren't just about the new stuff -- selling Dell Westerns, or issues by Barks or John Stanley, or even copies of Nexus or Neil The Horse or Steve Englehart/Gene Colan Dr. Strange -- to name a few random things from the last couple of weeks -- helps to connect us all to the long strange history of comics, and educate customers about the possibilities of the medium just as much as selling the new Dan Clowes does.
"It's hard to be both types of retailer -- many dealers have gone the Hibbs way, just to new issues, or the reverse, where they stop carrying new books altogether and just concentrate on the older stuff. All About's managed to walk that tightrope for a long time, successfully, and while it wouldn't work for everyone it represents a reasonable and important alternative.
"Sorry to rant on so much about your rant (although I'm sure you're used to it), but reading your weblog has become part of my daily routine for awhile, and getting a place I know fondly dismissed in such an offhand way seemed both unfair and untrue. I don't think All About's the problem; if anything, it represents one possible solution."
Thanks to everyone who wrote in.
