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Robert Boyd on Comics and Pay For Play
posted August 1, 2005
 

Robert Boyd
Via The Internet

Regarding co-op in bookstores, I have a lot of personal experience. You asked whether such a thing could work in comics stores, and I will answer yes because we've seen such things in comic stores. But it's harder to do with individual stores than with chains.

Heres how it works with a chain. You have a buyer at the chain who looks at your books and decides which ones to acquire for the store. He or she is making this decision based on the potential for sell-through. THere are a lot of marketing metrics that go into these decisions. For instance, some books may work in some stores but not all stores--for example, a Gary Panter book may sell only in stores where there is an identifiable "urban hipster/cutting edge artsy" clientele. Or another book my be OK for the kind of stores that sell-through almost everything they get (for instance, stores in busy shopping areas of New York or Chicago), but not in the stores where sell-through is generally slower. So the sell-in (the number of books taken by the buyer) is dependent on how many stores will carry the book and what the anticipated sell-thtough in each of those stores is. Obviously this is at best an educated guess, and buyers necessarily have to toss the dice when it comes to new authors or--a few years ago--new categories of books like graphic novels.

At this point, the buyer or a merchandising manager (or sometimes the seller) will talk about merchandising. The idea here is that certain placements in the store will cause a book to sell better. For instance, if your book is on the shelf face out, it will probably sell better than if it's spine out. If it's placed on a table in the front of the store, it will sell better than otherwise, etc. The difference in sell through based on different kinds of merchandising is quantifiable, and therefore can be sold. If you do a co-op deal like this, the buy-in will be greater.

But bookstores don't sell in-store merchandising for any book. They only want to sell merchandising to books that have potentially high sell-through. Because the fee they charge for the merchandising is 1) smaller than the value of the sell-through of that merchandising "space", and 2) deducted from what they pay the publisher, which is only for books sold. So they have to feel confident of the book's sales potential if they are willing to give prime retail space to it, even if they are being paid by the publisher.

In Barnes & Noble, Waldenbooks and Books-a-Million, publishers can build cardboard displays for books called "dumps". (For some reason, Borders doesn;t allow this.) These are, generally speaking, the largest merchandising co-op publishers can do.

Back in when graphic novels were being given a shelf or two in the sci-fi section, the biggest issue for graphic novel publishers was that bookstores simply could not display all the GNs being published. Tokyopop found this intolerable, because this was a market in which they were (quite rightly) depending on for their future success. They tried numerous strategies to increase their presence in bookstores, including selling GNs aimed at children (like Cardcaptor Sakura) to the childrens' books buyer and getting them shelved in the childrens' section. But their most successful strategy was selling in dumps.

This worked because it was sort of a conspiracy between TPop and the buyers. Buyers felt there was more of a market for GNs, but they weren't empowered to add more shelf-space for the category. Such a decision would have to come from higher up in management. But one way to convince management that GNs deserved greater shelfspace was to demonstrate high sell-through and high revenue. So putting in a dump for Tokyopop was a way to do this. It was a gamble on everyone's part, but it worked great.

The result has been that for manga (and for CrossGen while it was still around), dumps are a standard coop tool. It's a great merchandising tool for series books.

On the other hand, Pantheon tends to go with table displays--which show off a single book (I recently saw Ice Haven on a Borders table, and I assume it was co-op). DC often does table displays.

I don't see many GN publishers doing facings--usually the cheapest co-op. But given the thin spines of so many GNs, it would probably be a good idea.

Co-op really helps sell books, and it's pretty much available to any publisher. You don't have to pay the cash up front, so it's different from payola. Obviously there is risk involved. Because the sell-ins are greater, the risk of returns are greater. (Again, see CrossGen...) But that's the kind of risk you need to take if your intent is to grow your publishing business. That's what Tokyopop did, and it worked.

Now as far as comic stores go, facings and table top co-ops are impractical because every comic store is different. But publishers have sold in dumps. Usually the store gets the merchandise at their usual cost, but get the dump for free. From the comic store's standpoint, they're getting a free (though temporary) fixture in exchange for buying in more than usual of a given product. The publisher may offer some points off the discount as well to entice the store.

The calculus is different for a comic store, which is buying the stuff outright. And for the publisher, it usually involves a lot of getting on the phone and selling to individual stores--a LOT more labor intensive than selling to B&N or Waldenbooks. Still, I've sold a few hundred dumps to comic stores over the years.