I Slept Better Last Night… Sort Of

I apologize for not writing yesterday's question with more clarity, although I was still surprised that no one took into direct account the majority of the phrasing around which the question was built -- the fact that sales of comic books in the DM seem to have gone down despite there being a lot more comic shops of the type that we've always been told were keys to selling such comics. I know alt-comics are a tough sell in general, but I'm speaking about a very specific phenomenon. If 15 great comic book shops could once upon a time sell 80 percent of 1500 comic books, why can 40 great comic book shops only sell 80 percent of 800? Something doesn't add up.

Yes, it's just as difficult as ever to convince devoted superhero comics fans to buy alternative comics at comic book shops. It's also clear that comics in book format sell a lot of copies through bookstores -- Brian Hibbs tosses out Bookscan figures that alternative comics publishers have vehemently and repeatedly denied come anywhere close to telling the full story when it comes to their bookstore sales, and unless these cash-strapped operations are in the habit of paying extra royalties as a cover-up to win some nerd board battle, I believe them, not Bookscan. I also give credence to a lot of the general factors readers cited about a loss of interest in art-comics comic books -- diffusion, an interest in trades over comics, alternative avenues for buying such comics, a shift in who is doing such comics, the lack of a critical mass of alternative comics of the kind that draw people into a store on a regular basis.

What makes me wonder if it's something deeper than an accretion of minute changes in customer behavior and publishing strategy is the kind of thing that nobody really likes to talk about because it's sort of rude. But here goes. The fact that so many trades have sold so many copies in bookstores comes after a period where the conventional wisdom in the Direct Market was that these books simply wouldn't sell because there was no audience for them. Not no audience among my customers; no audience, period. Could it be that comics retailers -- the people who should be selling the most comics in any format but no longer do so for certain key publishers and entire categories of comics -- are underestimating the potential for alternative comic books as well? If retailers are willing to sign their names to a sheet of paper in attempt to "recover" one or two "lost" sales, why isn't there a wider effort to boost sales of a neglected category that could generate new-found sales, if only one or two at a time, in a category that the DM served to a much more effective degree book by book at one time in their history? And maybe the biggest question of them all: are comics publishers and retailers jointly moving away from a traditionally unique form of publication and purchase that might serve to distinguish them in a field of publishers and outlets devoted to the book format?

I see many more sleepless nights ahead.
 
posted 9:25 am PST | Permalink
 

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