Blog @ Canadian Geek

Behind The Counter #199 - Small Press Issues

Posted on 2008 under Behind the Counter

There’s been recent, excellent discussion on the CG forum regarding ways to improve the industry, specifically the quality of material being produced by it. A call for extablished, high profile creators to leave the mainstream and focus on creator-owned projects is a noble one and if a balance could be achieved that allowed the sales for ALL the titles to sustainable, I would be all for it. As it stands right now, the market is overstaurated with mainstream and indie works and the buying public just isn’t, well, buying all of it.

Today’s comic market has never been broader or more accessible for creators of all levels. The publishing opportunites though small press and online are huge and everyone can get their feet wet somewhere, gaining exposure and potential partnership arrangements with many different companies. But the biggest problem in the end isn’t having the opportunity to create material or even publish material, it’s the selling of that material is where just about everyone falls short.

I’ve touched on this in the past (and next column I plan to recap all the articles to date for quick reference) but comics are SOLD to comic stores by publishers, so when you see sales figures, that’s what we bought to sell to you. Sales to actual consumers tend to be lower as things like variants and long-range forecasting force retailers to order more product than they can initially sell. The hope is that the product will sell over the course of several weeks to months but in many cases, there are long boxes in back rooms packed with extra copies of books ordered just to get that 1-in-75 variant.

And while the frontline retailer has the self-interest to sell as many of those comics as possible to keep his cash flow intact, what are the publishers doing to support them? Very little, that’s what. Advertising in the comic industry is dirty word (along with continutnity, affordability, punctuality and a few others) and primarily because it is expensive and the majority of publishers are pretty small.

However, there are more than a few things these small press peoples can do to help and I’m frequently surprised but the silly mistakes that these publishers make while trying to sell comics to retailers. In the August 2008 Previews catalogue, there are 2 bone-head errors that, for us, broke the deal when I was looking to order product.

The first is from Radical Publishing, an upstart company producing some pretty slick books of good quality (creator wise) and had an excellent initial promotional push, offering a sampler book on FCBD before they launched and followed that with $1 first issues. Unfortuately, this month they were offering their newest book called City of Dust and it comes with 5 different covers that, while available individually for order, they forgot to lable the pictures of the covers with their respective creators. So how do I know which cover is the Arthur Suydam cover, they one that will sell the best for us? I don’t. And what happened? I decided not to order any. Sorry Radical but my time is valuable and I can go hunting for things tlike that.

The next company did somthing that was so close to being great it’s that much more disappointing that it failed. Yen Press, a manga publisher, has a rating system to advise people of the content of their books. That’s awesome and very helpful. What’s even better is that they publish this information in the Previews catalogue at the beginning of their section. The short fall comes into play when they forget to apply those labels to the descriptions of their books. Why go to the trouble of telling me you have a rating system if you don’t give me the ratings for your books in advance? Since I’m looking to purchase specific types of books for the store I can’t order any of these books since I can’t tell whom they are appropriate for.

Now, I’m not refusing to order the books out of spite but when I have to pick out of 500 plus titles each month, I have to do so quickly and effeciently and if a publisher doesn’t give me all or the necessary inforamtion I need for their product, I have to move on. And these things are simple little things that every small press publisher needs to do. If you want your books to sell, make 100% sure you give retailers everything they need to know. And after that, give them more. Make posters or bookmarks (I can never keep bookmarks in stock people), do cheap promotion issues, send me an email with a link to promo pages on the web; just do something other than complain about how no one’s buying the book.

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Behind The Counter #199 - Small Press Issues

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