The DM’s weird like that

In the past couple of years we’ve done special issues of AG; 16-paged comics (plus another 16 pages of ads) with a cover price of $1~$1.25.  While last winter we sent 10,000 of them out to direct market retailers free of charge, it was still technically an end user promotion.  This year I wanted to try something more geared towards retailers, so we opted for a little experiment: in Previews August we offered the 69th issue of Comic AG at a special 69% discount (normally, our books have the “F” discount, which is 45% off MSRP) as a small gesture for retailers who regularly order our books.  We didn’t expect much change in the orders, although we certainly hoped for a positive spike… but a peculiar thing happened. 

As you know, we solicit two issues of AG every month.  Sales may go up and down from month to month, but the overall numbers are more or less consistent, and each pair of issues usually stay within a dozen copies of each other.  But not for August.  Issue 69 did get a bump in orders over issue 68, however small… it’s up 82 copies.  However, AG issue 70 was down 29 issues from issue 68, making it the lowest selling issue this year.  In essence, direct market retailers took advantage of the bigger discount on issue 69 by diverting money away from issue 70.  On the face of it, this would seem to make sense, except for these two problems:

1. Comic AG has sold a consistent number of copies for ages, so there’s little reason to cut orders on any single issue.

2. Comic AG isn’t available for re-order from Diamond because they don’t stock it beyond the typical 3% overage above initial order to cover damages.

I don’t know whether it’s because the direct market is dead set on selling only a certain number of our books, or if it can only set aside so much money for them each month, but this is the only instance of orders going down; almost all of our other non-DM accounts saw this as an opportunity to try to sell more copies with less risk, and bumped orders up on AG 69 anywhere from 50% to over 400%, without cutting orders on AG 70. 

Now, I’m not going to write a screed on how the system is keeping the indy pubs down; I’m not a retailer so I don’t understand the intricacies of ordering, and the change in sales number we’re talking about here is really trivial, after all (I also honestly don’t think there is any conspiracy against indy comics, much to the chagrin of some of my comrades.).  But what I’m taking away from this as a publisher is that, in terms of returns on the time and financial effort spent on advertising between the DM versus other markets, doing this kind of promotion in the DM is a zero-sum game (actually, it’s worse in this case, because we’re taking in much less money on the discounted regular issue.)  In other words, it seems there’s little reason to spend advertising money to specifically promote DM sales once a certain sales ceiling is met, especially when those same efforts are much more warmly received in every other channel.  Whether this ceiling is artificial or if the current number of comic shop patrons is a limiter, I do not know… but it sure seems awfully easy to hit.

Since our ratio of Diamond to non-DM sales is almost exactly 50-50, they’re both of equal importance to us.   We definitely want to keep our current level of advertising for the DM to maintain our sales.  But if it takes less effort to generate new interest outside of the comic store, I can’t help but be leery of doing any major promotion for comic stores alone.  It’s probably not fair to extrapolate the results of this one little experiment in such a way, but then again I haven’t seen much evidence to justify more aggresive efforts either.

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In other news of note…

Adult manga publisher Toen Shobou is officially no more.  Seriously, when you have to cut back on your porn mags in Japan, it’s time to call it a day.

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The Odex situation in Singapore is escalating to the boiling point.  Reuters reports that a “handful” of anime fans staged a protest against Odex’s copyright enforcement tactics at a park using figurines, prompting Singapore police to send 4 vans of riot police to keep those menacing, anti-capitalist toys in line.

Pictures of the PVC-induced madness here, here, here, and here.

Meanwhile, Odex is taking a step back and re-evaluating their practices after the PR backlash.