Rocket Bomber - article - retail - commentary - Rethinking the Box: Books vs Comic Books

[see the first ‘Rethinking the Box’ column]

“Although referred to as comic books, these publications are actually more akin to magazines, having soft covers printed on glossy paper, with the interiors consisting of newsprint quality paper” [cit.; emphasis mine]

Harken back to the “Golden Age,” dear reader —

Comics were kids’ fare. Cheap, plentiful, available at the corner newsstand, on a rack at the nearest five-and-dime or at your local drugstore (which in that day and age also served ice cream and sodas): Where Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post (it’s very name an anachronism now, refering to a time when the mail was delivered twice a day weekdays – but only mornings on Saturdays) could be found, so too was the pre-Comics-Code comic book: a lurching horror of lurid content, hinted-at sexuality, crime, murder, war, the supernatural and even the occasional superhero.

(And then Fredric Wertham had to go and ruin a good thing for everyone. Bastard.)

Work-for-hire art rushed through with only the barest gloss of editoral and packaged with advertisements for plastic army men, sea monkeys, and x-ray glasses. Good-and-evil matchups on cheap newsprint in all four glorious colors, between glossy covers that promised everything except what was inside. 32 page masterpieces available for pocket change.

Now consider for a moment not the content of the age — post 1954 largely appreciated in the present day on an entirely ironic basis, in my opinion — but the Commerce.

Comics were cheap, disposable entertainment served up monthly, and weekly. A retailer bought Donald Duck, Archie, Detective & Action Comics, et al, because the local kids were buying them. If something didn’t sell, maybe it stayed on the rack for another month or two — but eventually it would go in the trash to make way for the next month’s shipment. Cash on the barrelhead, print 3 to sell 1, if-the-kids-liked-it-last-month-print-more-this-month — the distribution was different, the outlets (both in type and number) were vastly different, the product was different; the audience was younger, broader, more diverse (in an American-50s-suburbia definition of the term diverse) and comics were not fringe but front-and-center.

Comics had a good run.

But by the time I was an impressionable young lad (late70s-early80s: Member’s Only Jackets, Parachute Pants, The Greatest American Hero, Knight Rider, Dr. Who on PBS, Robotech & Voltron in syndication, ‘Wars and ‘Trek as established canon — Jedi as the choicest piece of eye-candy ever and The Empire Strikes Back as my peer-group’s Citizen Kane …but just a smidge before Star Trek: The Next Generation) comics were merely peripheral: OK, yeah, fine if you’re into that kind of thing but the promise of the original Superman movie had been squandered, no-one was even thinking about Burton’s Batman (or Dini’s BtAS — that was afternoons-after-high-school-and-into-college for me)

and just then Nintendo was introducing us to a mustachioed plumber, JRPGs, and pocket monsters by the gross; Raimi was synonymous with Hercules not Spiderman, and JMS was a television producer not a 1st (2nd?) tier comic book writer.

[yeah yeah — I’m compressing 15 years of fandom into one comma-spliced sentence]

Times were different then. Not Simpler, not Better, just Different. And while I went through puberty and slowly figured out first that girls were different, and then that girls were fantastic, and then that girls just don’t like me much, the Direct Market for Comic Books was also maturing and comic shops as an entity came into their own, crashed, came back — and even today soldier on.

The ‘drugstores’ of American legend are gone — subsummed into a morass of embedded pharmacies in supermarkets (and Wal-Marts) and 24-hour convenience stores that just happen to also employ pharmacists. Unless you live on Manhattan or within cell-phone-tower range of the exact center of your local Metropolitan Statistical Area you likely have no idea what a ‘newsstand’ even is (or was). Today, if not found on the checkout aisle at the grocer, magazines are bought at the local big box bookstore (as a concept, themselves not even two decades old yet) and comics are bought at a Local Comic Shop, if you bother, or collected into graphic novels which are readily available online and occasionally found on a front-of-store display at BigBoxBooks for an impulse buy. The landscape has changed.

The current Local Comic Shop sells dust, nostalgia, and good will. And the occasional graphic novel. And the same 5 recurring titles to the same dozen people every Wednesday. 30 (40?) years ago the very idea of a ‘comics-only shop’ would have thrilled the fan base and set tongues wagging at all the local junior high schools; now, the comic shop is a caricature (or ultimate expression) of what it used to be and the jr. high kids are clogging the manga aisles at the bookstore next to the mall.

— Quick Check: If the kids aren’t trying to steal your merchandise then your long-term business is in trouble.

[unnamed comic shop ‘closed on Sundays’, image credit whatleydude@flickr, cc license some rights reserved]

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The difference between selling books and selling comic books comes down to Diamond, the Direct Market, and the little issue of returns.

Whether or not the merchandise is returnable (or if a given shop owner chooses to participate in a the returns process) is secondary to customer expectations and customer demand. But this question of returns has been knocking around for years. In the end, returnabilty isn’t so much about selling books, but more a matter of inventory-control than anything else.

If you come from a comics background, and you haven’t been paying attention to the aftermarket recently, then perhaps you’d think comics are comparible to wine: there is the initial sale, of course, but if even the most ephemeral of demand lingers — through brand recognition, association, manufactured hype, false rarity—or rarest of all, actual quality of work—then it is worthwhile to hold on to old issues with the expectation that eventually they’ll be worth something.

And this is a legitimate business model. For E-bay.

If one chooses to deal with actual street-level retail and store inventory as, you know, inventory rather than an extended personal collection, than this micromanaged-title-at-a-time approach makes little sense. You’d need to divorce personal interest and perceived demand from the equation and instead consider immediate sales, turn-over rates, and margin. Any long-term sales must be part of a proven trend — which leaves one with only a shelf and a half or so of established backlist.

Take fresh fruit as an example: fruit is popular with a wide appeal [ha ha] but has the shortest shelf life of any consumable good. Waste is a part of doing business. You buy from the producers, and attempt to price it such that you make your money back (and, with luck, then some) before it goes bad. I might even go so far as to characterise comics as fruit—with a finite shelf life—rather than as potential collectibles. You sell it within 3 or 4 months, or you throw it away.

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The very concept of book returns relates to the publishing business and the needs of publishers, not retailers. At one point in time (and still true, by-and-large, today) there were a finite number of shelves in bookstores. If a publisher wanted to get new books into stores, then they had to be willing to accept their own old books back. King makes way for Hill. Dickens makes way for Fitzgerald, who in turn steps aside for Hemmingway, then Kerouac, then Michener, then Grisham, then Brown — not that Dickens or Fitz is out of print, but except for titles assigned to high school students every summer, we’re not exactly stocking dozens of copies of Little Dorrit…

Returns are a two-way street. Sure, it’s expensive and the publisher is left with most of the risk (and the associated shipping costs, which are almost always bourne by the publisher) but in a way, book returns are also a service the bookstore provides to the publisher. —The alternative for the retailer is to order fewer books, and fewer new releases.

If a store chooses to participate in the returns process, then it is also a part of that store’s inventory control procedures: both invoices and returns are booked and at the end of the year some sort of reckoning is made. A store has to pay taxes on standing year-end inventory as well, so that’s also a consideration.

…But the dynamic on returns is also changing. The big box is the size of 15 other old-model bookstores combined. It’s not a single store ordering a single copy of a new novel, it’s a chain of 300 (or 500, or 800) ordering in a dozen copies for each of its stores so they can set up pretty display tables. And if the book doesn’t sell in the month or so that a title is actually on that display?

A $20 hardcover times a dozen, times several hundred stores, times new displays 12 times a year, times 40 titles or more on each table, times 5 (or even 10) big tables like this in each store…

OK, so now the publishers are beginning to seriously reconsider this return thing. This isn’t a matter of finding room on finite shelves for new, deserving books — the pubs are in effect subsidizing the displays. For the bookstore, this is great: we get to sell what sells, maybe we order more of those bestsellers for the short-term, or a title gets added to the long list of things we try to keep one of in stock — and we were able to do so at almost no risk.

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So that’s one take on inventory: a dynamic tally which includes both invoices and credits (and sales) and for accounting purposes only affects the bottom line once a year. If you are a large nationwide sales chain, then all the paper shuffling is fine: you’ve more than a few file monkeys on staff who do nothing but invoicing and they like it. A modest, single-store sole proprietorship has much different concerns; sure, if you have excellent credit or a cash buffer you can play it like a big bookstore chain, but most independents live hand-to-mouth:

Buy at the bigger discount now: trust your gut (or hope for a sale someday) and also rely on your own judgement as to which titles will sell, or what’s up-and-coming, or what the internet is talking about, or whatever.

The Direct Market (Diamond) offers titles at a better discount (better by 10% or so? correct me, please.) than book distributors on graphic novels. Floppies… well, one can also get some monthly comics from a magazine distributor but I doubt it’s worth it and the selection is laughable — Diamond is practically the only option. So you order periodicals (non-returnable) from Diamond and since you’re sending in the order anyway I’m guessing most of your manga and GNs are on the same sheet — discounted from the cover price (and it might be a fine discount) but still non-returnable —

This is a ‘sunk cost’. You bought it, you own it.

And here also is the point of contention: A comic shop owner, buying items week-to-week on a non-returnable basis, knows sunk costs. His (or her, but likely his) entire inventory is ‘sunk’: he owns all of it. Either he can sell it a adventageous price, or he stores it indefinitely. Never does it occur to him to write it off and throw it away. (Maybe discounted, but never trashed.) Never will a non-mover actually move off his books. The assumption is that someone, sometime, will ask for it.

A bookstore, in contrast, has a backlist (Dickens, Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Kerouac, Michner, Grisham, Brown — op cit.) but cycles through everything else every 90 days, if not sooner. There is no ownership of stock: the publisher owns it, we just move it — and if doesn’t move it’s the publishers fault and we send it back. This is a great deal for retailers (and thank you, pubs) but this convoluted, bass-ackwards system is a result of the needs of publishers: we can’t stock their newest releases if last year’s books are still clogging shelves. They take old books back because they want us to stock their new books now.

This is a dynamic that will apply to graphic novels as well. It already applies to GNs sold in the chains (Border’s returns put a hurting on several manga publishers) and I think with the tendency of comics publishers to put out a collection of anything, regardless of market or merit, will eventually clog up the shelves of the direct market retailers, too — and if DC and Marvel want to get copies of the latest movie tie-in property on the shelves, they’ll have to take back unsold books from last summer’s dud.

I know we’ve already run out of room for new books in the graphic novel section at my bookstore; who knows how the local comic shops are coping.

Some retailers that could easily call themselves ‘bookstores’ (and thus play by the already-established rules for book sellers) cling desperately to the direct market, floppies, and the extra discount that they can get from Diamond. Sure. Fine. Have Fun.

Digital downloads (legal or illegal) are a publishing phenomenon that are only going to get worse (or better, depending on your POV) and no one knows what impact they’re eventually going to have but the business is going to change. And I think a graphic novel, in most cases a collected story arc in full, will fare better than 24 page snippets when a consumer is debating between ownership of a dead-tree artefact and a digital download.

—and if you think comic shops are immune because they are a ‘specialty’, a form of retail that can’t be duplicated, then I’d advise you to talk to a newsagent. If you can find one.

A decision is coming on the near horizon, whether you plan to sell mostly floppies or mostly books. Either choice is fine, I guess, but the selection will determine the future direction of your business. (personally, I’d bet on books over floppies.) You have to choose one or the other, though. If you stick with floppies and think you’ll cover the gap with collectibles and longboxes of backstock then you should drop the rent payment, move everything to your mother’s basement, and concentrate on your E-Bay business — book retail just doesn’t suit you.

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I didn’t even know about manga until after my quarter-life crisis and well into my second career (third career if you count my decade in college as one) and it’s only been 30 months or so that I’ve been looking into the industry side of manga (and to an extent comics as a whole) as both blogger and pundit. I work retail 40 hours a week — field management for one of the big bookstore chains. I joke that I came in through the back door, because 8 years ago I took a part-time job working shipping and receiving in the stockroom (trying to make ends meet while my consulting business gloriously failed back in the autumn of aught-one). My part time job became a full time job; my blogging experiment became a habit, and then a hobby, and then a website with my own domain and CMS and a 20-hour-a-week part-time job doing data entry (of all things) to compile sales charts and I’m still not sure how I ended up here. My interest in manga and anime have grown into an obsession, to the point where I begrudge the time spent on the website because I could be reading, dammit, or sitting back on my day off with a DVD box set and a cooler full of beer.

Oh gods that sounds nice. I’ve all 26 episodes of Aria’s 2nd season just sitting here, too. Damn you, internets!

Anyway, my point (and the reason I’ve tied so much personal narrative into this post) is that I have next-to-no experience in running a comic shop, and my research and readings (and experience in runnning a bookstore) only take me so far. I’ve tried to spell out what I think the differences are, and how upcoming challenges will affect both, but I am in fact just presenting my opinions on these topics.

I invite both correction and rebuttal from anyone who can speak with authority on any of my points.

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Further Readings and References:

Bookavore.com, What do comic book stores and book stores have in common?, Mar ’09

Brian Hibbs at The Savage Critic, How Returnability Works; Or: Why the DM is often a better system, Jan ’08.

Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter with an editorial, Why Comic Shops Still Matter, or At Least Why They Should, Sep ’07.

Kip Manley at Long Story Short Pier, Why you don’t read comics, Jun ’03 * must read

Wikipedia is not research, actually, but it’s fun to get lost there and exceptionally easy to link to:
Books – History of the Book – Publishers – Self-publishing – Bookselling (this wiki article desperately needs a rewrite) – Independent Bookstores – Paperbacks – Newsagents – Magazines – Comic Books – Comics

top image credit: crop from ‘Comic Spin Rack’, credit roadkillbuddha@flickr, cc license some rights reserved.