Targeting the Demo

There's been much written about DC's new Minx imprint set to launch next year, from enthusiasm that there will finally be comics for teenage girls to cynicism that they are doomed to fail to concern that DC's a bit out of touch since such comics already exist and are called manga (which you'd think they already know since they do publish their own line of essentially DOA manga under the CMX imprint).

On basic principle I'm a big fan of a direct market friendly company like DC publishing a wider variety of comics. Whether this initiative will work is anyone's guess, but putting Karen Berger in charge is a good start and the talent they've lined up has me looking forward to reading nearly all of these books. Yeah, yeah, I'm not the target demographic (except in the sense that I place the orders for a fairly progressive direct market comic shop but we'll get back to that in a minute) but we're talking about great creators who will almost certainly produce some marketable content. And to that end, I'm also glad to see that DC is sinking $250,000 into promoting the line, rather than crossing their fingers and hoping their target demo will stumble onto it.

As part of that promotion, DC has enlisted Alloy Media + Marketing, a company that is incredibly effective at marketing books to teen girls via online social networking sites and guerrilla techniques along the lines of book covers and sampling. The question, though, is where these marketing efforts will direct the customers. The answer is most likely nowhere. The guiding principle of advertising is to raise product awareness coupled with offering a competitive advantage. Once that is accomplished it is generally left up to the consumer to determine where best to locate the product (assuming it isn't location specific). Assuming DC and Alloy are successful in their marketing campaign, these new consumers will be heading to the local bookstore to find these titles. Which raises the next question: how will these books be shelved? Is part of that significant marketing budget to secure prime display locations for these titles in chain bookstores in the teen/young adult sections? If not, it probably should be.

Then again, since the marketing efforts will likely lead to an influx of new readers via bookstores, the direct market may not feel much of an impact from this initiative. At MacGuffin, we strive to be new reader friendly but we still have to get those readers in the door. All the same, it's not DC's job to promote one market over another. It's up to the direct market to take advantage of the any new market that's created.

Under Serving the Market

A few weeks ago Dave Carter at Yet Another Comics Blog posted about The Long Tail as it applies to comics, specifically in determining where demand is being under served. He breaks down (in a very straightforward way) how the physical limitations of movie theaters limit the number of film that reach their full potential audience and compares this phenomenon to the world of comics. In other words, there comes a point in any industry when outside factors limit the sales potential of the products within that industry. If those boundaries could be removed those products would reach their natural sales level. Dave looked specifically at the Diamond sales charts for single issue comics in August 2006 and found that only the top 45 selling singles are serving their market as anticipated. He then offers some possibilities regarding this incredibly low inflection point, ranging from an increase in readers waiting for the trade or limited rack space to sales lost to other distribution channels.

This is an approach that fascinates me and I went ahead and pulled 10 out of the last 24 months sales data for analysis. Putting each into a log-log plot, it turns out that the inflection point in each is remarkably consistent, falling at between 43-47 in all 10 charts. Then again, we have to be careful when using these numbers for anything beyond pointing and laughing because they're notoriously controversial.

Even so, a few thoughts:

The most common factor in limited a product ability to fully serve its market is a distribution bottle-neck. Because these numbers are sell-in to retailers rather than sell-through to readers, the implication is that any bottlenecks would lie with Diamond or the publishers. This is certainly possible considering the limits on growth due to the relatively low overprints from Diamond's brokered publishers and Diamond's own unwillingness to stock much of their non-brokered publishers' titles in any depth. The bottle neck more likely occurs, however, much later in the supply chain, namely at the retail level. Most direct market comic shops (at least the ones that manage to stay open) base their orders primarily on previous sales patterns. This makes perfect sense, but most shops aim for at least 80% sell through on each title, which means that if orders are based on previous sales, growth is almost be definition limited to 20-25%.

On top of that, most shops have fairly limited shelf space. For example, at MacGuffin most books get little more than one week of full exposure while placed on our new release racks. Unfortunately, because we devote the majority of our shelf space to graphic novels and trade paperbacks we automatically limit the sales window for the majority of titles to one week. In fact, its difficult for us to display more than 70 titles in any given week and we often find that some weeks as many as 100 different titles are released, forcing some creative shelving on our part.

The effect of those waiting for the trade should be fairly consistent across the board and have little effect on creating such a low inflection point. While certainly there are some publishers and imprints that do much better sales in trades that singles (Vertigo and Kirkman's Image books come to mind), that would simply push these books towards the bottom of the sales charts, not throw off a log-log distribution of the other 250 titles in the top 300 each month.

There may not be much in the way of definitive reasons for any of the sales behavior implied by these numbers, but it certainly does give the impression that there's plenty of market that is being under served. It's likely, though, that the reasons for such a phenomenon are so varied that it may be impossible to determine just what impact each has, much less how best to overcome these issues.

New Readers at $.25 a Piece

I offered some thoughts awhile back about DC's decision to publish a $.25 version of the first issue of Fables, a move we were extremely happy with at MacGuffin. I didn't mention that as a promotional tool for the Absolute Sandman volume, they reprinted the first issue of that series with the updated coloring and a few of the many extras contained in the Absolute volume.

We've been giving both of these out to just about every adult who has come into the shop over the past month (whether they buy something or not) and they are paying huge dividends already. Selling a single volume of either Fables or Sandman covers the cost of giving away almost fifty copies of these promotional issues and we've more than covered the costs of what we've given away already. I would love to see more of these first issue reprints, especially for Vertigo series like Y: The Last Man, The Losers or the soon to be reformatted Transmetropolitan.

There really is nothing like giving away the first part of a story for free to get a customer to come back for more. As successful as it is to give away Free Comic Book Day titles and #0 preview issues, you can't beat promoting a proven commodity with a free giveaway, especially when we're talking about titles with up to 10 volumes worth of material to follow them up. Fortunately, while we're close to running out of copies to give away, Diamond still seems to have plenty in their warehouses. Unfortunately, eventually those supplies will run out but in the meantime, it's nice to have an easy, affordable way to promote these series to new readers and even better to put into someone's hand when they just aren't sure if they really want to read comics.