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.