Singling Out Books With Crossover Potential

The last two months have seen the release of a rash of what I like to call crossover comics, i.e. those books that bring new people into (or back into) comics in general and our shop in particular.

Over the long term, I suspect that the most important of these will be Dark Horse's new Buffy the Vampire Slayer series. The wide-spread appeal of this comic is pretty amazing, so much so that, despite the fairly common knowledge that Buffy was a popular show and made for some truly devoted fans, retailers and Dark Horse pretty badly misjudged demand. Over at the Engine, Warren Ellis asked how this was possible and a series of individuals proceeded to toss their theories against the wall. One of the great things about Buffy is not only the number of new customers it's bringing in but the type of customer it's bringing in. Joss Whedon is so tied to fan's concept of Buffy (which makes sense since he wrote the movie and created the show) that it's easy to point out Fray, Serenity, Astonishing X-Men and Runaways. More on why we love Joss Whedon.

Next up, Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Really solid stuff from Marvel with top notch productions values and more importantly, it's own unique visual style thanks to Jae Lee and Richard Isanove. I've had more than one customer mention that it doesn't look like a comic book. Obviously I can't know what every new customer expects when they look at a comic but any time that one can broaden their opinion of what a comic can be and do, that's a win-win-win for the industry. While the Dark Tower series has about as devoted a following as Buffy, though, I've noticed more of a reluctance among Dark Tower devotees to branch out into other comics. Part of that is Whedon's obvious connection to comics versus a much more tenuous connection between King and the rest of the comic world, but it's far from impossible to find something similar that a reader might like. Still, there's more of a tendency among the new faces coming in for Dark Tower to grab the latest issue and head out rather than browse a bit.

The third crossover comic was the surprise, Captain America #25. Here we have, far and away MacGuffin's best selling single issue of any comic since we opened. In fact, it's been our best selling single issue each of the past three weeks and this is all with limited quantities available in the first week of release. Unfortunately, while this issue brought in the most new faces and would seem to be a solid gateway comic, it's also an ending rather than a beginning. With Buffy and Dark Tower, even if these new faces don't pick up anything else, they'll almost all be back for the subsequent issues of the series that brought them in. If a new reader likes Captain America #25, the best we can do is start working backwards. Sure the series will continue, likely with someone like the Winter Soldier as the new Cap, but that's not exactly what these new readers signed up for. As I've said, there's always places to point a new reader (in this case, towards Brubaker's other stuff is a great place to start), but there's quite a bit more work involved when Cap #25 is the starting point.

What's a little bit unusual about these three books, at least in the short term, is that they're all bringing in new readers to buy single issue comics. We're designed to introduce customers to new materials and I've found that a big part of that is finding a format that the new reader is comfortable with. Nine times out of ten, that means a trade, but as much as I like trades, if new readers can adjust to different formats quickly it allows for a much broader range of titles to choose from. And that's good for everyone.

Return of Movie Marketing

Just a quick post to point out an unusual bit of coincidence:

In the 3 months prior to and the month following the release of the film adaptation of V for Vendetta, MacGuffin made exactly $.14 more off of that book than we have off of 300 in the 3 months prior to and the 2 weeks since the release of that film adaptation. I found it rather unusual for the difference to be that small, especially considering how much more business we are doing in general this year. To a small degree I'll credit DC with running their consignment program last year, allowing us to always have V for Vendetta in stock and to carry enough to have a small, fully stocked display. On the other hand, knowing the difficulty that Dark Horse has had keeping books in print in the past, we stocked up early and there were only a scant 3 days when we were without a copy of 300 in the months leading up to the film's release.

All of that said, we clearly had proportionally more success with V for Vendetta, especially when you take into account the 20% discount we experimented with in the weeks leading up to the release of the film. In retrospect, the discount was a mistake because nearly every sale we made was to someone coming in specifically for the book rather than as an impulse buy. We gave away money on those sales since the discount was not the deciding factor except in one or two cases. The money we would have saved by eliminating that discount would have more than made up for the smaller unit sales.

Speaking of small unit sales, those of you who have put 2 and 2 together have realized that, once the $30 price tag of 300 and the discount we offered off of the $19.99 price on V for Vendetta are taken into account, we moved roughly half as many units of 300 as we did V for Vendetta, despite a much larger box office performance by the former and a much less faithful adaptation of the latter. Not what I was expecting, but I'm sure the price tag and unusual format of 300 scared more than a few potential buyers off.

Not So Much Free

Over at Comics Worth Reading, Johanna Draper Carlson recently summarized some of the more important pieces of a conversation on the CBIA regarding the upcoming Free Comics Book Day offerings. The gist of the conversation is that many retailers are only willing to pay so much to promote a publisher's product via giveaways.

There are 42 FCBD titles this year (a few publishers have more than one) at an average cost of $.275. I certainly don't blame any store for carrying only what they think they can use, or even only those that they think are cost effective. And, while the majority of titles come in under that average, some of the more useful titles (I'm assuming sight unseen) will likely be Whiteout, Train Was Bang on Time, Unseen Peanuts, Owly & Korgi, Amelia Rules and hopefully Wahoo Morris (a cool little book that hasn't gotten much coverage -- Johanna's got a review). Notice, none of these are Gold Sponsor books, but I'll get back to that.

Unfortunately, only two of these books come in under the average of $.275, and they are from two completely opposite sides of the spectrum. Train was Bang on Time costs is an excerpt from The Black Diamond Detective Agency, Eddie Campbell's newest due out from First Second at the end of May and costs retailers $.20 per copy. It has the promotional weight of First Second (and by extension Holtzbrinck publishing) behind it and these are publisher's used to working in the spend money to make money world of book publishing. The other is the Wahoo Morris book, excerpting the first chapter of that series' first book, from creator and self publisher Craig Taillefer, who's working on a much smaller advertising budget yet he's also offering his book at $.20 per copy. I suspect (or hope) that this price point may pay off in spades at those stores restricting their purchases to the less expensive silver sponsor titles.

The rest of the titles I listed are$.29 and up, topping out at $.37 for Owly & Korgi (overall the most expensive title offered is Pirates vs. Ninjas #1 at $.50 each). In my breakdown of our FCBD purchasing last year, I pointed out that we set aside a certain percentage of our budget for each title and bought however many copies that budget would allow and we've done the same this year (if I have time I plan to break down the percentages for this year's books in the coming weeks).

All of that said, we're carrying almost every FCBD title this year. The only titles we're omitting are Jack the Lantern Ghosts (only 2 people took last year's book and we're never sold a Jack the Lantern comic) and Comic Genesis and Keensot Spotlight, two books that promote web comics and that almost no one picked up last year.