WAITING
FOR TOMMY: ED BRUBAKER
By
Richard Johnston
RICH:
When will we get to be just consumers again?
ED:
When this market gets to a point where every store has at
least the ability to carry every good comic available. Like
your local bookstore does. Maybe when the major publishers
stop their exclusive distribution deals and allow some competition
back into the field. Competition is an important part of capitalism,
which is something this industry needs to wake up and remember.
You would never see the bookstore market cut back to one distributor.
Most bookstores go through 3 or 4 sources at least to get
their product, and they don't have to pay for everything upfront,
either, so they can afford to stock their shelves. Most comic
stores can't afford shelf copies of anything beyond the top
25 selling comics. That's just pathetic. This entire industry
is becoming a subscription service and we've all been quietly
watching it happen for a decade now.
My biggest
advice to comic stores is to get an account with a book distributor
and stock your trades through them. You can fill your store
with books that will be returnable. You won't get as high
a discount, but you'll be able to get a lot of merchandise
to lure in new customers without risking your mortgage.
RICH:
Isn't that a bit simplistic? The difference between returnable
and non-returnable discounts is not a small one. Big comic
shops get near 60% off cover price... so their mark-up is
near 150% of what they pay. Your local bookshop can't get
anything near that. I'd also dispute that local bookshops
stock one of everything that's good... I'll often have to
trawl through a number of bookshops looking for, say, a particular
PG Wodehouse title and end up going to Amazon. As for the
subscription service - if we all have to be activists, doesn't
that make it worse? The industry further relying on pre-orders?
ED:
I'm not talking about the big stores, though. Those stores,
places like Big Planet and Isotope, are doing fine and usually
stock a wide variety of stuff because that's how you make
money as a retailer. I'm talking about the little stores that
are barely scraping by. Those are the stores that could benefit
from getting stock on the shelves even at a lesser discount.
And yeah,
not all bookstores carry as wide a variety as you'd like,
but the material is readily available to them, and they don't
have to take a risk with each order on the same level that
comic stores do.
I'm really
just pointing out obvious stuff here, and what I see is that
this market is backwards in a lot of ways. Why don't good
reviews help sales in this industry? Why don't awards help
sales? They do in film and book publishing. They do in video
games. Why not for comics, too? What makes this industry so
different than any other? The only thing I can see that's
so different is an impractical business model on the distribution
end that puts most of the risk on the retailer. And that's
why you end up with subscription services, because then the
risk is passed on to the reader. And if the readers have to
order everything they want out of a catalog ahead of time,
your market can't grow. It just won't happen.
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