Newsarama article: the periodical and the book (Joss mentioned)

From Newsarama.com - By Brian Hibbs

Newsarama article: the periodical and the book (Joss mentioned)

(#162 – October 2007)

So, first up, an apology.

Those of you with longer memories will remember this column, where I discussed Countdown. I talked about the lack of advance solicitation material before the series began, and how I felt that was one of the major reasons it was selling as poorly as it appeared to be selling. The published sales charts at the time showed Countdown selling below 75k.

I had written this:

Obviously, I have no idea if I’m at all typical (I’m probably not), but if I am, then Countdown wouldn’t even be a Top Fifty book in these early days, and history shows this type of series does nothing but decline for the rest of its run. It is, I think, conceivable that Countdown is going to drop under 50k during its year. 52 stayed more or less over 100k its entire run.

That column, and a subsequent public comment from Dan DiDio, which all parties I think understand was aimed at me, led to a little flurry of emails back and forth. What happened was that, because of the conditionally returnable nature of the first twelve issues of Countdown, Diamond wasn’t reporting the entirety of sales in the sales charts, on the assumption there would be returns.

Now I don’t know what the exact unreported percentage really was, but it would appear to be between 20 and 25%. If we use the more flattering number, that’d mean North American sales for the first issue (#51) weren’t really 91,083, but, rather more like 113k, and, in fact, all of the first four weeks were over 100k.

More importantly, if you adjust the twelfth and final “returnable” issue (#40) upwards by 25%, then the drop to “non-returnable” status is basically nothing – all of about 2% — which seems to indicate that Countdown is resonating just fine with the national audience.

It would appear that I am guilty of universalizing my specific experience (where we lost half of the readership between 52 and Countdown), and that I appear to be wrong that the lack of pre-Previews-ship-date information had any impact on the greatest bulk of readers or retailers. And, in fact, I think it would be safe to say that the overwhelming majority of the marketplace has chosen to, at least saleswise, treat Countdown as an extension of 52 – 104, if you will.

So, there, I was wrong.

* * *

But what I really want to talk about this month is the relationship between the periodical and the book, and what I think it means to the Direct Market.

I’m long on the record that I think the book format is where we want to put our efforts – none of the “original” (Comics Retailer) run of Tilting at Windmills is on-line, so I can’t easily search for the exact column (or link it, even if I could find it), but I said, in the mid-90s, something like “You shouldn’t even publish the periodical in the first place, if you’re not going to collect it in a book”

Heh, be careful for what you ask for, eh?

The funny thing is, I still mostly believe that – given the effort it takes to create a work, it is pretty inefficient to only ever sell it once, as a periodical. Having a perennial version is good for virtually everyone, as long as sales can sustain it.

Because that’s the rub, and is the corollary of “don’t serialize if you’re not going to collect” – Don’t serialize if it isn’t worth collecting!

There’s an awful lot of material being created now that doesn’t have any lasting or widespread interest, yet is being bound up just the same – does the world really need three volumes of, say, the current Ms Marvel series? In both hardcover and softcover? Nothing against Ms. Marvel, of course, but this doesn’t strike me as work people will still be seeking out in any appreciable quantities in three years, five years, a decade from now. To an extent, this simply makes it another kind of periodical, albeit one with a slightly longer shelf-life.

One of the tests that I think should be put into place is “When volume 1 (or 2 or 3) goes out of stock, will it be reprinted?” If not, then, most likely, the work shouldn’t be collected in the first place, other wise we’re just creating more “orphans” clogging up the system and the shelves – and we have far too many of those as it already is.

But let’s say that you’re a publisher and you’re willing to make a serious commitment to keeping a work in print and available, what then? How do you handle both the serialization and the eventual collection?

In my opinion, the periodical serialization is tremendously important to both the Direct Market in the micro, as well as the overall production of comics work in the macro.

In the macro, serialization helps underwrite the cost of production, and makes it significantly more likely that a working artist can make a “living wage” from the production of comics work – because publishers are able to steadily recover costs of production, as a work is serialized, it is a whole lot easier to pay competitive wages. If the “comic book” disappeared tomorrow, you can just say goodbye to virtually any property that isn’t an “A-Level” one – there’s hardly any way to recover the costs in any kind of a reasonable time from on a “B- (or C-) list” property. Moreover, a significant percentage of creators need to have regular production of their work as a spur to keep actually producing more, and to keep their names “on the radar” of retailers and consumers.

In the micro, the periodical comic book provides a tremendous amount of cash flow to both publisher and retailer. Book publishing tends to be “burst”-y – weeks will pass where nothing especially significant gets published, then half a dozen major books will all drop at once. Without the (relatively) steady week-in, week-out publication of serialized comics, your friendly neighborhood comics store will never be able to keep their doors open.

At Comix Experience, over half of our sales come from book-format material (as opposed to comics-format), but I’d have to shut tomorrow without the steady, and reliable cash-flow that the periodical provides. Periodicals provide cash-flow, books provide the profit.

The comics-only reader has very different behaviors than the book-only one – a “typical” comics reader might be shopping bi-weekly or better, while the book reader typically comes in quarterly, or so. The comics reader tends to be savvier about what they read, and more informed about the product, and so on and so forth. One type of customer isn’t “better” than the other (oh no no no!) – both type’s money spends the same – but the more-regular comics buyer is providing that crucial cash flow in a way that most book-focused buyers just don’t.

There’s one other factor at play here as well – and that’s the cost of entry. At (about) $3-per, it is much easier to get someone to “sample” a work, and thus to commit to it. When I look at the runaway sales success of something like Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight (over 100K per issue), I can guarantee you that is a function of the periodical format. If those first five Joss Whedon issues had come out as an “OGN”, it would have sold amazingly, I have no doubt – but 100k? Not a chance. To the best of my recollection (and maybe 10 minutes searching ICv2’s charts), I don’t think there’s any OGN that’s sold over 30k in the DM during its first month, yet 100k people (and many many of them are “civilians” to comics) are coming in clamoring to read a serialization of Buffy (or, say, Stephen King’s Dark Tower) – it is much easier to drop $3 to see if you’re into something (and discover, hey! You ARE!) then the $20+ an OGN is going to require on a high-profile license like that.

Further that “cost of entry” applies at least as much to retailers as it does to the end consumers – without something “A-Level” behind an OGN, I’m less likely to invest my purchasing power into something that’s going to cost me $7-10, as opposed to $1.50-2.00.

Really, go take a look at the charts – in the short-run, a serialization of something of any viability is nearly always going to sell to an audience significantly larger than the audience for the eventual collection. I believe that’s just the wider audience’s natural tendency, unless something is done to short-circuit that tendency.

Like what, you ask?

Well, let’s start from this premise: the collection is (usually) the “better” format for reading a work. Typically on better paper, usually priced cheaper than its component parts (because they’ve amortized a great deal of the expense of production on the serialization – but this wouldn’t likely to be true with an OGN), no advertising, no “having to wait” for the rest of a storyline, and so on and so forth.

And all of that is fine, until you “rub it in the face of the consumer” by producing the trades “too dependably”. Let’s look, for example, at Vertigo.

Of the last, mm, let’s say twenty-five “ongoing monthly” titles that Vertigo has introduced, each and every one of them has had at least one collection produced within no more than 120 days of the publication of the final chapter of the first “arc”. In fact, though I’m doing this wholly from memory at this stage, I think you’d need to go all the way back to something like The Minx to find an “ongoing” Vertigo title that didn’t get at least one trade. Even material as critically panned, and commercially unviable as the most recent Deadman series, got that initial $9.99 (for $15 “worth” of comics) trade paperback.

So what happened next? Vertigo stopped being able to launch “commercially viable” monthlies. No? With the exception of Jack of Fables, a spinoff of the “tried and tested” Fables, Vertigo hasn’t launched a book in about the last three years that has managed to hold a monthly audience of even 15k readers (at least, when looking at the first-calendar-month sales among North American stores, he said, predicting Brian Wood’s complaint). Even something perceived as successful for the line (Wood’s DMZ) is, in the most recent sales report, pegged at under 12k. And Un-Men, Exterminators, Scalped, American Virgin, Army @ Love, Testament, and Crossing Midnight are all sitting at under 10k. Heck that last one is sitting at under 6k, probably below the point where it even is mathematically possible for the comic to break even, let alone amortize the perennials as it is meant to do.

Understand this clearly: Vertigo has trained their audience to Wait For The Trade. This isn’t accidental behavior at this point, it is a learned behavior. You know you have a problem when Avatar (of all outfits!) can launch new ongoing “Vertigo-like” titles at better numbers than Vertigo can!

I don’t think this is a matter of “quality”, at all, because I, for one, would rank Crossing Midnight or Army @ Love at least as high-in-quality as something like Fables. No, I think this is a direct result of a marketing plan that says “Your trades are 100% guaranteed”.

Well but, if the audience is “waiting for the trade”, those trades have to be racking up big big sales, right? Um, no – Crossing Midnight v1 had initial orders of a paltry 2510 – under half of what the periodical sells. It seems to me that not only has this marketing tactic utterly annihilated Vertigo’s periodical sales, but it has gutted the confidence of both the retailer and consumer when it comes to the trade finally arriving.

Were I in charge of Vertigo, I’d immediately institute a policy that trades will only be issued after the periodical “proves itself”, and I’d promote that policy change at the actual point of solicitation to encourage the customer base to actually support the serialization in the first place. I’d also find a way to encourage the purchase of the serialization by some form of “backmatter” that won’t be reprinted, even if that’s something as basic as a letter’s page. I think I’d also institute a policy that even if a book will get TPed, the wait will be pre-announced as being so long that you wouldn’t want to wait, if you’re interested in the title. Say, a year, minimum.

Because the only other path that can be rationally taken is to just skip the serialization altogether, and simply do only OGNs. The problem there is that the OGN doesn’t exactly lend itself to “long form” work – because an OGN has to have an “end”, if not a firm conclusion. And it isn’t really feasible, I don’t think, at this point in Western comics, to have multiple volumes of OGN series “in the pipeline” – what if v1 doesn’t take? So you’re looking at more of a stop-and-start-again kind of production which can both sap the life out of a work, as well as create a much longer wait between volumes.

Clearly, I don’t think this is purely a Vertigo problem – I’m at least as frustrated by the legs being kicked out from beneath the “Prestige Format” superhero-based mini-series (like the recent 90-days-after-#4 publication of Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil HC for one example) – but at Vertigo, the problem has become codified into the very DNA of “how they make comics”, and it’s very clearly having a deleterious impact on their ability to bring goods to market, and for those creations to find and keep their audience.

At the end of the day, I think the serialization is utterly crucial for the comics marketplace as it is constituted; and anything that works against maximizing the amount of periodicals sold (even if there’s a long term goal of having a strong-selling perennial product at the end of it), is something to be strongly avoided. Yes, books are wonderful, profitable things, but without a system to healthily feed the creation of individual pages, production and profit has to dramatically tamp down. Heck, even the steamroller that is manga is (nearly?) universally serialized first in Japan before being collected in a perennial format.

There’s a tremendous amount of value in the periodical serialization of work – lets not throw it away in our rush to a book format; regardless of how important the book format is to the future of comics.