Warren Ellis is slightly confused by Dark Horse’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer selling out:
[H]ere’s the thing. Printing numbers aren’t set until the order numbers are in. And no-one wants to sell out a print run inside 24 hours of release, so you look at the numbers and you set an overprint, an additional number of copies to satisfy re-order demand.
Lots and lots of books have been selling through their overprints like wildfire. More and more, in fact. And I can tell you that the overprint percentages aren’t being reduced on my books, many if not most of which have been selling out lately.
So what the f**k is going on, that the market cannot guess the demand for BUFFY, SEASON EIGHT, EXCLUSIVELY TOLD IN COMICS AND WRITTEN BY JOSS, to the extent that the overprint is f**king VAPORISED something like twelve hours after the book hit the shelves?
If I’m missing something here, please tell me.
The rest of The Engine is somewhat more cynical:
“[They're i]ntentionally using scarcity to create demand, I’d wager, although it’s possible here that they were simply too conseravtive.”
“I always assume they want it to sell out, so they can putting out PR’s like this.”
“My guess is that is was indeed to sell exactly the way it did… Who wouldn’t want to be able to say, ‘We’ve got Joss! He’s doing Buffy! Number one sold out! Reprints available with striking special cover! Issue number two follows in only one week! Don’t dare miss it!’ Those exclamation points could go a long from turning a just over 100,000 sales mark into a nearly 300,000 sales mark. Some of which may be for repeat orders just to get the variant cover. Of course, I could be wrong. But if it wasn’t intentional that way, I think it should have been.”
March 16th, 2007 at 9:46 am
An underestimation of Buffy fans’ willingness to cross mediums, I’d wager. Print runs (including overprints) are based on orders– retailers probably expected a Buffy comic to sell like comics, not kool-aid.
(said as a Buffy-lover)
March 16th, 2007 at 10:06 am
It didn’t sell out everywhere. We still have a bunch. Of course, most of our customers are college kids and they’re on Spring Break this week. So I guess we’ll see what happens when they get back.
March 16th, 2007 at 10:43 am
No one said it sold out at the stores…it sold out with Diamond…there’s a HUGE difference.
March 16th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Dark Horse isn’t used to selling more than 40,000 copies of a comic, for them to go above 100,000 on an initial print run probably seemed like an unrealistic expectation (unacceptabley high risk).
March 16th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
That’s true, but given the plethora of “sold out at Diamond” announcements we get these days, even on middling or low-selling comics, I think it’s a reasonable assumption that publishers are generally entirely happy to have a sell-out and judge their overprint accordingly. They appear to take the view that they get more buzz, and a longer-term gain, by going to a second printing. Or, alternatively, they’re just not prepared to assume the risk themselves by overprinting heavily on the first print. I would generally assume that the responsibility for these sell-outs lies primarily with the publisher.
That said, BUFFY SEASON 8 is an odd book with likely appeal to a fanbase outside the regular direct market audience, which does present retailers with a more difficult guesstimating job than usual. Again, because trade paperbacks and second printings tend to come along fairly quickly on high-profile comics, while ordering high saddles the retailer with the risk, the system is set up to provide a DIS-incentive against ordering high to start with.
Rightly or wrongly, the industry seems to consider that it prefers to discourage retailers from ordering comics, rather than share the risk by (for example) making unsold copies returnable.
March 16th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
“My guess is that is was indeed to sell exactly the way it did… Who wouldn’t want to be able to say, ‘We’ve got Joss! He’s doing Buffy! Number one sold out! Reprints available with striking special cover! Issue number two follows in only one week! Don’t dare miss it!’ Those exclamation points could go a long from turning a just over 100,000 sales mark into a nearly 300,000 sales mark. Some of which may be for repeat orders just to get the variant cover. Of course, I could be wrong. But if it wasn’t intentional that way, I think it should have been.”
That’s what I would have done. High five to whoever pulled that off, if that was the case. That is S-M-A-R-T, smart.
March 16th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
[H]ere’s the thing. Printing numbers aren’t set until the order numbers are in. And no-one wants to sell out a print run inside 24 hours of release, so you look at the numbers and you set an overprint, an additional number of copies to satisfy re-order demand.
That’s funny, coming from a man who’s been working with Marvel for a while.