Over at AiT blog, Larry Young shares his responses to an old interview that never saw the light of day … until now. One of the topics was Continuity, the graphic novel that AiT put up on their website for free before soliciting it through Diamond:
“CONTINUITY was a very interesting test-case, because usually I do marketing experiments with *my* books, so if things don’t work out, it’s only me impacted, and if things do work out, we can implement them later for the benefit of our creators. The size of the ASTRONAUTS IN TROUBLE: MASTER FLIGHT PLAN collection was just us testing the book-trade’s lament of ‘we want 6×9 manga-sized books.’ That worked very well, and so we released the DEMO collection at that size and it’s sold gangbusters. Now, I’m sure DEMO would have sold relatively similarly if it was 7×10, because Brian and Becky were on their games, but at least we can tell folks in the book trade and in the libraries that we are responding to their needs…
“But Jason McNamara and Tony Talbert were gung-ho with me to test the whole Napster-esque legal-download thing for comics, so we posted the pdf at the same time that direct-market preorders were due and popped open a couple of beers and sat back to see what would happen. Initial orders of our books in the direct market are in the 1000-3000 range, depending on project and creative team, and that’s where CONTINUITY fell. About average for an AiT book. The month that the pdf was first offered, it had on the order of 30,000 individual downloads. That tells me that the Internet audience and the dead-tree enthusiasts are basically two different sides of the stadium.
“So, we got a very good bump in attention in general which has to be a favorable thing, but is pretty un-quantifiable in terms of sales. It’s my *feeling* that it was a positive thing overall, but feelings don’t pay the rent, right? CONTINUITY hit about what I was expecting, so we learned quantifiably that Internet eyeballs and paying customers are two different things, and I sure do appreciate Jason and Tony sticking their necks out with me to find out that that was so. That really could have backfired on us, but I’ll give the pdf thing a ‘neutral-to-positive’ score. Nobody got hurt, but nobody broke out the Cristal, either. It told us something about the state of comics in 2006, so it was a valiant effort.”
September 5th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Larry pulled up in a van with tinted windows and told Tony and I he me he was giving us a ride to our parents. Next thing I know Tony and I had matching sailor outfits and our graphic novel was a free pdf.
I thought Boing Boing was something that cartoon mice did when they were hungry. The last time I gave 30,000 people something for free it itched for a week. Did you want hot, mild or fire sauce with your order?
September 5th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I’m still itching, Jason. What was in that drink you gave me?
September 5th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
Did you wake up with a bunch of phone numbers written on your back?
Yeah, that was a Shirly Temple my friend. You were in the placebo group.
September 5th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
Hard to follow the comedy routine but given recent internet discussions about comics I’m taking this perhaps way too seriously: I couldn’t help but see Young’s point about the 3 titles with orders within 8 copies of each other to be yet another indication of the way that the current direct market retailer order system acts as a bottleneck for sales of indy comics. It means there’s a lid on sales that can only be lifted by getting retailers to understand that indy comics can bring in a new audience that isn’t being served as well by the bookstores as manga fans are. I also think from my own experiences that retailers can’t expect indy comics fans to buy Previews and have pull lists since the best indy comics will never be monthly and that level of obsessive collector mentality isn’t what draws those fans to comics as it does some of the spandex-longbox axis.
I think it’s a detriment to the industry if floppies go bye bye which they might do if quality indy books can never break that 3,000 plateau which seems to hold true for a lot of other publishers besides just AITPL given the Diamond top 300 list every month. The indy books that are hits are usually only so after a decade of sustained effort and/or leap to a big traditional publishing house.
Now, I’d like a little ‘Boing Boing’ with ‘fire sauce’ please…
September 5th, 2007 at 11:07 pm
“Hard to follow the comedy routine but given recent internet discussions about comics I’m taking this perhaps way too seriously…”
Perhaps so.
“I couldn’t help but see Young’s point about the 3 titles with orders within 8 copies of each other to be yet another indication of the way that the current direct market retailer order system acts as a bottleneck for sales of indy comics.”
Well, except that’s not the current thinking, for indie comics in general or us in particular. The three books mentioned were over the September/October/November months of 2005, and as I said that’s when I personally stopped worrying about our company’s market penetration. That’s a different thing from extrapolating all indie books and their sales, but I appreciate you holding us up as a bell-weather.
Me, I don’t think there’s any more of a lid on sales of indie books as there is on any other sort of book. The thirteen bucks you have to spend on an INVISIBLES trade is the same thirteen bucks you have to spend on MONSTER ATTACK NETWORK, you know?
If a retailer isn’t stocking our book on his shelf, that’s my fault, not his. I haven’t shown him there’s a demand.
And if you have his phone number, I’ll call him.
September 6th, 2007 at 12:44 am
“…yet another indication of the way that the current direct market retailer order system acts as a bottleneck for sales of indy comics. It means there’s a lid on sales that can only be lifted by getting retailers to understand that indy comics can bring in a new audience that isn’t being served as well by the bookstores as manga fans are.”
That is a very bizarre assesment of the DM marketplace. Not all your fault though, stuff gets repeated so often as fact, that sometimes I almost start believing it myself, almost.
There is no “bottleneck” for indy comics, well not because of the “current direct market retailer order system” anyway.
I think Larry almost touched on the the problem when he suggested that the creator consider avoiding the crowded spandex market in favor of a more wide open genre. I say he almost touched on it because he sorta missed addressing (IMNSHO) the major reason why that was such great counsel.
The bottleneck, if it does exists, exists because most creators (regardless of genre) create and run. They have aabsolutley no idea what it takes to create a viable commercial product and merely ape what they see others doing, or what they think they see others doing. Forget the fact that none of the folks they are aping are succeeding either, they continue lemming like, to create product that has very limited (if any) demand and throw it in a catalog that has limited distribution to a limited consumer base (and have the balls to blame the marketplace for not supporting them!)
I call it the “Print it and they will come” mentality. And where Larry missed the opportunity to make a fantastic point was, it don’t matter if that creator wants to do super-hero, romance, sci-fi, slice-of-life…
if he is not going to create an awareness, a need, a demand for his work, he will see the same thing almost every other indy creator sees. DM orders for 0-1,000 copies.
Why, because the DM consumer base isn’t finite but DM retail space pretty much is. Even if DM retailers could afford to and wanted to order every indy title available, they don’t have the shelf space to display them. And if a publisher/creator isn’t bringing (at least some of) new faces through the DM doors on their own, then they are not going to earn that valuable shelf space over other titles that are delivering customers.
Many indy creators are doing their work on the side, this isn’t how they make a living. Not so for most DM retailers. There is no reason anyone should expect retailers to subsidize any title, no matter how much the retailer may like the book. It’s a business and retailers need their vendors to remember that and act accordingly.
If publishers/creators spent more time studying other entertainment industries instead of inbreeding and creating more retarded efforts by repeating the last 20 years of mistakes, they might see that bottleneck free up.
I’ll leave you with a couple points to ponder.
1) I have many friends in the local music scene. The ones who are constantly booked and actively sought out are the ones that have an active machine that packs their venues full of folks forking over cover charges and buying drinks.
The ones who just know they rock and sit around waiting for everyone to realize how great they are, spend more time sitting next to me in the clubs complaining how “lucky” the guys on stage are.
2) I can’t remember ever going to a theater without knowing what movie I was going to see. Sure, it may have sold out and I had to choose another but I have never just driven to a theater on a whim, just to see what was playing.
I know what I want to see (and what I don’t) because the studios have made sure I knew. They don’t need the theater to shill for them or try to get them to forgo the latest Sony, Paramount or Fox feature in favor of a little indy film.
Theaters are a destination spot as are most comic shops. Some may be in (strip) malls and get some casual interest from walk by traffic but most won’t. If publishers aren’t sending people into those shops talking/asking about their titles, they will not be ordered.
When publishers shoulder their responsibilties in a more professional manner and begin working with the DM, there will be no more talk of bottlenecks and they won’t be able to print books fast enough. Until then, the same whine that I’ve been hearing since the late ’80s during my time in rec.arts.comic.misc and on the Compuserve Comcis forum, “Gosh darn it, if only there were less spandex titles…”