So, Marvel has just sent out a press release announcing its free double-ship of next month’s Point One one-shot:
To ensure all retailers have enough stock to meet anticipated demand over the next year, Marvel will provide all retailers with an additional 100% of their orders for Point One (excluding incentive inked variant cover) at no additional cost (excluding shipping).
What’s odd about the release is that it includes David Gabriel apparently revealing that the book had been ordered really low originally. He’s quoted as saying “We just want to make sure everyone is well stocked with over 120,000 copies of this book in stores for excited readers.” So… that’s 120,000 copies after doubling initial orders? Which means that initial orders were around 60,000? That wouldn’t have brought it into the top 20 books sold in September. Admittedly, that was a freak month, but still: That barely has it in the top 10 in July or August, either. Doesn’t that seem rather low to anyone else, considering that Point One is supposed to be a primer/teaser for everything major in Marvel’s 2012 plans?
Also, I got into this yesterday on Twitter, but now I’m curious: Given that retailers will now have twice as many copies as they ordered, what are they planning to do with them? Will they give the extras away? Sell them full-price? Sell all of their copies half-price ($2.50 is a much more attractive price than $4.99, after all)?
October 19th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Comic Suite has been very buggy recently. At one point, I was unable to add Point One as a special order for one of the store’s biggest customers.
Maybe this is part of the issue?
October 19th, 2011 at 1:58 pm
They’d have to sell it at full price, because there’s no reason to believe that they could sell twice as many at half the price if the order was so low to begin with.
I’d love to see something like, “Buy any issue of the Sixth Gun and get Point One free,” which they could spin pretty easily since Cullen Bunn is a Marvel writer now.
October 19th, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Marvel are nuts.
A brief look at the credits tells you that the book is a glorified trailer. If they were offering this for free, I might be inclined to take a look.
At five bucks? Zero interest.
October 19th, 2011 at 2:34 pm
The more relevant question is: Would they even need to overship if they had priced it appropriately as a promotional comic (like DC did with Brave New World and Countdown a few years back) in the first place?
October 19th, 2011 at 6:33 pm
at 5$ buck’s im surprised it sold that many I mean come on.
October 19th, 2011 at 7:51 pm
“The more relevant question is: Would they even need to overship if they had priced it appropriately as a promotional comic (like DC did with Brave New World and Countdown a few years back) in the first place?”
Nailed it, just about. 64 pages of new story for six bucks wouldn’t be so bad if there were an actual story there (like Countdown), but when it’s just a series of eight-page teasers for storylines that will play out elsewhere? Absurd.
October 19th, 2011 at 10:20 pm
maybe people are finaly starting to stop leting marvel uping the price on the consumer.kind of a shame that marvel admit’s to increseing there price’s just to see if people will still buy them.(my basic point is if you don’t they will lower the price by there own word’s lol)
October 20th, 2011 at 12:11 am
You might have a point here.
October 20th, 2011 at 8:34 am
Yeah, while there may be some good stuff here, I just can’t drop $5 on a book full of 8 page previews for coming series. If Marvel was really interested in getting these into readers’ hands they would have followed DC’s lead from a few years ago and priced them at $1. Will probably pick one of these up when they’re sitting on the shelves at FCBD next May.
October 21st, 2011 at 1:25 am
I believe the retail price for this book is $5.99, not $5. Looks like it’s going to be a winner.