http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page ... e&id=32417
Take the time to read this if you are interested in what a retailer is seeing happen. Here are some of the more fascinating (to me) quotes:
There is, especially in this economic climate, a finite number of dollars available to be spent by existing consumers, and once you produce material beyond that effective cap what you end up actually doing is fragmenting your own market. This is a very bad no good thing to do because, as stated, the periodical market provides the steady cash flow needed for the market to function at all -- sensibly producing collections is inherently less risky than producing OGNs! And periodical production is essentially a contract between publisher and consumer. Start breaking that contract, start pushing the market past its point to absorb product, and you risk the entire thing coming down.
What's been going on for a long time is that the top is really (and this may be too harsh of a word, but I'm not sure I have another?) collapsing, while the bottom is steadily growing, and the middle is no worse that flat. This maybe doesn't sound so bad (after all, we only lost about 2.5% in total pieces in three years, and with this recession that's pretty awesome!), it fundamentally changes the way the market operates.
When people talk about "the death of the Direct Market" I usually groan, because they generally think that outside forces are far more corrosive than they actually are, or that the notion of a specialty store is somehow inherently flawed, but I firmly believe that the DM may in fact die in my lifetime, but that the culprit will actually be murder by the publishers (especially Marvel)
I also firmly believe that the publishers (especially Marvel) don't actually know that they're slowly strangling their own base -- oh, sure sure they can see how the national numbers move, but I think they don't actually know what those numbers actually mean in any individual environment. Largely this is because that as a "big business," they tend to only want to listen to the largest volume stores. I mean, duh, right? You probably would too, I'm not actually faulting them for that -- but the issue is that those largest volume stores absorb unsold books very differently than medium or small stores do.
What the Direct Market needs to be healthy is a lot more titles where the average store can sell fifty copies and no more titles (none!) where we're going to sell 5 or less.
The other side of this, of course, is that what you do publish should be released in a logical fashion. I frankly believe that my personal nadir of Direct Market behavior was reached on April 27 of this year, when Marvel released two separate issues of "Secret Avengers" (#12, and #12 "point one") on the same day. That is literally unfathomable publishing behavior. Why would you compete with your own product, especially with an iteration intended to serve on a "jumping on point"? How can that possibly make sense?
And, of course, I sold 10% less than usual of those two issues, but who has to pay for that? Certainly not Marvel.
As an aside, this is essentially what killed the superb show "Firefly", in that case it was Fox airing the episodes out of order on variable days/times. It was never able to build a core audience.It kills me, it literally kills me as I watch publisher after publisher, time and time again, walk up to their customers and say to their face, "Please stop buying my comics!". Whether that's feast-or-famine shipping, completely blowing the scheduling on new lines, not balancing a production schedule over the month, whatever. Behavior that we tolerate in the DM would never ever fly in any other medium. Can you imagine a TV show succeeding with the kind of stop-and-start, constant change-in-scheduling kind of production that we have in comics? No, the mass audience wouldn't be interested in those kinds of shenanigans.
And now for some stuff for the people who like to buy trades:
The funny thing is that the math of a reprint really should be pure gold: with a steady turn rate, recouping your fixed costs comes absurdly early in the product lifecycle -- for a retailer by the time I've sold my third copy of, say, "Watchmen", every single copy sold after that it pure profit and essentially found money (the second "turn" of the book breaks you even on the cost of the product initially, as well as the replacement cost) -- but this assumes you only put out material that has strong turns, which clearly we're not doing.
The problem with the "bookstore model" is that dead inventory chokes all of the profit away. "Three turns and you're profitable" doesn't work if you're absorbing a whole lot of material that never turns the first time. These days Marvel and DC combined are publishing something like twenty new TPs/HCs each and every week. The market can't absorb all of that material from just two of the myriad of publishers, and I believe that we need to drastically scale down the amount of collections we produce if we want what we produce to sell well.
