COMICSPRO INCOMING
ComicsPRO 2020 is almost here and I’ll be off to Portland next week, but wanted to take a few minutes here to talk about the meeting with people here before I hop on the plane.
For those who don’t know, ComicsPRO is the Comics Professional Retail Organization. It is a trade group for comic retailers to collectively work to improve the business of the comic industry as well as network with each other, publishers, suppliers, and creators. If you own a store that sells comics, I cannot recommend joining highly enough. The organization has been one of the most beneficial things for my business in its history. I’ve met lifelong friends, made invaluable business contacts, and, eventually even started working on doing the work of helping run the organization and it has been incredibly rewarding.
The single biggest thing the organization does each year is the meeting where a large number of us get together in person and discuss issues, challenges, and upcoming projects. Unlike most comic events, there’s rarely much “breaking news” that fans and readers would be interested in checking out.
For example, last year Boom! Studios, one of the biggest supporters of ComicsPRO, announced Once and Future, but the emphasis wasn’t on the editorial content as much as it was focused squarely on the programs Boom! was putting in place to help make it a success for retailers. And if you read my article on 2019 best selling comics, that focus worked.
We hold seminars and meetings where knowing about what is coming in the next issue of Superman isn’t as important as understanding the marketing push behind the book.
That said, each year I try to go to ComicsPRO with some data to discuss with publishers and clear questions to pose to them about how they’re doing business in the coming year.
This year, I have one clear question I want answered. What are publishers doing to extend their reach and drive people to their product?
It is no secret if you dig around that overall circulation numbers of periodical comics have been lagging overall. Even when a book clears the 100k circulation mark, it is usually due to a large number of covers being produced. (For those who don’t know, when Diamond announces best sellers, they combine the covers for a book into a single line item. So a book that has five covers with an average of 20k per cover shows up on the chart as a single item with 100k total copies.) Periodical comics have a great deal of challenges facing them in the current entertainment marketplace, and I want to know what publishers are planning to do to push their product above the noise levels of the various entertainment options in the market.
It really feels like publishers are not focusing on true outreach efforts. A Twitter account and an article on a comic news site is NOT outreach, but they seem to think that is enough. Many publishers also talk to us about hand selling their books, and that is simply not a good plan. As Billy Beane said, “Hope is not a strategy.” The amount of hope that is put in retailers handselling books is entirely too high, it ignores the basic fact that there’s hundreds of choices every single week, and it is physically impossible to handsell them all. Publishers who can’t produce a reasonable answer to this inquiry will definitely see a lower priority in my ordering in the upcoming year.
Beyond all of that, there will be plenty of time chatting with other retailers which is one of the most valuable aspects of the show. There’s a million ways to run a comic book store, and the only correct one is the one that stays open and profitable. Learning how others approach that in person is invaluable for coming up with strategies in the future. As I’ve said for years, I’m terrible at coming up with ideas, but I’m great at using a good one when I see it!
Also this year, I have figured out that I can update this blog from my phone on Squarespace’s app so that is something I may experiment with while I am there. I’ll try not to do a blog post on the pitfalls of reusing barcodes though. I don’t want to bore you that much!
Tim