Hmmm, this could be interesting...Marvel, DC and Others Persuade Comic Stores to Put Spinner Racks in Other Businesses



I am curious how this will pan out. There are pros and cons I see here-pros it puts comics where people are outside the traditional direct market, cons-shops could use it as a place to dump poor sellers rather than stocking it with stuff readers might buy creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure for the endeavor, especially if the pop up location buys the books outright from the comic shop rather than a consignment deal. Poor initial sales or experiences are disincentive for pop up locations to re-up on the deal after 6 months, and the books are still non-returnable so someone gets stuck with boos that don't sell, especially if they get beat up form browsers bending and flipping through books on a spinner rack. Fingers crossed this does well and is a good thing for expanding readership, but I can see lots of ways for it to go wrong too.

-M

Well now a lot of what is surplus is copies ordered to meet minimum requirement for variant covers. Some variants are 1 in 10, some 1 in 50, up to 1 in 1000. YOu have a customer who wants that 1 in 500 variant, you have to order 500 copies, if you only sell 100 in your shop, you got 400 copies leftover. You probably made your money back in the price of that variant, but you still have 400 copies of a book to sell.

For many titles now, shops only order enough copies to cover pre-order/pull lists plus maybe 1 or 2 shelf copies unless it is a proven seller like say Batman or Spider-Man. Stuff like Star Comics now, many shops only order for pre-orders customers, so if no one preorders it, they don;t order any copies. It is very hard to find copies of the vast majority of comics on the shelves of comic shops these days unless you preorder it or it is a major event/1st issue/very popular character. This is one of the many reasons books have a hard time building audiences-there are no copies of it available for people to buy in print unless there are already big preorders for it. Occasionally a surprise seller will go back for a second printing (the way the new Ms. Marvel book did when it launched, it had 5 or 6 printings eventually), but this is a business that really only prints to order, retailers order x number of copies and only a few hundred to few thousand more than tat are printed to cover damages. Most stores do not order to have back issues available, they order to sell out before the next issue is released. What they will have as overstock is overorders for variants, or books they overestimated sales on for first through third issues (you can adjust orders for issue 4 of a monthly after you see sales for #1 but you have to order #2 and #3 before #1 comes out on monthly books the way Diamond is set up). Many retailer shave longboxes of that kind of overstock, they usually dump as bargain stock at cons and such, but if you can dump them on a pop up retailer for a better price, some will go for the quick buck even if it has long term negative effects. Not all, there are some really good retailers out there. But there are some bad ones too. I'd have more faith in the spinner rack pop up if there were standard terms and parameters for stocking them as part of the initiative, but Diamond is leaving that up to each individual retailer in hopes they can tailor something that works well in their community, and the ideal is good, but all it takes is some bad retailers to see the loopholes and abuse them to their own advantage even if someone else gets screwed for it all to come crashing down like a house of cards.

-M