|
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2014 7:44:43 GMT -5
Just to add a little more perspective-there are roughly 5000 Diamond accounts at last estimate, i.e. establishments that place monthly orders with Diamond distributors. If a book sells in the 10K copies a month range (like DH Super-hero books, Valiant, a lot of Dynamite books, etc., that's an average of 2 copies per account. If you then consider there are accounts like Westfield, DCBS, TFAW, Midtown Comics etc. that do mail order accounts across the country and probably order hundreds of copies of those books, that means there are a significant number of accounts that order 0 copies to keep that average at 2.
It's not a poor business decision to not carry a product line that doesn't sell or make you a profit. It's a necessary one to keep cash flow liquid and stay in business. What would be a poor business decision is to carry a product you know won't sell and waste resources to do so and pay even more in opportunity costs as the money could be better spent on something that does generate revenue.
-M
|
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Nov 30, 2014 11:45:40 GMT -5
I'm not doubting you, but that's pretty poor business decision I'd say. Hard to believe that people don't want Dark Horse. Is the product failing or the service ? I'm total agreement with MRP here and I just wanted to say thanks for MRP for writing it up for me. It's pretty sad in our area and not many comic book readers don't enjoy Dark Horse Comics. Sorry to say this, but MRP spoke in reality here. |
|
|
|
Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 1, 2014 11:43:41 GMT -5
In our shop, the Dark Horse Hero lines has a grand total of zero pulls for the entire line. Buffy and Angel are the best selling Dark Horse titles in our shop now that the Star Wars line is done. Halo and Mass Effect also sell decently. We have one guy getting DHP. That's about it. Our customer base general reaction is that they don't want "fake super-heroes" if they are going to get super-hero comics they want the real thing (i.e. Marvel & DC). Non-super-hero indies do ok, but non-Marvel/DC super-hero books are pretty much down to pull order only ordering because they just don't sell for us, not even when we put them in the dollar bins 6 months or so after they are released. Not even Occultist sells by Tim Seeley, and because Tim was guest of honor at the first 2 Champion City Comic Cons and did store appearance, he has a pretty hardcore fan base at the store-we can sell a lot of Hack and Slash (and constantly have to reorder trade collections of it)and other Seeley stuff, but Occultist gets wrapped up with the fake/cheap imitation super-hero mentality of our customer base that they wouldn't read if you gave them the books for free. Valiant gets the same reaction in our shop too. We have 1 guy who pulls the whole Valiant line, one guy who got Harbinger and Unity and one guy who samples the books each month. No one else has picked up a copy. Not even the $1 intro issues Valiant did that we got in to promote the line. Invincible Spawn and Savage Dragon gt the same reaction. We have 1 pull for Spawn, 0 for Savage Dragon and had 1 guy in 5 years buy Invincible, but he moved a year ago and we haven't moved an issue since. If we get a customer who wants to add them to a pull or even tells us he wants to pick them up off the shelf, we would order them in (we like books that sell not matter who puts them out, the genre, or the creative team), but they don't sell for us and if we go three months without a selling a copy of a book we stop ordering it until such a time someone asks us to carry it again. Our shop may not be typical, but it's not unique either. Small shops have to know what their clientele will buy and order accordingly. There are too many books to carry them all and many are bad risks based on your clientele. The cut off line for making a profit is 80% sell through. So if we order 5 copies of a book, we need to sell 4 before anything sold is profit because of overhead and margins. Anything we can't sell 4 of we can only order as many copies as sell exactly or we make no money on the book. So unless we know it will sell, we don't order a book. And that includes all of the Dark Horse hero line. We tried. X and Ghost sold copie sof #1, but #2, 3, 4 didn't move any copies, so they were done, Capt. Midnight made it to issue 6 before we dropped it, as someone tried 0,1, and 2 (3 sat unpicked up in a file on that customer who just stopped coming in). Occultist didn't sell at all. After that, we stopped ordering in new series if we didn't have a pre-order on #1. We haven't gotten a single pre-order.... No sense in throwing good money after bad supporting a line that doesn't move in our shop. -M Off topic I know, but I love this inside baseball kind of thing, how do books like Hellboy, BPRD and Abe sell at your shop? |
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2014 12:05:41 GMT -5
Off topic I know, but I love this inside baseball kind of thing, how do books like Hellboy, BPRD and Abe sell at your shop? Sadly not at all outside of me, and I am doing the trade route on them for the most part. The new Maleev series is the first we passed on, which guts me, but we just don't move Hellboy in our shop. The good news is it sells a little better at a couple of other shops in the area I know the owners of, and we passed our unsold backstock of stuff to them for customers who were just getting into the stuff. The sad part is that we have a big horror fan base in or shop, but because it's not gory enough and has no zombies, they won't buy into the Mignola stuff. They'll jump on Avatar stuff though.... The other problem I see (and this is just me) is that there is a large intersection between the horror fans in our customer base and the guys looking to flip books for ridiculous profits and they are all looking for the next Walking Dead to buy into and get rich on, and that's not the Mignola stuff. I wish I knew a way to get people around here to get into the Mignola stuff, but in the nearly 2 years I have been helping out at our shop, we haven't ever sold more than 2-3 copies of any Mignola book, and the folks who were into it seemed to have disappeared when the store moved to a new location a little over a year ago. Meanwhile I have a bunch of horror guys who pick up multiple covers or 2 issues of Crossed a month and will snag every cover variant for Evil Ernie or Lady Death, but look at you as if you had killed a puppy when you suggest Mignola to them. -M |
|
|
|
Post by thwhtguardian on Dec 1, 2014 12:18:17 GMT -5
Strange times indeed.
|
|
|
|
Post by wildfire2099 on Dec 1, 2014 14:49:16 GMT -5
I tried Captain Midnight... it didn't grab me enough to spend $3.50/$3.99 or whatever on it. I liked DeConnick's Ghost, but getting an older omnibus made me re-think that... it's awfully anti-female (the older ones, anyway).
I think the only thing I pull from Dark Horse is Conan and Usagi.
|
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2014 15:01:00 GMT -5
The Comic Book Store that I go to officially took out Dark Horse Comics in it's entirety due to poor sales and all that. He had an agreement with Dark Horse to buy 100 Comics of 8-12 Titles a month; the problem is that he sells 12-16 Books (per title) per month - and losing monies badly.
Having said that, he told his Dark Horse Comics Customers to go to a Comic Book Store a hour drive away from his store and they could use the business there. The problem is that none of our customers wants to do this because it's would mean 2-3 (Drive, home, business and back) hours to get there.
That's all I can say about them.
|
|
|
|
Post by Deleted on Dec 1, 2014 15:22:37 GMT -5
The Comic Book Store that I go to officially took out Dark Horse Comics in it's entirety due to poor sales and all that. He had an agreement with Dark Horse to buy 100 Comics of 8-12 Titles a month; the problem is that he sells 12-16 Books (per title) per month - and losing monies badly. Having said that, he told his Dark Horse Comics Customers to go to a Comic Book Store a hour drive away from his store and they could use the business there. The problem is that none of our customers wants to do this because it's would mean 2-3 (Drive, home, business and back) hours to get there. That's all I can say about them. See that's a bad business decision too. You don't need to sign up for a Dark Horse program to order their books (those are meant for stores who do high volume), you order what you can sell for each book from Diamond. If you are signing up for a retailer program from a publisher without knowing what you can and will sell in your store, you are not doing your job very well. If you can sell some but not the volume needed for the incentive programs, order it when you place your monthly Diamond order on an a la carte basis. Never send your customers to another shop for a book regularly, once there, they will likely shift their pull list there and you will lose all their business. In fact, it's better to order the book from that other shop at retail and pay to have it shipped so your customer gets what they want and are satisfied with their experience at your shop than it is to send them to another shop when they are dissatisfied. You will lose in the short term on that product, but will likely retain the customer and their long term revenue. Send them to the other shop and kiss all the revenue they bring goodbye, plus you will be stuck with the books on their pull for the next 3 months because you have already ordered them, unless you know for certain they are gone (and they won't tell you, you have to guess) and can cut orders before FOC. Don't carry what you don't sell sure, but never turn away a customer who wants to buy products you can get. -M |
|
|
|
Post by hondobrode on Dec 2, 2014 0:05:27 GMT -5
There are more fanboys owning shops than business people owning shops, hence, poor service and selection.
It's been my lifelong dream to open a shop and make it great, but alas, that's not going to happen.
Especially over the last few years with DH's digital store, I've become more and more a fan.
One of the biggest challenges to the store and consumer both is getting the right product mix and then being able to give them the exposure they need.
How many times do I see a store with Marvel and DC prominently displayed and everything else is covered up with the last 6 months worth of product stacked on top of it ?
It takes work to put the older issues into long boxes and rotate the new ones, but that's good retailing and that's your job.
I'm sure if retailers did this, they'd find a shocking number of indies being sold. I've found this myself from my digital purchases, where I have access to everything via the Internet.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dizzy D on Apr 7, 2015 5:44:42 GMT -5
Bumping this as I got the new Empowered in my inbox last weekend, which hadn't been mentioned, though I believe that others are reading it (dupont and dupersuper, IIRC?)
Last issue was a collection of the oneshots previously published (so if anybody is interested in some single issues Empowered, I have a few of them lying around) with various guest artists.
|
|
|
|
Post by hondobrode on Apr 7, 2015 23:54:41 GMT -5
Empowered was a huge surprise to me.
I gave it a chance and Adam Warren really bowled me over and I love this title now.
Could easily see this on Adult Swim.
|
|
|
|
Post by Dizzy D on Apr 8, 2015 4:18:03 GMT -5
I got into Adam Warren through Gen13, his was by far the best run on that title. His Livewires and Iron Man: Hypervelocity were also great, but Empowered is definitely his best work so far.
|
|
