Mayo Report

[JohnMayo]

John may have info on the # of titles that Marvel/DC publish each month. May not have all this data since they may have titles that don't make it into the top 300. At a minimum, it should be possible to show the # of Marvel/DC titles in the top 300 each month over time. Total # of titles published in each month? I'm not sure if John has that data since it's not necessarily in the Top 300 data released by Diamond.

I have a ton of data beyond just the top 300 comics. This is why the Excel file I put together every month is so extensive. Doing these kinds of queries and getting accurate results requires more consistent data than is provided. I've been working on a faster data cleaning process which would make answering these kinds of questions much more doable. This is one of the many things that I try to work on between the weekly comic book reading and podcasting.

[LA Rabbit]

Enjoy the episode as always. I have no insight into the numbers behind Boom but I think those variant covers seem to be quite popular and, at least in the short term, worthwhile. When I go to artists alley, I see the artists moving their variant cover copies and often selling them out. Part of the success is because they done very well with getting the Adventure Time license. Those are their best selling books and seem to have some legs.

At least locally, Boom really has not grabbed the local LCS market. My main guy does stock Boom but pretty much a few copies. If you miss out on it that Wednesday, then you are out of luck. The store mainly turns new comics and collectibles. The back issues are just about non-existant (a few recent months) and the trades are just a few book shelves. This place has a decent selection, they get IDW, Dynamite, Image, Broadsword, Avatar, Aspen, Red 5 but the fat stacks are Marvel and DC. He does stock the Adventure Time stuff and I have been able to grab Superbia but if I am not there Wednesday, I will miss out. Deathmatch #2 I missed. So I now have 1 and 3. The LCS a few blocks up the street is the one that never even heard of Boom when a long time ago I asked about Valen. I could haul up to Earth 2 (but it is a long walk) and they are so-so on indy books. Overall a nice clean, well-lit, friendly place but failed to capture my imagination. Last night I was in the city, so was going to swing by Meltdown but it was 9:30 so they were closed. In all likelyhood all this nonsense means there is a fair chance I am done with Deathmatch.

I haven't asked but I have to imagine the Mark Waid books ending hurt. I also think that Stan Lee Boom universe may have hurt. He used to stock all that stuff but those things had no long lasting demand. I liked them but I imagine you can pick them all up for next to nothing if you can find them. They may have been pulped by now.

I think they are smart to keep the series short (not sure that is intentional or not). I liked Valen, I read Superbia and think it was smart that they restarted with a new number 1. Because their distribution is so spotty, they need to keep it short.

If I was Boom, they need to reach out to the LCS, the dollar first issue is great but it seems like their follow-up is just too spotty. I had trouble with Valen as well, I was able to pick up the missing issues at cons and at the well-stocked LCS's in my area. Most LCS aren't really stores but more just gatekeepers. They need to win them over. Not sure how feasible to track but they may want to consider some buybacks.

The Nemo book is very good. It is a fairly straight up old timey adventure story with a bit of a send up of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. With the League I probably land about 40% of the references but it still works for me. Because this is a stand alone adventure, it may read better for y'all. It is a nice package and a quick read (for a league book). That normally is a strike against but might help win you back.

I think that Squadron Supreme mini was recently on sale at Comixology. I heard coverage of the story on a recent podcast and pretty sure he got it off Comixology. I just checked and they are currently $1.99 an issue. I guess that is good for digital (I don't buy digital) but would think you could get those issues cheaper at a con. I have not read it since it came out but I remember liking it.

If you do start up Mayo comics, put me down for a sale. I still wouldn't mind hearing the details of your old business plans (or new ones). Thanks.

[BobBretall]

If you do start up Mayo comics, put me down for a sale.

You say that now, but you'd cut John loose when you discovered that your local shops that don't even stock Boom! were not stocking his indie label either.....

[Nissl]

You guys said you wanted to hear from any listeners getting under a half dozen series per month, so here I am. Right now I'm at 5. (Saga, Thor, Hawkeye, MLP, MLP micro.) I'm an animation fan, I love exploring the business side of... just about anything really, and I'm on a 6 month project that involves a lot of mindless busy work and I'm using podcasts to keep myself sane. I actually was a bit of a collector back in the early 90's, dropped it when I hit my teen years, and just got a little bit interested in the industry again maybe half a year ago because of the last two titles on my list. Since then I've tried about ~20 titles, including a few recommendations off your podcast (mostly things that have buzz on /co/, though), and I've stuck with the few that clicked. The low click rate for me probably reflects what seems to be my natural entertainment "home" in animation, dating all the way back to The Simpsons and early 90's Disney movies.

Anyway, I like the data-driven analysis you guys do, and the comic industry has a lot of very unusual standard practices that I find pretty interesting.

[SpideySavestheDay]

I want to start this post with a 'thank you' for a great podcast.

Recalling the discussion of the main Batman title carrying the bat-family, it made me think can any other character carry so many books? Is this a case of the right writer (Snyder) matched with the right character? Can Snyder/Lee do the same with Superman? Will that new book carry all the 'super' titles with crossovers?

Comparing the two characters over the course of the relaunch, it appears Batman is head and shoulders above Superman. DC seems to be pulling the strings fairly well with one but not the other. Why can't it do the same with its other major character?

[JohnMayo]

Comparing the two characters over the course of the relaunch, it appears Batman is head and shoulders above Superman. DC seems to be pulling the strings fairly well with one but not the other. Why can't it do the same with its other major character?

Maybe the people at DC are waiting for the court cases of who owns Superman to come to a conclusion before fully leveraging Superman.

[LA Rabbit]

Enjoyed the latest episodes as always. Your comment about whether a book is salvagable from a sales perspective after it reaches a certain point is something I wonder about as well. Speaking just about DC, how soon do you think they can try renumbering a title and getting the traditional big (but temporary) bounce? By doing the big reboot, they removed that tool from their arsenal at least for a few years I would think.

As far as other tricks to revive a dying title, I don't know what DC could do. The crossover bump ends when the crossover ends. They have tried some creative changes but at the bottom end it doesn't seem to make much different.

I was struck by how high the sort of regular percentage of decline in a title normally is. I wonder if it is not just people dropping the book but also stores tighting up their orders. Maybe So Cal is a strange market but as I have commented before very few stores maintain much in the way of back issues, some better than others. I tend to use the internet to usually get my back issues (maybe a con). I wonder if some stores would rather lose a potential sale or two than muck around with low end DC or Marvel titles. From personal experience, it seems that short lived titles from the big 2 seem to be plentiful in the cheap bins. If a store gambles on one of these titles and it ends up getting canceled they are stuck with some issues that they have to fire sale. Everything they order is money out of their pockets and space on the shelves. I would think having another copy of Walking Dead TPB would probably move as opposed to a bunch of OMAC #3's. As a store owner it must be tempting to try to jump off the sinking ship ahead of time which only helps sink the ship faster. Not sure this idea isn't just hot air and maybe titles sell what they sell. Certainly an owner risks losing customers if they deprive customers of books they want but they may just order enough to cover the existing pull list so there aren't any around for curious new customers.

Maybe by offering a buyback/credit on some of these lower selling books would encourage the stores to take a risk to retry one of these failing books? Probably not worth the effort on behalf of the publisher.

[JohnMayo]

Enjoyed the latest episodes as always. Your comment about whether a book is salvagable from a sales perspective after it reaches a certain point is something I wonder about as well. Speaking just about DC, how soon do you think they can try renumbering a title and getting the traditional big (but temporary) bounce? By doing the big reboot, they removed that tool from their arsenal at least for a few years I would think.

They could relaunch with a new #1 with the next round of solicitations. I think it would be a mistake to do so unless the relaunched title was somehow fundamentally so different that keeping the numbering would just be unthinkable. I can't really imagine such as case but I'm open idea that such as case could exist. But not reverting Detective Comics to #900 recently, DC does seem committed to the new numbering. I respect that.

As far as other tricks to revive a dying title, I don't know what DC could do. The crossover bump ends when the crossover ends. They have tried some creative changes but at the bottom end it doesn't seem to make much different.

Some properties doesn't seem to have that larger of a core audience almost regardless of who is on the creative team.

I was struck by how high the sort of regular percentage of decline in a title normally is. I wonder if it is not just people dropping the book but also stores tighting up their orders.

Certainly it is a reflection of stores tightening up orders. I suspect the majority of stores order for what they can sell by the time the issue would get taken off the rack. Back issues are a niche market inside a niche market. Some stores do still have back issue bins but that seems to be increasingly less common. We have at least two such stores here in Austin, Texas. One might do decent business on back issues (Austin Books) but I would be a bit surprised if the other one does (Capstone Comics). The days of stores ordering extras for the back issue bin are pretty much gone. Obviously, there are some titles were ordering a copy of two for the back issue bins might be viable but that is the exception, not the rule.

Maybe So Cal is a strange market but as I have commented before very few stores maintain much in the way of back issues, some better than others. I tend to use the internet to usually get my back issues (maybe a con). I wonder if some stores would rather lose a potential sale or two than muck around with low end DC or Marvel titles. From personal experience, it seems that short lived titles from the big 2 seem to be plentiful in the cheap bins. If a store gambles on one of these titles and it ends up getting canceled they are stuck with some issues that they have to fire sale. Everything they order is money out of their pockets and space on the shelves. I would think having another copy of Walking Dead TPB would probably move as opposed to a bunch of OMAC #3's. As a store owner it must be tempting to try to jump off the sinking ship ahead of time which only helps sink the ship faster. Not sure this idea isn't just hot air and maybe titles sell what they sell. Certainly an owner risks losing customers if they deprive customers of books they want but they may just order enough to cover the existing pull list so there aren't any around for curious new customers.

I think Southern California is a somewhat unique market. Much like New York City, Chicago, Dallas and San Francisco, Southern California seems to have a larger number of stores than most parts of the country have. Population density is a factor. Regardless, if a title isn't selling, the best a store can sometimes hope to do is blow it out cheap and not have to hassle with it taking up space in the store. Some stores order just enough to the pull list customers and none for the rack on lower selling titles. That prevents the title from growing an audience at the store but also prevents the store from losing money on the title by having unsold copies. It is a bad situation all around. Readers have difficulty finding lower selling titles. Creators, publishers and retailers all lose out on sales to casual readers. But, compared to the virtual certainty of losing money on copies that history indicates won't sell, I can't really fault the retailers.

Maybe by offering a buyback/credit on some of these lower selling books would encourage the stores to take a risk to retry one of these failing books? Probably not worth the effort on behalf of the publisher.

That isn't a horrible idea. It shifts the risk back to the publisher which seems fair. But it also makes a title which probably isn't all that profitable that much less profitable for the publisher.

Perhaps the better avenue to success is for creators, publishers and retailers to invest in learning what keeps readers around on a title and focusing on that. Before trying to get people back into a sinking ship, find the leak and plug it. This sort of investigation is possible with point of sales information which many retailers are collecting already. That data just needs to be gathered and analyzed.

[fudd71]

Some comments John made on the two most recent Mayo Report’s got me thinking about the number of comics the “average buyer” purchases per month. One of the things I find interesting having friends and acquaintances running a broad spectrum from around 10 -120 book a month, that we all have a budget. That budget is not necessarily a financial budget, but in some cases time, or even our own ability to remember multiple stories is the budgeting device. Seemingly most comic fans have a monthly level of comics they are comfortable buying/reading, if anything most people tend to buy slightly more then they can comfortably read. Seemingly a large number of comic readers I know end up with a large to-read pile of purchased books, over time they realize they have a large quantity of title X in their to-read pile and stop buying that title.

The point is that there seems to be a limit to the number of titles any given reader gets per month, whatever that number is. Not just a limit but also a stable range. Personally for me that number is around 80 titles a month (and I read them all, and don’t have a larger to-read pile) others will have a lower number, some will be a higher number. Almost no one I am aware of buys for example in a six month span: 70 month 1, 6 month 2, 80 month 3, 40 month 4, 10 month 5 and 100 month 6. The deviation in the number of books purchased from month to month just isn’t that great. If you buy 30 titles a month you may have a month with 25 or a month with 35 but you won’t have anything wildly out of that range. One thing that is common and seemingly more common is that there is a group of people always looking for the “next big thing”. This is the, “I’ll buy every #1 theory”. Heck even some comic professionals have this attitude, I heard Jimmy Palmiotti say he did this very thing at a Wonder Con panel.

This sounds like a great idea, the problem is it will lead to the inevitable dropping of a previous title. So if you read 30 books a months and try 3 number one issues a month in ten months you would have dropped every title you are currently reading. I realize it isn’t a straight line like this, but you get the point. Constantly looking for something new will inevitably lead to this bleeding off of an older title.

A lot of the grumbling I hear about the Marvel double shipping of titles really comes down to this same problem. Bob has talked about this on multiple episodes. Financial or not we all have a budget of some sort. Getting a new book, be it a new title, a greater number per month of the same title or crossover mini series forces us all to reevaluate our budget. Some of us may have a somewhat elastic budget but still new books each month will change the budget. And that will hold true if you are 200 issue a month buyer or a 10 issue a month buyer.

While John made a valid point that while there is no longer an advantage to a large issue number there really isn’t an advantage to a low number either. The key is what gets someone to drop a book they are getting and try your book. The simplest way to get people to do this is a new #1. After the #1 the number is irrelevant. The chance of a reader buying issue #2 or #222 is based almost entirely on if they bought #1 or #221 and it is easier to sell #1 then #221.

[fudd71]

Another interesting but admittedly antidotal piece of evidence to my theory. I was chatting with the owner of my local shop about this last night, I mentioned the idea that people tend to buy the same number of books consistently. He said he noticed this years ago and it hasn’t really changed. Particularly when looking at Wednesday receipts for the shop. That regardless of the weekly invoice total from Diamond, the Wednesday shop receipts tended to be the same. It didn’t matter if it was a big shipping week or a small shipping week. Obviously it changed slowly over time as the business grew but did not change much week to week with large or small numbers of new titles.

[JohnMayo]

Another interesting but admittedly antidotal piece of evidence to my theory. I was chatting with the owner of my local shop about this last night, I mentioned the idea that people tend to buy the same number of books consistently. He said he noticed this years ago and it hasn’t really changed. Particularly when looking at Wednesday receipts for the shop. That regardless of the weekly invoice total from Diamond, the Wednesday shop receipts tended to be the same. It didn’t matter if it was a big shipping week or a small shipping week. Obviously it changed slowly over time as the business grew but did not change much week to week with large or small numbers of new titles.

I find that very interesting. I would have expected sales to reflect the size of the shipping week to some degree. If a number of top selling titles come out one week and the next is mainly nothing by lower selling titles, I would expect the first week to be better than the second. His this retailer charted the Wednesday totals or would he be willing to do so? Even if he takes the dollar amount off the chart, it would be interesting to see.

[the1captain]

Sometimes I feel that the publishers really don't care that much about a huge drop off between issues one and two. Likely they factor in approximately what they figure issue 2 of the series is likely to get. Then how to boost sales on issue one as that is the one that they can likely bump numbers up on. For example, if book "A" is assumed to sell approximately 40K with its 2nd issue. Based on character interest, creative team, ect. But they know issue one will sell better just based on first issue syndrome. Add on variant covers, speculators, ect one can see issue one sales surging.

In other words, if companies already assume issue 2 of "A" will likely sell about 40k. (just making up a number for an example) What does it matter to them the size of the drop from issue one? If the drop is 50 percent or 70 percent. If in this example they hit 40K then they hit their goal. Regardless of the drop amount. They already know the sales will be inflated for that issue due to the above reasons.

My opinion is their marketing is focused on short term bumps in numbers rather than grow a fan base that can grow and be relied upon to come back to a particular book every month.

[the1captain]

The real problem is marketing for the comics industry is its incest like devouring of the already converted. What is being done to draw interest from outside the comic shop world itself? What are they doing to help push along the next generation of fans?

Putting out an Avengers movie is not enough. Building an ad campaign outside the industry itself to show people more about what comics are about these days. If I was never a comic fan but liked the Avengers movie, how can I get into comics? Where to start? I'm not going into Barnes and Noble and buying a trade for $15. Especially when I have no idea where to start. Local comic shop? What if there are none is my area? Also, as much fun as the Avengers was, it doesn't illustrate the wide variety of comics that are out there. I'm not putting down that movie. That wasn't their intent.

People think digital is the great hook for new fans. As much as I have grown to really like digital. How many people outside the fandom in the "real" world even know digital comics exists? Or how they work?

This is where sometimes I think comics lost something when they left the newsstands and spinner racks. Think of all that advertisement of different books out there for people that never walked into a comic shop. At a check out in a store a dad might impulse buy a 2.99 comic of their child. Even if dad's not a fan himself. And maybe that leads to a new fan. They are less likely to splurge on $15 for a trade for their child.

[BobBretall]

That regardless of the weekly invoice total from Diamond, the Wednesday shop receipts tended to be the same. It didn’t matter if it was a big shipping week or a small shipping week. Obviously it changed slowly over time as the business grew but did not change much week to week with large or small numbers of new titles.

This makes a certain amount of sense. Maybe customers have something like $20 per week to spend & they go in the shop and buy $20 of stuff that interests them from the vast array of stuff that is available to pick from that week.

[SpideySavestheDay]

This is where sometimes I think comics lost something when they left the newsstands and spinner racks. Think of all that advertisement of different books out there for people that never walked into a comic shop. At a check out in a store a dad might impulse buy a 2.99 comic of their child. Even if dad's not a fan himself. And maybe that leads to a new fan. They are less likely to splurge on $15 for a trade for their child.

How many of us can remember going to the grocery store with mom and endlessly begging for candy, cheap toys, or, in my case, MAD magazine. From having kids of my own, I know they still beg for all those items except for...the magazine/comic book.

The real problem is marketing for the comics industry is its incest like devouring of the already converted. What is being done to draw interest from outside the comic shop world itself? What are they doing to help push along the next generation of fans?

The term "incest" is perfect description of marketing in comics. Think about every time you visit your LCS. Who's shopping? Kids or adults? Who's buying - kids or adults? Are the shop owners appealing to people who are 'all in' or those on a budget (usually kids).

As we approach Free Comic Day, this question needs to be answered - Are those comics going to new customers (hopefully kids) or established readers (adults)? I do not partake in Free Comic Day but I encourage my middle school students to do so. Whenever I discover another student talking, reading, or discussing comics, I always ask about Free Comic Day and the usually response is shock that someone is giving away comics. The good news is the shock is followed by a smile. The bad news is why didn't these future comic readers know about Free Comic Day? Quite a few of them are not visiting their LCS. Instead they are buying comics from a hodge-podge of local stores that specialize in other areas of media (in my area a record store with a comic section). If any comic shop owners are reading this, please answer this question - Are you advertising to kids? To schools and building community-school partnerships?

Putting out an Avengers movie is not enough. Building an ad campaign outside the industry itself to show people more about what comics are about these days.

The movies are not enough but it is a beachhead. How many teenage males walk out of that movie wanting, needing more stories about Captain America or Thor? I can not tell you the number of teenage females who obsess over Dr. Who. They would love to read more about the Doctor. There's your audience...the lifeblood of this industry.

I think this is a task for LCS owners. Marvel/Disney and DC/Time Warner are going for the big bucks now with the movies and tv. LCS will have to be the front-line soldiers for the industry.