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I guess I never got variant covers. Why would anyone pay huge money for a variant cover? Then again, I've for the most part been more a "reader". Not judging. Whatever makes people happy. Just apart of comic collecting I never got. I get paying big money for certain books. #1's, key issues, ect. But a book not even on the shelf yet for just the cover? To each is own, I guess.

I understand the allure of percentage split covers, independently orderable covers and retailer incentive covers from the perspectives of publishers, retailers and end consumers. While they can be profitable, I consider such profits to be "bad profits." These cover gimmicks focus on short term gains at longer term expenses and do little, if anything, to drive actual readers to titles. At best, they get end consumer to purchase specific issues.

I get the multiple cover thing but does this phenomenon have to be tied to a #1 issue. In theory if the extra covers boost in sales is about the consumer liking and being willing to pay more for a cover by a certain artist, the specific image, or the rarity of the cover why does the issue number matter in this equation? All of those same factors would seem to apply to any issue number not just a #1 issue.

I can see doing this on a title or issue you think will sell more. Like in Bob’s example of a 1:100 cover if you are already planning on ordering 60 you have to increase your order by 67% to get to the 100 needed. However if you would only order 10 you have to increase by 900% to get to the same 100 copies threshold. So for this reason incentive covers should work better on titles that sell more to begin with.

What that doesn’t explain is why a shop would think it needs 60 of the issue if had a #1 on it any only ten copies if had any other number. Especially when dealing with relaunches.

Say comic Y has been around a for 3 years, and the next issue would be #37. As a reseller you would order 10 copies of that issue #37. However the publisher decided to renumber and instead of issue #37 publishes a new #1. Now you think you need 60 copies. Incentive covers can possibly make a reseller order 25 instead of 10 for issue #37 or possibly 100 instead of 60 for an issue #1, this however does not explain the demand jump from 10 to 60 before incentive covers are even brought into the mix. There has to be more to this than just incentive covers. If it were only incentive covers the issue number would be irrelevant.

Bob and John,
I really thought the Dec Comics sales podcast was awesome. I absolutely loved the point you two brought up about Disney/Pixar comics at Disneyland and Disneyworld. They should have comics of all their animated properties for sale at the parks like you said. Heck, they could have a Mickey's Clubhouse comic for the little ones. Great way to get kids started on comics in my opinion.

Another thought is why doesn't Disney reprint all of their comic stuff? Do they not own their reprinting rights or don't think it will sell? I know Fantagraphics is putting out collections of some of it, but I would think Disney could reprint all of it if they wanted. I wanted to get your thoughts on that, but I loved this episode alot. Great job again as usual guys!

Enjoying the podcast as always. Is it known what percentage the publisher makes on a book? Jim Zub's blog made it seem about 36% or so. Further, is it just a straight up percentage deal or is it more complicated (prices pegged to flexible variables)? I would imagine the latter but no idea.

fudd71 wrote:I get the multiple cover thing but does this phenomenon have to be tied to a #1 issue. In theory if the extra covers boost in sales is about the consumer liking and being willing to pay more for a cover by a certain artist, the specific image, or the rarity of the cover why does the issue number matter in this equation? All of those same factors would seem to apply to any issue number not just a #1 issue.

The LCS loves the number 1. Presumably this reflects their customer base because if it did not then they would be a pretty inefficient business. Still the data is sales to the LCS. They love it more than just new creators. If you look at the Marvel NOW titles that did not renumber, you will not see such a tremendous jump. Journey into Mystery (Switched at issue 646) and Hulk (which became Red She Hulk with issue "58") which both kept the old numbering but both had major shifts in the book (one was even the title). Iron Man was a stone cold number 1 reboot. The numbers are lifted from John Mayo's columns at CBR so skipping the column headings as we all know them. Deleted some columns so they read here better, it goes Title, issue, sales

Red She Hulk 59 20,670
Red She Hulk 58 31,134
Hulk 57 21,553
Hulk 56 21,558

So it saw a bump of 10K for one issue. That is a bump so switching it up did help. Less of an effect on Journey

Journey Into Mystery 646 22,900
Journey Into Mystery 645 20,703
Journey Into Mystery 644 20,586

So that saw a bump but a much smaller bump. Lets look at a reboot.

Invincible Iron Man 527 36,978
Iron Man (2012) 1 116,540

Now that is a bump. Now we can explain it other ways other than just a number 1 bias. Maybe not enough (or any) variant covers, etc. Hulk and Journey were lower sellers so maybe any subsequent changes would be less magnified. Maybe the new teams on Journey and She-Hulk are not as popular. But at the end of the day, there is a big difference. I think bigger than any of those proposed factors can account for.

Now just spitballing here, but I can imagine reasons why a number 1 is preferred by an LCS over just a random number. The LCS has to fully commit their order way before they will have real hard numbers. Even if the LCS had great data from their customers, there are enough people (or at least there is 1, me) that don't know everything they want until it is in front of them. No matter how much research there is some guesswork involved. #1's are easier to sell as a place to jump back into a book. They don't require the LCS or the staff to know much about any particular customer to sell it as an entry point (or re-entry point). Titles tend to flag in sales (Walking Dead excepted) so always some readers to try to get to recapture. (again assuming that those earlier copies sold to readers and weren't just rotting on LCS shelves and the "decline" in sales was merely actually finding the current number of end readers). There is a buzz about a number one that many of us old readers remember. When on the fence with Marvel Now, I made the conscious decision to get the one that was NOT renumbered. Old Andy would have probably gone the other way. In fact, the burned me because everyone loves Thor and I went Journey into Mystery route.

Now if Bob and John are correct (and I agree), this number 1 effect will eventually burn itself out and we will see more modest bumps with creator shifts and renumbering.

As to incentive covers, some of those are expensive. I would imagine that the customers for those are highly sought after but I don't know. I would think those people would spend big money on lots of comic related stuff but I don't run an LCS. However if it is true, then there is extra motivation for the store to land that rare cover. Even if that sale just breaks even because they lose money on all the extra copies they order, if that big spender stays and buys more stuff, it may be worth it to keep the customer.

Not finished the episodes, so apologies if this is mentioned, but the Disney XD channel shows animated programming based on Marvel licensed properties. They are doing a cross promotion with the Disney XD website to offer at least 1 free digital comic to read. Hopefully it encourage a trend and please feel free to click the link and check it out. I hope Disney gets lots of hits and continues to do this. I understand that getting people to pay for comics is a big step from just looking for free, but we need to get the kids hooked. I don't like the interface but it is not designed for me. I hope Disney keeps up pushing this stuff.

http://disney.go.com/disneyxd/

Thanks and sorry for going on but I do like to pontificate about this stuff.

P.S. I think the internet really killed the in-store back issue market or at least here in Southern California. Most of the stores I have been to here have a pretty limited back issue selection and the new place that makes back issues a big deal, pointed out that they don't keep much at the store because they do so much online. He said to email him but I am impulse buyer so sale lost. However I understand as retail space is expensive.

LA Rabbit wrote:Enjoying the podcast as always. Is it known what percentage the publisher makes on a book? Jim Zub's blog made it seem about 36% or so. Further, is it just a straight up percentage deal or is it more complicated (prices pegged to flexible variables)? I would imagine the latter but no idea.

How the money is split is much more complex than flat percentages of the cover price. Obviously the cover price is a fixed value for a comic book issue. Depending on the publisher and the amount the retailer orders, the percentage discount the retailer gets can be anywhere from 35% to a high of 57.5% or so. It might be as high as 59.5%. I don't have the data in front of me at the moment. The premiere publishers have multiple discount tiers while the smaller publishers usually don't. For DC and Marvel, Diamond is a sales agent, not a literal distributor. The difference is when acting as a literal distributor for other publishers, Diamond purchases the material from the publishers and then sells it to the retailers. As a sales agent, Diamond never takes ownership of the material and therefore has a reduced risk in the transaction. As a result, Diamond takes a lower percentage for DC and Marvel titles than for publishers it acts as a distributor for. I believe Diamond and the publishers have agreed upon discount percentages and Diamond pays the publisher that x% of the cover price for when buying the material from them. All of this is why the various publishers in the back half of Previews have differing discounts and lower discounts than the premiere publishers. Zub's 36% seems a little low but not exceedingly low.

LA Rabbit wrote:

fudd71 wrote:I get the multiple cover thing but does this phenomenon have to be tied to a #1 issue. In theory if the extra covers boost in sales is about the consumer liking and being willing to pay more for a cover by a certain artist, the specific image, or the rarity of the cover why does the issue number matter in this equation? All of those same factors would seem to apply to any issue number not just a #1 issue.

Multiple covers are not limited to first issues. Both can increase sales which is why first issues with multiple covers sell much higher than second issues which usually have far fewer multiple covers.

LA Rabbit wrote:The LCS loves the number 1. Presumably this reflects their customer base because if it did not then they would be a pretty inefficient business. Still the data is sales to the LCS. They love it more than just new creators. If you look at the Marvel NOW titles that did not renumber, you will not see such a tremendous jump. Journey into Mystery (Switched at issue 646) and Hulk (which became Red She Hulk with issue "58") which both kept the old numbering but both had major shifts in the book (one was even the title). Iron Man was a stone cold number 1 reboot. The numbers are lifted from John Mayo's columns at CBR so skipping the column headings as we all know them. Deleted some columns so they read here better, it goes Title, issue, sales

Red She Hulk 59 20,670
Red She Hulk 58 31,134
Hulk 57 21,553
Hulk 56 21,558

So it saw a bump of 10K for one issue. That is a bump so switching it up did help. Less of an effect on Journey

Journey Into Mystery 646 22,900
Journey Into Mystery 645 20,703
Journey Into Mystery 644 20,586

So that saw a bump but a much smaller bump. Lets look at a reboot.

Invincible Iron Man 527 36,978
Iron Man (2012) 1 116,540

Now that is a bump. Now we can explain it other ways other than just a number 1 bias. Maybe not enough (or any) variant covers, etc. Hulk and Journey were lower sellers so maybe any subsequent changes would be less magnified. Maybe the new teams on Journey and She-Hulk are not as popular. But at the end of the day, there is a big difference. I think bigger than any of those proposed factors can account for.

Invincible Iron Man to Iron Man is not what I consider to be a reboot. It is a relaunch. A reboot, in my mind, involved major changes to the backstory of the character. Valiant has rebooted those characters. The Sigil and Mystic titles Marvel tried to revive CrossGen with were reboots while Ruse was a relaunch. That Ruse #1 read as if it were a continuation of the previous series. Sigil and Mystic revamped the concepts and restarted the characters.

New first issues usually also come with a major marketing push behind them. Red She-Hulk and Journey into Mystery has smaller promotional pushes supporting them resulting in small bumps in sales. Arguably Journey Into Mystery wasn't any sort of major shift in direction for that title, just a shift in which Asgardian was the lead character moving from Loki to Sif.

LA Rabbit wrote:Now just spitballing here, but I can imagine reasons why a number 1 is preferred by an LCS over just a random number. The LCS has to fully commit their order way before they will have real hard numbers. Even if the LCS had great data from their customers, there are enough people (or at least there is 1, me) that don't know everything they want until it is in front of them. No matter how much research there is some guesswork involved. #1's are easier to sell as a place to jump back into a book. They don't require the LCS or the staff to know much about any particular customer to sell it as an entry point (or re-entry point). Titles tend to flag in sales (Walking Dead excepted) so always some readers to try to get to recapture. (again assuming that those earlier copies sold to readers and weren't just rotting on LCS shelves and the "decline" in sales was merely actually finding the current number of end readers). There is a buzz about a number one that many of us old readers remember. When on the fence with Marvel Now, I made the conscious decision to get the one that was NOT renumbered. Old Andy would have probably gone the other way. In fact, the burned me because everyone loves Thor and I went Journey into Mystery route.

First issues are seen are blatantly obvious "jumping on points" whether or not the really are good places to jump into a title. Retailers have a hard time missing the #1 while they might not notice the shift in lead characters in Journey into Mystery or the shift from Hulk to Red She-Hulk. After all, the Red Hulk was the feature character in the Hulk title and the Red She-Hulk has been heavily featured in that title too. Keep in mind that not all retailers read all titles. What seems fairly obvious it you read the title might not even be on the radar that doesn't read the title and has to figure out what percentage of the customer base for the store will be interested in each item in the catalog every month.

LA Rabbit wrote:Now if Bob and John are correct (and I agree), this number 1 effect will eventually burn itself out and we will see more modest bumps with creator shifts and renumbering.

The data seems to show these sort of sales bumps diminish with re-use and Marvel in particular has been relaunching titles like crazy over the past few years.

LA Rabbit wrote:As to incentive covers, some of those are expensive. I would imagine that the customers for those are highly sought after but I don't know. I would think those people would spend big money on lots of comic related stuff but I don't run an LCS. However if it is true, then there is extra motivation for the store to land that rare cover. Even if that sale just breaks even because they lose money on all the extra copies they order, if that big spender stays and buys more stuff, it may be worth it to keep the customer.

This hits on the concept that not all customers have the same financial worth to the store. Obviously retailers (and publishers) should try to please as many readers as possible. But when that isn't possible, they really need to think about which group of readers they benefit from the most. While gaining new readers is incredibly important, it does no good to do so if you can't keep existing readers. Given most titles lose sales every issue, and therefore are almost certainly losing actual readers every issue, it is clear that most creators, editors and publishers have little success retaining readers. (Walking Dead being the go to counter-example.)

LA Rabbit wrote:Not finished the episodes, so apologies if this is mentioned, but the Disney XD channel shows animated programming based on Marvel licensed properties. They are doing a cross promotion with the Disney XD website to offer at least 1 free digital comic to read. Hopefully it encourage a trend and please feel free to click the link and check it out. I hope Disney gets lots of hits and continues to do this. I understand that getting people to pay for comics is a big step from just looking for free, but we need to get the kids hooked. I don't like the interface but it is not designed for me. I hope Disney keeps up pushing this stuff.

http://disney.go.com/disneyxd/

Thanks and sorry for going on but I do like to pontificate about this stuff.

I haven't been watching much, if any, Disney XD lately and didn't know about the digital comics promotion. That sounds very cool.

LA Rabbit wrote:P.S. I think the internet really killed the in-store back issue market or at least here in Southern California. Most of the stores I have been to here have a pretty limited back issue selection and the new place that makes back issues a big deal, pointed out that they don't keep much at the store because they do so much online. He said to email him but I am impulse buyer so sale lost. However I understand as retail space is expensive.

I think collected editions is what turned back issues into a niche market inside of the already niche comic book retailer arena. For most stores it doesn't make sense to stock back issues if the stories are available in collected editions. The internet expands the customer base back issue retailers can reach. I think the size of the back issue market is too low for more than a store or two in any given area to really succeed in that area.

The signal-to-noise ratio just doesn't work out unless a store has a huge back issue selection. A super-store approach means that I'm very likely to find the back issue I'm looking for and for each "hit" on my back issue buying list, a store is likely to have thousands of "misses." Not every item on my back issue buying list will be at the store and not every item at the store will be on my back issue buying list. Selling back issues requires a large diversity of back issues and a large customer base interested in buying back issues. Retail space costs make the large stock challenging and geographical limitations make having a huge customer base challenging. The internet solves both problems by allowing the store to locate in the cheapest location practical and still reach everyone online.

It also is much easier/faster to search an online collection than to thumb through hundreds of long boxes of comics.

JohnMayo wrote:
How the money is split is much more complex than flat percentages of the cover price. Obviously the cover price is a fixed value for a comic book issue. Depending on the publisher and the amount the retailer orders, the percentage discount the retailer gets can be anywhere from 35% to a high of 57.5% or so. It might be as high as 59.5%. I don't have the data in front of me at the moment. The premiere publishers have multiple discount tiers while the smaller publishers usually don't. For DC and Marvel, Diamond is a sales agent, not a literal distributor. The difference is when acting as a literal distributor for other publishers, Diamond purchases the material from the publishers and then sells it to the retailers. As a sales agent, Diamond never takes ownership of the material and therefore has a reduced risk in the transaction. As a result, Diamond takes a lower percentage for DC and Marvel titles than for publishers it acts as a distributor for. I believe Diamond and the publishers have agreed upon discount percentages and Diamond pays the publisher that x% of the cover price for when buying the material from them. All of this is why the various publishers in the back half of Previews have differing discounts and lower discounts than the premiere publishers. Zub's 36% seems a little low but not exceedingly low.

Thanks.

JohnMayo wrote: New first issues usually also come with a major marketing push behind them. Red She-Hulk and Journey into Mystery has smaller promotional pushes supporting them resulting in small bumps in sales. Arguably Journey Into Mystery wasn't any sort of major shift in direction for that title, just a shift in which Asgardian was the lead character moving from Loki to Sif.

Good point about the smaller promotional push, but the one advantage of that stupid banner (other than an eyesore) is to direct readers to this collection of books that are being revamped. Part of the sales pitch seemed to be new directions and often new creative teams. So on Journey we had a new writer and other creators. With all that double shipping, it is tough to argue that continuity of the art team is a big deal but it does seem like creators do drive sales to some extent. I was informed by the big ugly banner that Journey into Mystery had a new creative team with a new direction so it caught my eye. Now admittedly Kathryn Immonen is not moving books like Bendis but for me Jordie Bellaire was a big selling point for me and when its rival (for me) was Thor the non-renumbering and Jordie meant Journey won the tryout.

Not all those books were getting the banner (at least at first) as Dark Avengers did not originally, but I think the last one did. However in that case I didn't sense much any change in direction or creative teams so it seems like all the Marvel Now banner did was ugly up one of the books I like.

Thanks again.

LA Rabbit wrote:Not all those books were getting the banner (at least at first) as Dark Avengers did not originally, but I think the last one did. However in that case I didn't sense much any change in direction or creative teams so it seems like all the Marvel Now banner did was ugly up one of the books I like.

The current story arc that has the Dark Avengers in a parallel world with New York divided into distinct areas controlled by super-powered people seemed like a fairly major change in direction to me. That was also when they finished rotating out the Thunderbolts and focused solely on the Dark Avengers.

Maybe they waited an issue or two too long to put the banner on the title.

In the recent Mayo report, John, you mentioned that the constant addition of new volumes with new number ones may be effecting demand for back issues.

I spent the weekend working at a buddy's booth at Phoenix selling comics all weekend, and got to talk to a LOT of buyers/collectors.

I met one guy who says that he specifically goes around buying the previous volume of various titles. For instance, he is now buying Bendis's New Avengers and Mighty Avengers, because he says that he can now get them cheap, because there is little demand.

It's anecdotal, but it does support your thesis that launching a new volume of a title lowers demand for back issues of previous volumes.

Nice job on the end of the year report, John. Enough stats and figures to make anyone's head explode. Throw in the great opinions/discussions between you and Bob, and it makes for a fine early morning listening.

There's a lot of talk about Marvel vs. DC and how DC seems to have a stronger base of readership on ongoing monthly titles as opposed to Marvel using gimmicks. I'm slightly oversimplifying the discussion but I feel that's the gist of how you and Bob feel. John, probably you more than Bob. In general I don't disagree with that.

I think that Marvel is just taking a different approach to how it's selling books. As we saw from the year end numbers Marvel was very heavy at the top of the list with AvX. John, you mentioned that those are sales Marvel can't count on in 2013. I disagree. I think that those sales will be replaced with the next big thing. Probably the recently announced Infinity. Marvel has shown that when they do big events, the big events sell. I think it has the long term negative side effect of training the readers that the only thing that "counts" are events but they are in the business of trying to sell as many books per month as they can. So that's the trend de-jour.

Adding to this are the constant re-starting of titles. I know that you feel the constant re-voluming is a short term solution since the books are quickly reduced back to or below the previous volume sales. But again Marvel is taking that juice that the re-start gives them and going with it. Better to have a few months of extra sales than let it slowly decline. Plus you never know when something is going to pop.

All this being said I think Marvel's long game is the short game. They'll keep at this strategy until they have a few events that don't give them above 100k sales or relaunches that don't have huge initial sales.

The other strategy I think Marvel is taking is pushing creators first. If you look at the marketing for most of, if not all, Marvel Now! titles the teasers focused on announcing a creative team and a teaser word about the title. We were left guessing what the book actually was or the concept behind it. For me personally, I was jazzed by some of those teams and to some degree it didn't matter what the book was. DC, could benefit from a little of this in my opinion. They have a few superstars but not as many. Plus there's a lot of creative shift.

Maybe it's age, maybe it's maturity, who knows. But, tight adherence to continuity is less of an issue for me as time goes on. It didn't bother me that DC rebooted almost everything with the new 52. Granted most of the rebooted concepts didn't work for me but it had nothing to do with me shaking my fist about "My Superman". You guys mentioned that in several books, Captain America has a different costume, he's in several places at one time, etc. The same can always be said about Wolverine. I didn't hear any talk about DC doing the same thing. Recently Tim Drake, Red Robin had his costume drawn in 4 very different styles for the Death of the Family crossover. The Batman title rarely has Damian but he's front and center in Batman and Robin, again these books take place in roughly the same time frame. Plus the whole flip flop on if Tim Drake was ever Robin (changed in the trade), how long each Robin operated, was there a Teen Titans previous to the current one, etc. Just an observation.

I love listening to the numbers shows. It's always fun to hear the three of you discuss these across both shows.

-Russell

Nice post, Russell

heroesmask wrote:There's a lot of talk about Marvel vs. DC and how DC seems to have a stronger base of readership on ongoing monthly titles as opposed to Marvel using gimmicks. I'm slightly oversimplifying the discussion but I feel that's the gist of how you and Bob feel. John, probably you more than Bob. In general I don't disagree with that.

I think that Marvel is just taking a different approach to how it's selling books. As we saw from the year end numbers Marvel was very heavy at the top of the list with AvX. John, you mentioned that those are sales Marvel can't count on in 2013. I disagree. I think that those sales will be replaced with the next big thing. Probably the recently announced Infinity. Marvel has shown that when they do big events, the big events sell. I think it has the long term negative side effect of training the readers that the only thing that "counts" are events but they are in the business of trying to sell as many books per month as they can. So that's the trend de-jour.

Adding to this are the constant re-starting of titles. I know that you feel the constant re-voluming is a short term solution since the books are quickly reduced back to or below the previous volume sales. But again Marvel is taking that juice that the re-start gives them and going with it. Better to have a few months of extra sales than let it slowly decline. Plus you never know when something is going to pop.

All this being said I think Marvel's long game is the short game. They'll keep at this strategy until they have a few events that don't give them above 100k sales or relaunches that don't have huge initial sales.

The other strategy I think Marvel is taking is pushing creators first. If you look at the marketing for most of, if not all, Marvel Now! titles the teasers focused on announcing a creative team and a teaser word about the title. We were left guessing what the book actually was or the concept behind it. For me personally, I was jazzed by some of those teams and to some degree it didn't matter what the book was. DC, could benefit from a little of this in my opinion. They have a few superstars but not as many. Plus there's a lot of creative shift.

Maybe it's age, maybe it's maturity, who knows. But, tight adherence to continuity is less of an issue for me as time goes on. It didn't bother me that DC rebooted almost everything with the new 52. Granted most of the rebooted concepts didn't work for me but it had nothing to do with me shaking my fist about "My Superman". You guys mentioned that in several books, Captain America has a different costume, he's in several places at one time, etc. The same can always be said about Wolverine. I didn't hear any talk about DC doing the same thing. Recently Tim Drake, Red Robin had his costume drawn in 4 very different styles for the Death of the Family crossover. The Batman title rarely has Damian but he's front and center in Batman and Robin, again these books take place in roughly the same time frame. Plus the whole flip flop on if Tim Drake was ever Robin (changed in the trade), how long each Robin operated, was there a Teen Titans previous to the current one, etc. Just an observation.

I love listening to the numbers shows. It's always fun to hear the three of you discuss these across both shows.

-Russell

Interesting points. I agree that Marvel, and to some extent DC, will continue to focus on bumping the short term numbers rather than slowly build a more consistent stable sales track. Like the 90's they are relying a lot on variants but the problem there is eventually even people that collect those will see they can't afford forever to keep buying multiple copies of the same book. This gimmick does nothing to motivate new readers to try different books but rather focus's on an ever decreasing fan base.