For the handful of you interested in the back-and-forth over the BookScan issue, I want to point you to Heidi's post, as well as Dirk's first and second sallies.

For those of you only here for the reviews, you can stop reading now. In fact, I'd really urge you to!

If I have edited this properly, it continues after the jump:



For whatever it is worth, I agree nearly 100% with Heidi: my biases are both obvious, (and directly stated in the original piece!) -- I believe in the Direct Market (as a concept, if not, necessarily, in the specific individual on-the-ground iteration) to be a far superior method of selling comics for the simple reason that a specialist, with a specialist's passion, is more likely to be able to do a superlative job in selling a specialty product than a generalist. That would seem to me to be fairly self-evident.

(Does this mean that ALL DM stores are going to be better than selling comics than ALL bookstores? No, of course not -- there are always going to be ends of the curve in either model which out/under-perform their opposite number)

I want to believe that I've been very specific and very exacting both about my biases, as well as the usefulness of the specific numbers. Certainly I went into great detail about how the numbers could be wrong and what they do and do not measure; part of the problem may be that on the internet (and who knows, maybe in life, in general, but we can track it on the internet...) people see what they want to see.

Look, I like me some "art comics", when a new EIGHTBALL or OPTIC NERVE comes out, its usually a Top 10 book for Comix Experience, but the fandom/internet meme/hope of "if only we get into the bookstores, then they'll all suddenly buy everything I think is good" really doesn't seem to be the case. I wanted to believe it too!

But let's stay on target when we look at retail sales -- let's not conflate them with other channels, let's not take anecdote as fact, and let's try not to move the Goalposts in the middle of the game.

By way of example, I point to Dirk's latest, where all of a sudden he's pointing to prose books; what does that have to do with anything? It should be pretty obvious that the math involved for both the publisher and especially the creator is very very different between prose and comics; the breakeven point for one is certainly very different from the other. I should know, I have a prose book in print, and I was involved in setting the print run, and the costs thereof; and I've got a pretty good idea of the physical printing costs of comics, and one is a fraction of the other.

Here's what I said (that Dirk is even quoting directly!):


“Art Comics”, with the exception of a tiny handful of “anointed” books, do not appear to be selling in the bookstore environment. Remember that BookScan includes Amazon, and all major internet retailers as well.

It further seems to me that with approximately 7500 BookScan reporting venues, this indicates that most book stores aren’t even bothering to stock “Art comics” in the first place.



And this seems to be a fairly unassailable fact in relationship to what BookScan reports -- with ~7500 venues (including the majority of the internet sales picture) if you're moving under 4400 copies that means that you're either not being stocked in the first place OR that the audience there isn't especially interested in that material OR both. For the record, I strongly suspect the answer is actually #1, that IF that material was stocked and supported and racked it would probably sell better.

The Elephant in the Room, to me, is Amazon -- Amazon is "bias neutral" in my opinion; that is that each book "displayed" at Amazon is basically equivalent to each other, and that "finding" a book on their "shelves" is a trivial matter, not influenced by physical "racking" decisions. It seems to me that if there was a deep, wide-spread market crying out for "art comics" material that Amazon would be capturing those sales in a pretty significant fashion, as Amazon is "the world's largest comics store". Yet THEY DON'T APPEAR TO BE capturing these sales in any significant fashion.

I have no problem with differing conclusions about the data -- in fact, I specifically asked for it -- but, please, let's not move the goalposts by suddenly claiming that "Oh well, a small publishing house doesn't NEED to sell as many copies", as if that were even slightly relevant to matter at hand. NO ONE said anything about whether the material is PROFITABLE or not, just that it doesn't appear to be selling in significant quantities in the bookstore environment, as far as that environment can be tracked (with all of the caveats and weaknesses of the numbers inherent in that tracking), relative to other comics material. Given the extant data, that appears to be true. If there's OTHER data to show otherwise, I'm sure that everyone would be happy to see that, but since we can't, we can only analyze what we have.

There's a larger issue here, and it is one that Robert Scott has brought up several times -- without marketing and advertising and general publisher support, it is very difficult for any material of any stripe or style or form or content to find its audience without direct intervention by the sellers of the book, be they DM or "bookstores". But that's almost certainly a topic for another day.

This will, hopefully, be my last comment on this (until it is time to write about the '08 numbers)!

-B

PS: to ADD: BONE is now "art comix"?! Buh-wha--?!?

Labels: BookScan, Brian, retailing

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Well, its Monday, but it's a long holiday weekend! (for the banks at least?)

First off, if you haven't followed along, here's a few updates: Heidi MacDonald at The Beat discusses the general topic, and there's also Tom Spurgeon's response to my last post.

With any luck (ha!) this will be my last word on the topic...

First, Tom. Ultimately, I don't think I disagree tremendously with any of his six summarized observations. So, hooray for that. I've even willing to admit that, in hindsight, maybe the paper isn't quite meaty enough. There's been a lot of internal discussion this weekend in ComicsPRO about how to solve this the next time out, so we'll see what happens. There were a lot of eyes on this (9 Board members, 7 members of the PP committee, plus the whole membership during a month-long voting process) and no one pointed a couple things out until after it had gone out. Sometimes this happens when you live with something too long, you can't see the things you're NOT saying, because you take them utterly for granted.

Tom says: Brian says they can't provide better support without naming individual publishers. This is insane. Let's make one up: "176 of 180 ComicsPro members report at least one lost sale of a pre-ordered book in 2007 due to convention sales." That's support with a number in it and nobody is named.

I believe, and its entirely possible I am wrong, but I believe that kind of a statement would be just as dismissed as being empty and meaningless of a figure. But noted, for next time.

Tom also offers three examples of "selling in advance of your primary sales force"; I'd argue that none of those are selling whatsoever -- they're giving material away in order to generate more business in the long run (in the first two examples), or to "focus group" (as it were) the material to make it BETTER for the "final version".

If publishers were GIVING AWAY comics at conventions, I don't think there'd be a position paper except possibly one that said "Here's how to do it better". The reason I think this is because we've been talking about, as an organization, a response to the BOOM! situation, and the strongest faction of discussion has been pretty clear that we can never stop comics going out over the internet, NOR SHOULD WE BOTHER TO TRY because there are some TREMENDOUS promotional benefits that can occur. But that we can issue guidelines to the way it can be done so no one is stepping on anyone else's toes and that ALL partners are selling as many comics as they can.

(This is why the rhetorical handwavings over "yeah, how do they feel about Advance Review Copies, huh?!?!" and stuff like that that commenters other than Tom have made are pretty much besides the point -- we're talking about the SALE of goods, and how we don't think that our suppliers should be competing with us in that manner)

So, yes, there's one fatal flaw in the position paper as presented and it is missing the "unless they inform us beforehand" sentence. That SHOULD have been there, and I'll mea culpa on that one. Again, I thought that was implied, and I'll fall on the sword for not spelling it out explicitly.

Because yes, this problem goes away with Tom's "transparency".

But here's the thing, and I'll stand behind it 100%, in the decade or so that I've been discussing this with publishers, not one, not a SINGLE ONE, has shown any interest in that transparency, because they're afraid its going to lower their overall sales.

What I would suggest, and feel free to disagree with me, but it seems to me that IF publishers are concerned about that, then it naturally follows that they ARE having an impact on the sell-through at retail, and that they KNOW it.


Meanwhile, over at The Beat, Heidi offers this:

In a dollars and sense world, there is a HUGE difference between $1 and $1000. If costing Brian Hibbs $1 makes Top Shelf $20K, then you need to just suck it up, man. The health of an ENTIRE INDUSTRY is the question here — put it the other way. Would Brian Hibbs donate $1 to keep Top Shelf, Cartoon Books or Fantagraphics alive?

Not that that is actually the point, but, yeah, when FBI and Top Shelf came to us with "please please buy stuff from us, we're on the brink of going out of business" we OF COURSE stepped up and bought a bunch of stuff that we didn't actually need in order to try and help keep them solvent.

I think Heidi is a little hyperbolic in "the health of the ENTIRE INDUSTRY is in question" statement (history shows us that publishers come and go with great regularity), but it's a fair question, really -- should I give up $1 for TS to make $20k?

The answer might in fact be "Yes", but it has to be an INFORMED transaction, and one made with CONSENT. When we're not informed of the situation, or given a chance to deal with it, until it is "too late", that's why we're upset about this.

This doesn't have ANYthing to do with "increased competition" or Amazon or libraries or the internet or the dominance of the superhero publishers via Diamond, or Diamond's often disgraceful treatment of non-brokered publishers, or any of the other smokescreens pundits are throwing out there.

I'm going to try one more time to explain this as simply as I can: Retailers buy non-returnable, non-adjustable from most publishers (via Diamond). Retailers are presented with titles to buy that are presented to us as "new". For retailers "new" means that it hasn't been released before, to any channel. OBVIOUSLY, the vagaries of distribution mean that some times copies will arrive in one place before another -- sometimes we get it first, sometimes another channel gets it first. No retailer is crying foul over NATURAL AND UNINTENDED distribution vagaries. What we're objecting to is when publishers take specific, conscious, actions DESIGNED to get books to cons before we could POSSIBLY have them in order to sell them first.

That's it, full stop.

If the printer screws up, and you HAPPEN to have copies in your hand for the show before it makes it through distribution, NO FOUL.

If you're selling material at a show that we have actual equivalent access to, NO FOUL.

If you inform us AT THE POINT OF SOLICITATION that you're going to sell in advance of us, NO FOUL.

Where we screwed up was in not include five words: "...unless they inform us beforehand", and I can see that now. Hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

As some one mentioned in one of the 20 gajillion threads I've read the last 72 hours (and I've forgot which one it was) effectively we're asking for common street dates, and FOR MANUFACTURERS to not break those street dates (knowingly)

That's pretty much it, and I think this is a pretty much a no-brainer of an idea that is eminently reasonable.

(Someone will ask, I am sure, "Well, why didn't you ASK for 'street dates'?", and that's because that's a MUCH more difficult issue, one that will require Diamond to be involved, and is probably 2-3 years from even possible implementation, in my opinion of the politics of this business. Lets get most of our vendors on a FOC system first before we even THINK to open THAT particular can o' worms)



Ultimately, as I said, I don't care if any given retailer loses $1 or $1000, but do you know why that is? Because it isn't necessarily about the individual store's individual loss -- it's about the AGGREGATE harm to the industry this practice brings. Its not even about the individual publishers' individual actions, its about the aggregate harm that this does to the market. $50 here and $5 there and $500 there starts to add up.

Further, I don't think "buzz" comes from being-on-sale-first *in and of itself*. I think Top Shelf would have sold exactly the same # of LOST GIRLS as they did, and had exactly and precisely the same amount of "buzz" and being "the book of the show" and everything else, had LOST GIRLS been in stores that same Wednesday. I'll go so far as to say I'm absolutely positive that LOST GIRLS would have had the same national buzz, and sold the same # of copies at the con even had the book debuted a week before in the stores.

And here's the thing, I further think that if TS had done that (ie, printed the book 2-3 weeks earlier to ahve it in-store and at-con the same day), not only would they have sold the SAME # of copies, had the SAME Big Book of the Con Buzz, but they'd have saved themselves the $10 a book or whatever stupid amount it actually was to airfreight the books in.

Heidi, though not in that blog entry, on CBIA instead, made a point that the problem on the publisher side is often "last minute-itis" -- as long as the book goes to press at the LAST POSSIBLE SECOND to go to the printer to be able to airfreight rush job the book to a show, it's "on time", and I suspect she's mostly right. If the "deadline in their head" was "in stores no later than the week of [the show]", rather than "The week of [the show], so we can pay the airfreight in" that, I think, would make all of the problem go away.

I want to make it really clear: I'm absolutely in favor of comics being in as many venues as they possibly can be -- that includes on the internet, via mail order, in mass market stores, on newstands, at conventions, sold in roaming ice cream trucks, whatever you please. More venues, more exposure, more widespread acceptance really can't be anything but good for the dedicated specialist.

I just don't want to be undercut by my own supplier before I even have a chance to sell their goods.



As always, I'm always interested in your thoughts.

-B

Labels: Brian, retailing

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Right, now for a response to Tom. Again, his original commentary is here, and my response and his as well is here.

Normally, I wouldn't turn something into a BLOGWAR! but Tom doesn't have messaging on The Comics Reporter, and I find his "letter column" kinda problematic (I actually hadn't even noticed the post and response until early today, to be honest), so I thought putting it somewhere when there's relatively open comments might be a good idea.

(Sorry if you feel end-runned, Tom?)

I'm going to try to do as little of quoting and counter-quoting that I can, just because it is messy and too internetty for me, but I might have to resort to it at some point.

More or less going from top to bottom, I guess we should talk about "evidence".

Tom seems to think that we need to attach some kind of specific numbers to this. I'm just trying to figure out both the how and the why of it.

In terms of the how, I don't see how we can do it without specifically singly out individual publishers. And I don't see how we do that in a public position paper without looking, frankly, like assholes. Further, it's not like we keep revenge logs where we write all our wrongs down. I can tell you that I am down (not "done" like I originally wrote, sheesh) a couple of hundred dollars in retail sales each year in the aggregate, of stuff I know. How specific do you want me to be? I had three different customers tell me that, sorry, they weren't going to buy LOST GIRLS from me (two of them preordered) because they bought it in San Diego. There, harm done. I lost at least two copies of BONE ONE EDITION, same thing. A copy of BLANKETS. Those are the ones where I clearly and specifically in detail remember the exchange with the customer, because those are big expensive books. There's half a dozen other ones each and every year, but I usually just file most of them in the *sigh* portion of my mental hard-drive; I don't recall the details, because life's too short.

I guess we could poll the membership and aggregate some numbers, but then I get to the Why? portion of it. Singling out specific vendors is only going to make them more defensive, I think, and I'm unconvinced that ComicsPRO has a large enough membership yet to even begin to present the full picture -- any specific number member stores can show is going to be under-reported by some significant factor just from that. And under-reporting a problem is much worse that not reporting it at all in a negotiation, in my opinion.

I'm telling you, specific examples above, that I've been done harm. I also believe that there's other harm done where customers didn't specifically tell me that they bought it at a show, but of course I can't prove that. OTHER retailers also will happily tell you about books here and books there they've been impacted by. What I'm not getting is why people (not just Tom) are questioning us on this. Harm has been done, maybe not massively towering masses of it, but here's a group of diverse retailers saying "We're harmed by this practice, please knock it off", it isn't just taken as read that we have been so?

See, cuz I think when you ask "how much harm", it seems like that opens up "well that's not 'enough'". What if we can only "show" within ComicsPRO membership, 20 copies of LOST GIRLS that didn't get sold when they were expected to. Is that "enough"? What if its only 10? What if it is only my 3?

For me, markets need Hippocratic Oaths too -- First thing do no harm. Selling in advance of your primary sales force being able to do so seems foolish. Can you think of any other business where that would be considered acceptable?

I guess maybe the question is that Tom doesn't see this as "harm", which OK, fair enough I guess, but when a customer comes to me and says "I am not going to take my preordered copy of this book, because it was at San Diego first", I don't see how else it can be taken?

Tom says "Also, to flip it around, are you saying that the publisher should sell $4000 fewer copies of Lost Girls overall to people not served by good comic shops because a couple of your customers may prefer to buy it from them directly?" and I think this is where some of the disconnect is coming from.

The issue is selling the book before it is released to the market -- people not served by good comic shops are STILL going to buy the book at the con, whether it was released AT the show or not, BECAUSE IT IS NEW TO THEM, whether, I repeat for emphasis, it was released AT the show or not! Every single one of those dollars will still be spent, there's no possible loss there.

In addition Tom asks "Have you ever been denied the chance to buy books at a con at a direct-order discount? Have you ever been lied to about a book being made available at a con?"

For the first, well kinda yeah -- Chris Staros flatly refused selling me any copies of LOST GIRLS direct, he insisted that all orders go through Diamond because he wanted to make sure that their orders there were as large as possible. Which means we were locked into that distribution channel.

For the second, the end of SWEENEY TODD pops into mind "No, no one ever lied/said she took poison/never said that she died". So, no, no one ever LIED as such -- but they've certainly committed sins of omission over the years where they didn't tell us they WERE. Which to me is, in effect, if not strictly taxonomically so, is the same thing. If you present a product to me as "new", I have (what I feel to be) a reasonable expectation that means that all channels will be getting it at effectively the same time. If that isn't the case, that's where we have a problem.

Tom goes on, perhaps baitingly to ask "Wait: so some stores aren't hit by this practice? Which ones? Why? Why if you have this information isn't it a part of your position paper?"

What I was trying to indicate is that not all stores are at all times impacted by every potential example equally -- MY customers are extremely likely to attend WonderCon and APE, fairly likely to attend SDCC, occasionally attend Mocca or SPX or NYCC, virtually never attend Wizard World: Anywhere. The specific and individual level of harm and concern varies for me individually with the individual show and the individual books that debut there.

Then there are stores who, say, aren't in the continental USA, or who only take preorders with prepaid credit cards, or whatever other reasoning there may be. Maybe they are in rural nowhere and were considering order 1 copy of [whatever], but read the boilerplate and decide not to, and so on.

What I do know is that over the last, sheesh, decade or more I've been speaking to publishers about this, note one has been interested in putting "this item may ship sooner to other venues before Diamond can deliver it" boilerplate on books they're intended to debut at a show.

Sorry, I'm getting really quotey here at the end. Tom: "I don't get this at all; are retailers really less amenable to being transparent about their sales practices because it might cost them a few sales and more amenable to eliminating that sales practice altogether and all of those sales? That makes no sense. Which publishers have you spoken to that indicated this?"

I think Tom means "publishers" for that first "retailers"? If not, I don't understand the question, if so then... I guess so? My sense of this issue, as always pursuing it as an individual, was that publisher reps (and pick one -- Top Shelf, D&Q, FBI, Cartoon books, and so on, all the "egregious ones", the ones where *I* see my personal impact from) was that I've always and uniformly dismissed because my concerns were unique as a snowflake to me and my individual business, so no, they weren't going to do a thing about it on the chance that it could hurt them elsewhere in an already perilous market.

But here's the thing that gores my orb, and probably doesn't touch yours: the Polite Unique Snowflake Brushoff that I got from Top Shelf was precisely the same kind of Polite Unique Snowflake Brushoff I got from Marvel over the late and missolicited titles. That's why we've got ComicsPRO, and that's why I believe in jointly issuing this kind of Position Paper is a really good thing. We may all be Unique Snowflakes, but a whole lot of us have common cause and common concern.

Sorry, here's where I'm the most internetty -- quoting myself first, then Tom now

(Also: allowing after-the-fact adjustments on orders generally delays books even further)


I wasn't talking about that.


Sure, but you can't withdraw the mechanical elements of distribution from the timeline. Allowing order adjusts is at least a month-long process from announcement to collection of changes, so doing so is almost always going to make a book ship later and not sooner.

I'm nearly done here, promise! Tom: However, my sympathy ends when it comes to advocating a system where people can't pursue whatever commercial means they wish, particularly when they're more than happy to reap the whirlwind when it comes to the results. I've never seen a publisher beat his chest in public that it isn't fair that you shouldn't adjust your orders to whatever you think is the likelihood you'll sell something.

First off, I can't personally recall any situation where a book has been made order adjustable after point-of-solicitation because of convention sales. I may be wrong, but I can't recall one. Further, publishers who aren't brokered are virtually never allowed to be made adjustable in anything like a meaningful timeline -- numbers are firm once you enter it into the ordering program and press "send", that's it, no tapbacks.

That's probably not important, really, because the first sentence is the one that kills me. Tom we're most emphatically NOT advocating a system where people pursue whichever commercial means they wish -- what we're saying is that the gun of the starter pistol should be going off at the same time for all and any channels. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with Top Shelf selling LOST GIRLS at a con. I have every problem with them selling it weeks before me, however, to my group of customers who are naturally the earliest of early adopters, on hard non-returnable non-adjustable orders. If they started selling LOST GIRLS at a Wednesday night Preview Night, and the book had been in stock at stores that same Wednesday, then game on, that's absolutely fine -- the playing field is level. We're sure as heck not advocating the limiting of anyone's potential venues, just asking them to watch their timing so there aren't intra-channel conflicts!

Finally, finally, we end this reply with Tom's final paragraph:

(In fact, here's a question: if you guys are all in agreement on this, and the position breaks down so cleanly like you say, why hasn't there been economic consequence? It's been years. No publisher I know has complained that they've been punished by stores even one little bit, and if you're losing orders, why the hell wouldn't you make adjustments? Are we supposed to believe you're just all really nice? Slow to react? Didn't realize it was happening? What?)

I think its pretty difficult for retailers to determine which books will be affected by which publishers -- the attendance line up for shows changes and moves too quickly, and it isn't like retailers have any easy central source to figure out who is where on what days specifically selling what.

It is often also hard to determine exactly and precisely which books will be impacted, nor specifically by how much. That's because that publishers who do this are usually the ones with... fluid scheduling and release dates. Short of purposefully underordering every title scheduled to ship from February to September on the off hand chance that I catch the one they're going to screw me on... man that don't make no sense.

From my point of view as a retailer, I'm trying to maximize sales, not minimize them, so forecasting to worst-case-scenarios isn't a really smart thing to do if you're trying to make a profit.

Right, I think I'm typed out about now, and I'm sure you're all sick of hearing my voice, so I'll leave it there.

Everyone is welcome to chime in with their two cents of opinion....

-B

Labels: Brian, retailing

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Lots of retailer-driven conversation this weekend, and we'll get to the main show in a second, but I realized I forgot to post a link to the newest TILTING AT WINDMILLS on Newsarama. This month I dissect a Dan DiDio quote about branding and COUNTDOWN, as well as talk about the move to an "annual" format for LOVE & ROCKETS.

If you have anything you want to chat about that piece, but don't want to dive into the morass that is Newsarama's Board feel free to use the commenting section below!

On Friday, ComicsPRO released the newest Position Paper on Pre-sales at Conventions. Oddly, you wouldn't know from the actual news sites, I've yet to see anything turn up on them as of yet.

I'd also strongly suggest that people go and read the comments on Johanna's piece about the paper, as I think there's a lot of pretty high-level quality commenting going on by many retailers there.

There's also Tom Spurgeon's thoughts here, as well as my reply to Tom, and his reply to that over here. We'll get back to that in a little while.

Finally, there's a plethora of commentary by Alan David Doane.

So, go read all that and come back.

I'm going to start with that last one, because ADD and I... well I don't know, we generally don't get along, I guess? He's famous for saying "Die, Direct Market, Die!", and as a participant in the Direct Market I oddly take offense to that!

Some of Johanna's comments also fall under the "Well, a lot of comic shops suck; so screw them!" defense (though Johanna, at least, tends to be much more deeply nuanced and also tends to be at least concerned with the changing and/or increasing demographic of READERS who, say, don't want to drive xx miles to a quality comics shop, or would rather buy on-line for a variety of reasons, etc.), so let's start off there.

OH, and lest it be misconstrued, I am, as always, speaking as an individual here, not as a representative of ComicsPRO or its Board.

ComicsPRO is an organization of Direct Market retailers who are trying to make things better for ALL retailers. I have and will probably always stipulate that many stores stink on ice, but I don't see any real relevance in that in terms of a ComicsPRO position paper.

Why?

BECAUSE COMICSPRO MEMBERS ARE NOT THE "PROBLEM" STORES.

(Well, or at least insofar as I know of their individual operations through anecdote and conduct -- I've certainly not personally visited more than a quarter of the membership, at most)

ComicsPRO is, by and large, "the best and the brightest" retailers. The smart ones, the passionate ones, the forward-thinking ones. The ones who outreach to their communities, the ones who get nominated for Eisners, the ones who strongly support as wide a range of material as they can. They're the early-adopters, they're the knowledgeable fonts, they're the communicable-passion carriers who work god-damn hard to move comics forward.

So any argument or debate that is predicated on a "DM stores are lousy, so why should we support stores that don't support us?" is, I think, shredded on contact with ComicsPRO membership -- these stores are NOT lousy, and these stores DO support you.

ADD's suggested position paper (his last link above) is pretty laughable in consideration of ComicsPRO's membership. I'm reasonably sure that virtually 100% of the membership would meet virtually 100% of ADD's requirements. And the ones that don't are actually a matter of ADD's preferences or misunderstandings rather than actual signs of professionalism.

Here, I hadn't intended to do this, but since I have that window open, let's discuss a few of those points.

Professional comic book stores do not favor one genre or sub-genre over another.

Professional comic book stores recognize that all comics are comics, no matter what country they originate from, or what format they are published in.

I might (just barely) support language that said "Professional comic book stores recognize that all comics are comics, no matter what country they originate from, or what format or genre they are published in", but as written this couldn't possibly be something that ComicsPRO could possibly endorse.

Why? Well, let's put it this way, would the American Bookseller Association release a policy that said that Mystery- or Science-Fiction-focused bookstores couldn't be considered "professional" bookstores because of their mono-focus? OF COURSE NOT. In exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reasons, ComicsPRO can't and wouldn't say "you can't focus on action/adventure genres" -- in exactly the same way we can't and wouldn't say "you can't just focus on manga" (as a small handful of stores in America are doing)

Like ADD, I personally and individually want to see stores offering me the kinds of comics I enjoy as a reader -- be that PERSEPOLIS or GREEN LANTERN or BONE or EXIT WOUNDS or FART PARTY or whatever; but unlike ADD, I know for a fact that business owners have every right to make the decisions they want as to THEIR vision of THEIR stores. Some retailers are in conservative communities, some retailers are running pop-culture stores, not comics-as-literature stores, and some retailers are simply following the trends of what their actual customers are actually buying, and weighing their stores appropriately. Who the fuck am I to tell them they're wrong or right?

Taken literally, ADD's first point would mean that a manga cafe like New York's Atom Cafe wouldn't be considered professional, and couldn't join ComicsPRO. (They haven't, but of course they COULD)

If what you want to say is that "Professional comic book stores are quick and willing to take reasonable special order requests" then that might be something that could hold up -- but you simply can't insist that a Mystery bookstore sell cookbooks to be considered professional.

I'm totally sympathetic to what ADD's intention here is -- he wants more stores that a family of four can walk into and walk out with something for each person, but that's not something that can be "legislated" or codified in a way that won't exclude some one you didn't intend, or, for that matter, that would stand up to anti-trust scrutiny.

And frankly, I'm not sure that there aren't quality professional retail stores that ALAN (and I!) wouldn't shop in but that DO satisfy THEIR customers in that all-four-walk-out-happy, just maybe not all four with a comic.

Moving forward, Alan offers this one:

Professional comic book stores recognize the transition from periodical pamphlet comics to more appealing and enduring graphic novels, and accommodate the readership’s clear preference for comics with a spine and a complete story.

Much like the above, I think you'll find that many many stores are not experiencing this. Stores that are not, in any way, "unprofessional"

I'm a book-oriented store, I've championed comic BOOKS nearly my entire professional life (Man, it was me and Rory Root and Bill Liebowitz in that LA conference room nearly 20 years ago now that helped convince the DC that, yes, there was a tremendous potential in their backlist. It was maybe 20 titles deep back then?) so you don't have to sell me on the concept, kiddo -- but the periodical is still a VERY viable format, and one that if you even just glance at ICv2's reports is pretty clear is still on a multi-year growth curve.

Books are TOO, but like the above, there's absolutely no way we can (or should) legislate what or how people stock or in what balance.

As I say, I run a comic BOOK store, I prefer selling trades to periodicals, and that's where our focus and energy is, but periodicals still sell VERY well, and, increasingly to the very "civilian" customers that ADD makes sweeping pronouncements about. DARK TOWER, BUFFY SEASON 8 are great examples -- those sold like MONSTERS, largely outside of the "Wednesday regulars", and people seemed to LIKE the serialization (they kept coming back, after all). For us, at least, the collections of these comics are doing well, but we sold at least 5x on BUFFY #1 than we did of v1 TP, and DARK TOWER is probably run 7x or so.

This is the last one, ADD says:

Professional comic book stores actively seek to buy from a variety of distributors, not relying on one monopolistic distributor for the entirety of their business, and not settling for receiving books “whenever Diamond ships them,” but rather, as soon as they are available, in order to better serve their customers.

Heh. OK, first, you're not going to get a ComicsPRO position paper that will specifically call out one vendor or supplier by name. Besides being beyond tacky, and needlessly confrontational (and more on that later), there are federal anti-trust issues that would absolutely forbid that. Jinkies!

Second off, regular readers will know that I have my fair share of complaints with the way Diamond conducts business, but one thing that Diamond usually does pretty well is moving items from point A to point B accurately and quickly.

In terms of exactly what moves when, these are largely questions of point of printing and point of receipt and timely notification of solicitation. There's plenty of plenty of stuff that comes faster via Diamond than it does from B&T, or even direct from the publisher.

But speed alone isn't the sole consideration here -- there's also cost. There's a lot of calculation that needs to be made in terms of shipping costs, manpower, and discounts when looking at what is the "right" source to buy from. For example, I buy most of my "New" Fantagraphics books from Diamond, UNLESS it's a book that I'm ordering 10 or more, then I'd go to B&T, UNLESS its 20 or more, then I'd probably go direct to FBI. It's all a matter of discount and shipping costs -- buying that book from FBI means I have to pay shipping on it, whereas B&T has $1 freight. With B&T, the increase in effective discount is about a half-percent better on 10 or more copies over Diamond, otherwise Diamond is the cheapest source. Diamond's also the SOLE distribution source for much of FBI's periodicals. If you buy a book NEW from FBI direct, you get a much better discount, but if its shipping from the printer, the freight costs tend to eat all of your profit because they're sending a single title. If you wait for it to ship from the FBI warehouse along with reorders, you're often adding a week or two to the process.

And so on and so forth.

On the other hand, I buy virtually none of my FBI backlist from Diamond -- that either goes direct, or formerly through Cold Cut, and some through B&T if I need something right away. Diamond's my tertiary source because of their reorder fee, and often lackluster stocking commitment.

The decision of WHERE to source a book is very much an INDIVIDUAL BUSINESS decision, and has more factors than ADD seems to want to allow for. And I'm not so sure that speed of delivery alone is the right metric to judge for a profit-focused/needed small business.

Otherwise, I wholly agree with ADD's other points -- being clean, organized, well lit, open on time, and so forth. But there's a big part of me that feels that's like issuing a position paper stating that we feel that water is wet, and the sky looks blue, and that fire can burn. There are pretty much already zero-point conclusions for ComicsPRO's membership.

Months ago there was a bit of discussion about having a professional standards paper, but no one stepped forward with a first draft, so I think it went into limbo. But I'll tell you what, I'll post a link to that discussion (and this one) in the ComicsPRO message board, and we'll see if we can find any advocate for putting out a Standards paper. Again, water is wet, but it certainly can't hurt...



I have a little more to say, because I want to comment on Tom's comments, but let's save your attention span and put that into a separate post. See you in an hour or two, I hope....

-B

Labels: Brian, retailing

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Over at Newsarama, Hibbs talks more about the POS system in the store:

"I’ve only been using POS for two weeks now; and only the one system, so nothing I say on the topic should probably be granted that much weight, really, but I can already see how this is going to transform the way that I operate my store, my ability to properly order things that have fallen “off my radar”, my accidents in double or triple ordering some material, my access to data for customer searches and special orders, and so on. If I can enact even half of the efficiencies that POS promises my store should quickly become that much more efficient and profitable."

It's not necessarily that easy, though. Go and read why.

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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So, the Point of Sale has now been live for a week, as of today, and I have to say I'm in love.

There have been issues, of course -- the primary one being me trusting the Barcodes that were already in the system thinking "well, they must have scanned clearly at Starclipper, so they must all be 100% right!" Well... no. Nice idea in theory, but pretty crap in practice. I'm not 100% clear on why the differences exist -- perhaps they're from Diamond-provided codes that hadn't actually ARRIVED at SC for confirmation when they sent me the database, or something along those line -- but either way the problems are easy enough to fix, even in the middle of a transaction, and looking up books is as fast as your typing skills will allow. (So... slow for most of us Comix Experiencer types!)

I'm pretty comfortable with the gun-gun-gun nature of transactions now -- in fact, I sorta doubt I can get much faster because there's a small but crucial lag (a quarter second? Less?) between gunning an item, and the system recognizing it, but there's NO DOUBT that scanning in a stack of comics takes a whole lot longer than typing "7x299[category]" does on a cash register.

Where I can improve my time is in learning the shortcuts built in the system -- some of which are intuitive, and a few that aren't.

MOBY is the only POS system I've ever used, but, even with only a week of being live and using it, I can pretty unreservedly recommend it. The small quirks of "well, that's not how *I* would have implemented such-and-such" are often down to me just retraining my mind to HOW to do something. Everything I do and think about comics retail is very much defined by having done it in certain ways for EIGHTEEN YEARS, so challenging my preconceptions is always a decent thing.

I'll give you an example: order check-in. MOBY has a check-in procedure that I, personally, find overly-pedantic. You have to scan every bar-code in TWICE, you have to manually confirm the pricing on an item, you have to positively tell it that there are no damages.

I understand these choices -- and if I was trying to "idiot proof" a system myself, I'd probably make very similar ones. Thing is, I've got a damage rate of like .001%. Prices don't change from solicitation on 99.989% of all comics, and, so far, the barcodes for the Marvel and DC books that show up with your weekly invoice (if you've asked them for "extended format") look to be similarly accurate. I'm hoping to convince them to build me a feature that allows me to just say "YES! The invoice is fine, just import it as is", and then fix the 2-5 mistakes "in post"

(I always tend to believe that "as long as you have enough 'coverage', you can *always* 'fix it in post'" -- and doing so is usually faster than being a total fuckin' anal pendent about getting it 100% correct upfront)

Anyway, my part of check in took me an hour last week, and only 40 minutes this week. I bet I can get it down to 20 minutes or so eventually.... but I'd rather it be, y'know, 30 seconds of "Yeah yeah, it is all good", followed by 5 minutes of fixing mistakes...

One thing I LOVE about MOBY is that I can make a suggestion, and then Mark will actually work on it -- now that's customer fuckin' service!!

We've still got some minor problems and things to work out and around, but the overwhelming bulk of the work is now done, and the ability to reorder with the push of a single (series of) button (s) is... OMG! I used to spend 3 hours walking the floor every week reordering stuff, and now its going to be an approximately 10 minute process.

What you do, see, is tell it what your "minimum copies on hand" should be -- "I *always* want to have at least 3 copies of WATCHMEN on hand" or whatever -- then when you do the reorder process, if you have less than 3, it does all of the math to tell you how many you should be ordering, and spits it out in a format that Diamond understands. All I have to do now is CONFIRM the data I've been given, and maybe massage a book here or there, or look for things that maybe I didn't want to commit to a specific number until I actually saw the final product. Roolage!

My efficiency is going to double (at least)

Ultimately, if you're an existing comics shop: bite the bullet, and Just Do It -- I'm going to get back all kind of time that I used to use doing rote scut work, that can now be used more productively. If you're a NEW store, then don't even THINK about opening without POS in place.

FOr myself, I can definitely recommend MOBY to you. I may be screaming about it in a few weeks when I have to do my first order form with it, and have to beat the learning curve, but I can most certainly tell I'm going to save buckets of time in the long run by computerizing this stuff; I'm not going to sell out as easily of stuff I "forget"; and I'm NOT going to double-order stuff because I'm a doofus. Those two alone will probably pay for the cost of the system and the software in six months!

So yeah, fourteen flavors of sheer awesome, and it's going to make a damn fine comics shop way way better.

Now that we're on the downslope of the data entry that needs to be done, I'll also be making a return to reviewing. Graeme, monster that he is, wants me to review the porn, but that might be too much of a Big Boy move after not reviewing jack or shit in like six weeks or something.

So, reviews from me again starting (probably) tomorrow, yay!

In the meantime: Here's what arrived this week at CE:

AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #11
ANNIHILATION CONQUEST WRAITH #2 (OF 4)
ARMY OF DARKNESS FROM ASHES #1
ARSENIC LULLABY PULP EDITION #1
AVENGERS CLASSIC #3
BAD PLANET #2 (OF 6) (RES)
BATMAN #667
BATMAN CONFIDENTIAL #8
BATMAN STRIKES #36
BERLIN #13
BLACK ADAM THE DARK AGE #1 (OF 6)
BLADE #12
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL #128
BOYS #9 (RES)
BPRD KILLING GROUND #1 (OF 5)
CARTOON NETWORK ACTION PACK #16
CASANOVA #8
COUNTDOWN 38
COVER GIRL #4 (OF 5)
CRIMINAL #8
DAREDEVIL #99
DARK TOWER GUNSLINGERS GUIDEBOOK
DEADMAN #12
DMZ #22
DYNAMO 5 #6
EXILES #97
FABLES #64
FANTASTIC FIVE #3 (OF 5)
FANTASTIC FOUR AND POWER PACK #2 (OF 4)
GEN 13 #11
GHOST RIDER #14
GLISTER #1
GREEN ARROW YEAR ONE #3 (OF 6)
GREEN LANTERN #22
GRIMM FAIRY TALES #16 (RES)
GRIMM FAIRY TALES RETURN TO WONDERLAND #2 (OF 7)
HEDGE KNIGHT 2 SWORN SWORD #3 (OF 6)
INCREDIBLE HULK #109 WWH
INDIA AUTHENTIC UMA #4
IRREDEEMABLE ANT-MAN #11
JACK OF FABLES #13
JLA CLASSIFIED #41
MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #30
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED LAST OF THE MOHICANS #3 (OF 6)
MARVEL ILLUSTRATED MAN IN THE IRON MASK #2 (OF 6)
NEW AVENGERS #33
NEW AVENGERS TRANSFORMERS #2 (OF 4)
NEW EXCALIBUR #22
NICOLAS CAGES VOODOO CHILD TEMPLESMITH COVER #2
NOVA #5
OMEGA FLIGHT #5 (OF 5) CWI
OUTSIDERS FIVE OF A KIND WEEK 2 KATANA SHAZAM
PHANTOM CVR A #18
POWERS #25
PUBLIC ENEMY #4
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #10 CWI
RED SONJA #25
SADHU THE SILENT ONES #1
SPIDER-MAN FANTASTIC FOUR #4 (OF 4)
STAR WARS LEGACY #15
STAR WARS REBELLION #9
STORMWATCH PHD #10
ULTIMATE X-MEN #85
UNCLE SCROOGE #368
UN-MEN #1
WALT DISNEYS COMICS & STORIES #683
WORLD WAR HULK FRONT LINE #3 (OF 6)
X-FACTOR #22
ZOMBIE PROJECT #1


Books / Etc.
100 BULLETS VOL 11 ONCE UPON A CRIME TP
ALAN MOORE THE COMPLETE WILDCATS TP
BLACK METAL VOL 1 GN
CLIVE BARKERS GREAT & SECRET SHOW VOL 2 TP
COMPLETE JON SABLE FREELANCE VOL 7 TP
DOME HC
DUMMYS GUIDE TO DANGER VOL 1 TP
EC ARCHIVES TWO-FISTED TALES VOL 2 HC
ESSENTIAL DAZZLER VOL 1 TP
FEMME FATALES SEPT 2007 VOL 16 #4
FORGOTTEN REALMS VOL 5 STREAMS SILVER TP
GHOST RIDER VOL 2 LIFE & DEATH OF JOHNNY BLAZE TP
HEAVY METAL SEPTEMBER 2007 #112
LAST CALL VOL 1 GN
LEES TOY REVIEW AUG 2007 #178
LORI LOVECRAFT VOL 2 MY BLACK PAGES TP
MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR VOL 6 DIGEST TP
PIRATES VS NINJAS POCKET MANGA VOL 1
SHOWCASE PRESENTS ADAM STRANGE VOL 1 TP
STYLE SCHOOL VOL 1 TP
SUPERMAN CHRONICLES VOL 3 TP
TOYFARE 10TH ANNIVERSARY ED CVR #122
VAULT OF MICHAEL ALLRED LTD ED HC
VIDEO WATCHDOG #133
WOMEN OF MARVEL VOL 2 TP
ZOMBIE TALES VOL 1 TP



What, as they say, looks good to YOU?


-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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OK, system in and up, doors opened a bit, and we've done our first 2 sales.

OF COURSE the first sale (w/ 4 items) scanned successfully on zero of them, but he was cool enough to let me go enter the scans back into the system (though I can easialy check someone out w/o it), so the NEXT time I sell those books it should go smooth. We'll see!

Second transaction was good for 3 of the 4, and the last was my last copy of something that I won't restock anyway, so I let it go.

Anyway, back to it, more later (maybe)


-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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OK, double Ow.

Left the house at 6:30 this morning, arrived back home at midnight. Whee.

That whole "let's try to open" thing? Turned out to be not so great of an idea, weirdly enough -- still just enough training to do/things to go over/ fussy things to finish (or get into shouting distance of finished at least) So we didn't bother to try.

Oddly enough, we still pretty much did a "normal" Monday's sales, as we let in subbers who were just there to pick up thier orders, and anyone who knew JUST what they wanted.... but still, that means we'd have had a GREAT Monday if we'd let browsers in.

We will definitely be open on time tomorrow, everything is set "enough" for it -- I still have about 200-ish items that were never in MOBY's database, or needed something cleaned up, or are something special to our store, or whatever, that need to be entered.... but those can be done catch-as-catch can over the next (whatever) because they're not exactly top sellers or anything -- but the overwhelming majority (98.5% or better) of the inventory is in the computer and ready to sell. Well, 20% of it doesn't have barcodes yet (and 10% of those won't ever), but we can look up via the keyboard anything really fast.

Anyway, game on tomorrow.

I'll be back in somewhere between 7 & 8 AM to clear up my last bits of business, then I'll have one last 12 hour day before I can go back to "normal" (though I'll be working all day each day for the next bit, just to back up Rob and Sue a couple of days each as they work their way through getting comfortable of the logic of the system.)

But, yeah, it is live and selling books tomorrow.

Hurrah!

-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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Ow.

So Mark Richman of MOBY arrived on Saturday night to complete our install of the MOBY point-of-sales system, and to begin our training on it.

Saturday night, Rob Bennett and I did the hard physical inventory of the store, as Mark wrestled the hardware into working order, clearing up all the issues I couldn't figure out, like how to get all three of the different printers (receipt, bar code, and regular 8.5x11) working in harmony.

Rob and I started around 7:30 PM. "How long can it take?" I mused out loud, "I bet we can get it done in 3 hours max". Admittedly, I thought we were going to have one more body with us. We were done SEVEN hours later, at just past 2 AM. I got to bed at 3 AM ish.

I was back at the store by 9:30 AM Sunday morning to actually enter the inventory numbers into the computer. I was freaked out that my estimate of 3 hours to accomplish that was catastrophically wrong, given the inventory timing, but I actually finished it in just under 2 hours, going at a leisurely pace, and spending lots of time double checking my entries.

(Originally Jeff Lester was meant to help with the data entry -- but he had an out-of-town wedding the same weekend, so it fell to me... He'd have probably finished in an hour flat)

Noon, and Mark started training Sue, Rob and I. Spent perhaps too much time on stuff not directly related to selling-TO-a-customer type functionality, so it looks like training will roll on 'til tomorrow as we get our first customers.

Mark had some programming related to requests we made, so, rather than hover over his shoulder while he is doing that, I decided discretion as better than, etc., and retreated home to lick my wounds. I plan on leaving the house by 6:30 am tomorrow to get a jump on the last fiddly bits of inventory management (as always, there was a fair chunk of stuff that fell through the cracks), because I'm setting my goal of being done with all of that (except, maybe, the mini-comics... and we might just skip it as being too-much-work, for too-little-return to get them in the system by about 9 am tomorrow. Which probably won't happen, but I'm going to try.

Mark thinks we should stay closed in the AM, to do some last things, and while I'll probably defer to him in the end, I'm trying to work it so we CAN open at 11AM like normal, rather than 2 or 3. We already cheated a bunch of customers out of today. Rather not perpetuate that, if it is sensible to do so.

Funny, I'm not in San Diego, but I'm pretty much keeping San Diego hours, and feeling that San Diego pain, too!

One big fuck up on my part: I didn't have the barcode scanner set up properly to capture the "hanging" 4 digits in a code, so I have 200-ish scans which will end up being severely wrong. Nice thing is, you can "train" MOBY in codes "on the spot", so this will be a fairly minimal hassle.

Ugh, my brain is total mush right now, but I think we'll be very cool at some point tomorrow -- MOBY is pretty clearly 7 flavors full of wonderful, and I'm pretty confident I made the right choice in POS systems; it is both sexy and robust!


More when I have another chance to breathe... I might even be skipping on the shipping list this week 'cuz I don't know if I will have the time.


-B

Labels: Brian, POS, retailing

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Woof.

So, first off, thanks to those who gave me Excel tips in the last post -- yep that's what I'm using. Wish I had those BEFORE I started doing the eyeball sort, but c'est la guerre.

'sfunny, I've been using Excel for like a decade (maybe more?), and I haven't got the SLIGHTEST idea how like 75% of it functions. I generally only need it to sort, or move chunks of data around, or that level of depth -- most of those options in the, say, "Tools" menu? Don't even know what they do.

ANYway, done with the majority of the database futzing -- yesterday and today I went and scanned in most of the barcodes that MOBY didn't already have (something like 600 of them?), but that was a pretty fast process, really.

There's still TONS of stuff w/o barcodes, or stuff that HAVE barcodes, but which won't scan, no matter how much I try -- but I have to say I'm more pissed about the former than the latter. There's a couple of surprising (to me at least!) publishers, like Heavy Metal, who never bothered to put barcodes on any of their books. I really can't figure it out.

I can get all of the comics that don't have them -- typically small/self-published books, or from publishers that didn't believe there was enough "critical mass" of retailers USING them for the time/expense in doing them, but my life will certainly have more of a pain in the ass from the OPTIC NERVE or LOVE & ROCKETS of the world, where we still sell 3-5 copies of each and every issue, each and every month. Having to slow down at the reg to either consult the "cheat book" (a binder with a bunch of non-barcoded items in it, with a user-generated barcode), or type-and-find into MOBY to look them up is not going to be fun.

I can deal with that pain for L&R or OPTIC NERVE, but I suspect that, come, oh let's call it 2009, I will no longer stock publishers-who-don't-barcode just from a hassle-vs-profit point of view, if they're not selling L&R numbers for us.

Anyway, as things stand, I think I'll be "done" with the database, latest, this time next week. Next week has several other things that need to get done (Tilting! And the SUPER SECRET THING that will make you go "whoa!" when we announce it [Very Soon!]; oh, and, just for good measure, the blackline of PREVIEWS showed up today, so ONOMATOPOEIA is presumably next week too!), so it will be "next Friday", rather than "Tuesday, latest" it would have been otherwise.

Really, all I have left to do is to set the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary distributors for the non-brokered publishers, which, I think, is less than 6 hours work. (It is probably 3, but I have to factor time to look-up-and-confirm-pricing on a number of books) My BIG PROBLEM with this, is there's a lot of items in the databse I'd want to set Cold Cut as the Primary, or Secondary-after-Direct-From-publisher, and I'm kind of dreading the possibility that Cold Cut might either close or drastically mutate in the next 3-6 months, causing me to have to edit thousands of records inside MOBY (not nearly as fast as Excel.... which could do it in about 9 keystrokes, total) -- in MOBY, you have to individually open each individual record of a product (or, I think, group -- which would make changing L&R, for instance, one action, rather than 20-something different ones)

The funny thing, is my orders to Cold Cut are probably poised to triple or better, because I won't be doing that ad hoc bullshit method I'd used before, but I'll now have a "one button" process to deal with it, and the encouragement to hit that button more.

I really and truly hope they find a buyer no later than San Diego, and that said buyer understands the potential they have there -- with just a couple of tweaks, Cold Cut could become a significant player, picking up the vast majority of the non-exclusive reorder business in the DM.

I want to comment on this a bit, because I think something that Dan Vado really needs to be stated again, a couple of times.

[So, in fact, let me give myself a clean paragraph break to make it easier to link, and take a deep breath to refocus my thought here]



ANY publisher who has signed a distribution deal with Diamond, that does not have exclusions, for Cold Cut or Last Gasp, or even possibly a new startup, where that publisher is sold to retailers at an "F" (45%) discount or less has made a terrible, terrible mistake that they really NEED to rectify at their next contract negotiation.

Why? Diamond assesses a 3% reorder penalty. That means your 45% discount, just dropped to 42%. Guess what? If Diamond is distributing your books, that means Baker & Taylor and Ingram has them. ANY chimpanzee, who pays on time, and places an order of 10 or more books (not of a single title, for a whole ORDER of books! Cake!), gets AT LEAST 42% off from B&T.

And Free Shipping.

And Returnability.

THEREFORE, at a 45% or lower discount -- again, that's the "F" code, or a "H" code for 40% -- it is actually CHEAPER for retailers to buy it from the Distributor that *Diamond* is selling to, than from Diamond, on a Reorder (and, in many cases, on the initial)

You want your retailers to get the BEST POSSIBLE PRICE on your wares, don't you? So they make lots of money, and buy MORE of your books, right?

THEN MAKE SURE there is competitiveness in the marketplace.

I kind of die inside when I ponder a company like Achaia -- they're exclusive to Diamond, no exceptions; They've been quietly building up a line of high quality titles with a fairly broad "real human" appeal... but because they are "Buy/Sell" with Diamond, DIAMOND DOESN'T HAVE THEIR BOOKS *IN STOCK* MOST OF THE TIME.

To give you a good example, for the last few weeks I've been buying my copies of the MOUSE GUARD HC from B&T, rather than Diamond BECAUSE DIAMOND HAD NO COPIES, and B&T *did*. I'd kill to be able to buy, in open stock, virtually anything that Achaia produces... but because of the deal they locked themselves into, I usually can't.

Tom asked why the New Boom doesn't seem to be translating for publishers or certain aspects of retail? That's because the only publishers, on reorder, that retailers can "keystone" (double their investment) are the four brokered ones -- the ones without any 3% reorder penalty. Everyone else, you're crippled at the outset because of a regressive policy that dates from a different time of distribution. Even if you're an "E" (50%) publisher -- your Onis, your DEs -- you're 47% on a reorder from Diamond, *and* dependent on Diamond's whim of whether they *stock* your comic or not. Not "will order it, if a customer asks", but *stocks*.

Think about that VERY carefully the next time your contract comes up for renegotiation. Because I have to tell you that I think about those things constantly, and I'm the one buying your books.



[*puff* *puff* OK, rant over]

So, ah, where was I?

Right, assigning dists to the database. Quick process, I'm hoping. Then... Hm, another pass through the "series" codes (I want to make sure it understands that, say, BPRD, is actually the SAME book, despite restarting at #1 every 5th issue), and maybe futz with the author and illustrator fields a bit.

And after that, it's just another 2 weeks of scanning and looking for errors I missed before, but not the intensive 10-13 hours a day things I've been doing the last few weeks.

I figure, since I'm working from an existing database, that, of the data I'll be using (way under 10%), I'm still going to have 1-200 books with some sort of error that I didn't catch, and won't until things are running. But, hopefully, I'll be able to deal with those on the fly, and that they won't be too disruptive as things run.

But, pretty much, the overwhelming bulk of the Scary Database Project is pretty much done. There's still doing the physical inventory, and entering that data, but that will just be an ugly 8 hours that can't be done until the last second, anyway.

Right. Off to have some recreation, then back at it for Saturday...



Oh. And did I say to watch out for something Really Cool in the next few days?

Well, do.


-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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Just jumping in real quickly to let you know the project proceeds.

Last Thursday, Friday and Saturday I spent a total of 33 hours, in those 3 days, walking the store, pulling books off the rack shelf-by-shelf and checking to see if they had records already in MOBY's database. Basically, over those three days, I've touched every single item in the store (except the back issues) at least once.

(I also pulled a lot of stuff OFF the shelves for our sale box -- so, if you're a CE customer and you haven't checked the TP sale box in a while, NOW is the time to do so; there are some tremendous deals in there! [I just made Jeff Lester spend another fifty dollars, I am afraid])

This took a whole lot longer than the inventory will take (estimate: 10x longer) because I had to pull everything off the racks, shelf-by-shelf, carry it over to the counter and the computer, and type in a bit of its title in the cntrl-F Find box, then walk the books back and reshelf them. Whee, and stuff.

The FUN part of it was that MOBY's database uses DIAMOND's database at its core, and Diamond does not... well, how to be kind about it?

It is my understanding (perhaps out of date) that Diamond doesn't have a master file of what it stocks. Instead, the individual brand managers RETYPE THE ENTIRE CATALOG EVERY MONTH. Perhaps more importantly, Diamond doesn't have an exacting standard format that they use to present information, so it is entirely possible that you'll have a series of TPs that look something like this in Diamond's database:

DWEEZLEMAN VOL 1 TP
DWEEZLEMAN DWEEZLES AHOY VOL 2 TP
DWEEZLEMAN VOL 3 DWEEZLES BIG ADVENTURE TP
DWEEZLEMAN GN #4 DWEEZLES NIGHT OUT

(this is an extreme "example", generally speaking no one series has more than 3 schema -- and even those tend to be multi-year 10+ volume series)

Because of this, if you were to sort your list into alpha-numerical order, it would sort like this:

DWEEZLEMAN DWEEZLES AHOY VOL 2 TP
DWEEZLEMAN GN #4 DWEEZLES NIGHT OUT
DWEEZLEMAN VOL 1 TP
DWEEZLEMAN VOL 3 DWEEZLES BIG ADVENTURE TP

Which drives me insane when trying to work with the data.

So I was also editing titles as I went along to try and mitigate some of this. For myself, there's only ONE format that is appropriate and that's:

[Series Title] VOL [#] [Subtitle] TP ([optional notes])

I also am a total weirdo in that I like to add a zero to sub-ten-volumes entries (that is, it is VOL 01, 02, and so on to 09) -- that's because, since the volume number is in the title field (though we have a column for "issue #" as well of course) if you don't do that, an alphabetical report sorts like this:

VOL 1
VOL 11
VOL 12....19
VOL 2
VOL 20
VOL 21...29
VOL 3
VOL 30

(and so on)

(and yes, you *can* stretch this out to the 40s. No, not a manga series; Fantagraphics PRINCE VALIANT reprints reached well into the 40s)

With the "extra" leading zeroes, everything sorts the way its supposed to.

Also, this is where I hate the ABC line books -- rather than "VOL [#]" they are listed as "BOOK [number spelled out]" so that "BOOK FIVE" sorts before "VOL 05". Once someone from DC (I don't recall who, nor the context) indicated to me that they were that way because Alan Moore insisted on it, but whoever made the decision to have it that way in DIAMOND'S DATABASE should be taken out back and shot. That's not just from a POS POV -- I'm changing the titles myself, obviously -- but from an invoicing POV. DIAMOND prints their invoices in straight-alpha, which makes checking in fun fun fun.

There's also a lot of mislistings -- things categorized by Diamond as "comics" when they are actually "magazines", that kind of thing -- or bad listings. For instance, basically every book that's listed in the "book" section of PREVIEWS has in the "publisher" field the header of the category that it was listed in PREVIEWS. "How-To", "Art Books", "Fantasy/Sci-Fi" that kind of thing. Which is often annoying, but not something I'm going to fix now, because it doesn't matter *that* much, and I can always edited the important ones later.

Anyway, so that was Thur-Sat, the upshot of which is that I *could* take a hard physical inventory tomorrow if I needed. (that's end of the month though)

Sunday I vegged out.

Monday I hit the database for ~10 hours and found "all" of the things that I "should" be stocking, but didn't have on hand. This includes a lot of out of print stuff, but that will work itself out quickly. I found about 200 items. Approx 60% of them are probably OOP. Of the ones that aren't, about a quarter were on this week's restock arrival already.

I also noticed on Monday that, hm, a lot of items I have on hand don't have a barcode in the database -- this is probably because Starclipper (MOBY's "home" store) never stocked them (Diamond's database doesn't provide barcodes in advance, except for a very small handful of publishers). I hadn't realized that I was going to fill in quite that many holes, so I sorted the list of on-hand by barcode and made a sublist of the ones I'd need to scan in. About 800-ish titles.

Tuesday morning I started in on it, and got about 10% of the list done in an hour (which reminds me, I'm going to need to make another list of things that will need to have barcodes generated FOR them...), but then it was time for the New Books to arrive, so clearing that up will be Thursday and maybe Friday in the store.

Today I am at home and, literally, staring at columns of numbers. MOBY has separate data fields for "MSRP" and "MOBY price" -- that is, what the "price" is, and how much the program will charge you for it. But Starclipper, over the years, has put some number of objects on SALE... so I've got to go through and compare column A to column B.

THAT's why I'm typing this essay, BTW -- comparing two columns of numbers on a computer screen is not easy on the eyes, so every 5 or 6 PageDWNs I flip over here and type a paragraph or so.

The way I am doing this, I *know* I am making mistakes (or, at least, not catching some) -- if there's a $12.95/$12.99 discrepancy I won't be catching it in most cases (though I caught one!), and maybe not a $15.99/$19.99 one either. Thankfully, on the few occasions where it's a Starclipper-putting-it-on-sale situation (as opposed to data-entry mistake) they're generally cutting the price to half, making 5/9.99 easy to spot.

Right, so that's done, thanks for listening while I distracted my eyes. Off now to start messing with reorder points!

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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Right, so where was I?

Last Friday I lost a few hours because the firewall router I was trying to install wasn't working with the modem for some arcane reason I can't begin to understand. I had my dad come (over three tries) and get it going (he was a network guy for PacBell before he retired), but that cost me some precious computer time on Friday.

Saturday, Sunday, and much of Monday were lost to me because I kinda forgot it was "that time of the month" -- order form for August, and subscription set up for July, and the general "end of the month blues" of paying bills, etc.

Tuesday, the comics arrived. Can't sell them until Thursday, but we have Tuesday delivery, and since Wed was the holiday, it was either Tue-for-Thur, or Thur-for-Thur, and I chose to have the piles of boxes in the store, thanks.

Wednesday.... well, despite the holiday, I HAD to get back to the database. So I did. All day. "Finished" the comics section of it. And the magazines (though, come on, how much work really needs to be done there?)

Thursday was today, and it was New Comics Day. And I worked it alone, because Sue is off at a wedding. And yet I still mostly managed to deal with the Book part of the database for most of the right hand side of the store.

Friday is tomorrow, and I'm hoping to finish off the right hand side of the store, and maybe (MAYBE) the center too.

I'm piling up a bunch of books to put on clearance, too -- nothing like touching every book in your store to go "and these must go away!". I'm hoping those will be put into the sale boxes by Saturday, but who really knows, might not be until Tuesday.

Saturday will be my normal weekly reorder pass, but if I haven't finished the center-of-the-store, then I'll have to do that as well, being wholly under Rob's feet. He'll like that.

Sunday... well Sunday, I'm hoping I can rest.

Monday, all day at home working with the books inventory of all of the things we DON'T have in stock, and setting up primary and secondary and tertiary distributors for them, as well as reorder points for the stuff I actively want to stock, and so on. Unlike the comics, where there is necessarily a reorder point except "huh, sold out, get more", basically every book needs to have a decision made about it about HOW MANY I want to keep in inventory at all times. That will take me 3 (?) days... so, since Tuesday is Comics-arrive, I'm planning on being done by Thursday early AM (Because, damn it, I have to have time to take Ben to the park!!!!). Then next Friday (a week from tomorrow) will go towards all of the "behind the counter" (T-shirts, toys, whatever is in the case) stuff, which, hopefully, is only 3-4 hours work, max.

Then normal-weekly-reorders on Saturday, rest on Sunday, then start thinking about writing a TILTING around 7/16, to run on 7/20.

There's also something else going on on Monday 7/16, but you'll hear more about that a little later.

On 7/28, Mark Richman, programmer of MOBY, is coming to SF to reimport back our now edited version of the database, and to train us on the system, Unless something goes categorically wrong (and, hey, shit does, in fact, happen), we should be trained on MOBY on Monday 7/30, and POS is "live" as of that point, just before my "Dream Date" of 8/1. So, fuck yes.

That also means that, between (let's say) 7/16 and 7/28, I HAVE to get the database finished, no screwing around. I think that's an easy deadline (unless I biffed something hard I really should be done with a week to spare), but it IS a deadline, and I have to remain aware of it all the way along.

And somewhere in there is the new ONOMATOPOEIA (I'm guessing we'll have the "blackline" of PREVIEWS on the 17th or so, for a we-photocopy-it date of 7/20 and PREVIEWS street date of 7/25, but I never keep PREVIEWS dates straight in my head)

OH, and the deadline to Turn In next month's orders is 7/31, which means that I can't possibly work the order form in the 7/28-7/30 window I would normal do.... because we're being trained in MOBY right then. Gonna have to figure out a way to do it all on Wed 7/26, because there's not a whole lot of other day options available to me right now.

And, the normal end-of-the-month functions (like bill paying!) seem like they're going to become first-of-the-next-month this cycle, whooops.

So, this is what July looks like to me, wheeeeee. But at the end, I'll have POS and a much better control of my inventory, so this "Lost Month" will be all worth it, I think.

Anyway, just letting you know I'm alive, and why I'm leaving Graeme out to fend for himself right now (Sorry, G!) -- and why my wife hates me because she's having to shoulder like 96% of the entertaining-Ben duties (Sorry, Tzipora!) -- but it's just going to be an ugly July.

More as I have time -- now to take a shower, and maybe pretend I'm a human being entertained by some recreational activity for an hour or two before I sleep...

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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Well! I *finally* got the pre-populated database for MOBY (took nearly a month because I had some fussy requests for them, and I wanted a go at the data without having to use MOBY itself to access it -- MOBY is nice as a POS program, but kinda of mediocre as a let-me-edit-100k+ items; I'm using Excel to manage the data), so this is now my life for the next 2-4 weeks.

The MOBY database goes back something like 5 years, and has something on the order of 140k items in it. Now, of course, AT LEAST 70k of those items aren't things I'd EVER stock in my store of my own volition (like, say, games, or cards, or XENA t-shirts), but it's nice to have them in the database on the off chance that anyone might want them one day.

Of course, 140k items? Yeah, that's a LOT.

So, step #1 was to hack that into more manageable chunks -- I started by sorting out the database by Diamond "category" codes: code "1" is comics, "2" is magazines, "3" is books, and so on. 1, 2, and 3 each have their own files right now, so I don't "cross the streams", while the final 12 or so categories I split into two files. For the most part, I probably will barely touch the final 12 categories (since we're, pretty much, a PURE comics shop), but I'm still going to have to at least look through each and every item to make sure.

Step #2 was to loosely sort the "chunks". Actually, that took all of five minutes per file, if that -- sort the "comics" by publisher, then by title, then by issue #, so that, say, all of the DC books are together, are alphabetical within the "DC" listing, and are in proper alpha numeric order.

This, of course, assume that the data is both accurate and complete, but of course it isn't precisely. Probably 98% looks pretty perfect, but there are definitely holes and problems and miscategorizations. As an example, it appears that every book with a "APR07" code either lost, or never was given its "publisher" field, which means that sorting through data is a two-step process: step a: look at the publisher's bit; step b: look at the "no publisher listed" bit. Oh well, shit happens.

Step #3 is where I am right now: going through those files and looking for things that do or will have. For example, the "comics" file has 36,298 items in it. I'm going to get that down to probably under 2k items, really, since "Back issues" aren't going to be individually tracked through the POS.

So, today I started going through the store with two goals: a) strip some of the "sludge" from the racks, stuff that's been sitting there for (likely) a year or more, almost all of that "indy" or "alternative" books, because, generally, a book comes OFF the rack when the "next issue" is there to replace it. Much of the "indy" stuff never GETS a "next issue", so it tends to accumulate longer. This goal is "pretty much" done (for COMICS) in the 4 hours I was at CE today -- I ended up with a shortbox of "unsalable crap" (estimate: $400, my cost)

Goal b) was to set up a new column in the database that's basically either a "1" or a "0". "1" = "do inventory on this". I almost finished the comics on the right side of the store. I'm going to go in 'round 9am tomorrow to take advantage of 90 minutes or so of no-customers-underfoot, but I'm hoping by, dunno, 3 PM or so I'll be basically finished with the "do we have this in stock/do we anticipate it being in stock soon" marking up of the comics file.

Once that's done, then we move to Step #4 which is going through and editing what needs to be edited in the portion of the comics list I'm "keeping" (we'll keep the data of the OTHER 34k-ish items, but basically trusting "MOBY Defaults" are all correct) -- there I'll be setting reorder points, primary/secondary/tertiary distributor, genre and so on.

There are, by the way, 52 (!!!) columns in each row of the database that I could edit if I wanted/needed to. Though I doubt I'll edit more than 5-10 of them for most items.

There's also Step #5: Look for things that I DON'T have on my rack, but that I WANT to have, and have "slipped through the cracks" over the years. That's a day's work, I think (I'm doing that semi-concurrently, and have finished all of the publishers that begin with an "A")

Then after that, is Step #6: printing a list, organized by rack (genre), and doing a hard physical inventory; followed by Step #7: entering that data into the computer; followed by Step #8: POS goes live (#6 & 7 will happen "concurrently", hopefully in one single day. #8 should be the day after)

I have to do much of those same steps for the "magazine" and "book" files. (much less for the two "everything else" files)

Mags will be pretty simple, actually -- again, don't carry most of that, and I think Books will go smoother as well because I won't have to keep running to the rack to say "Wait, what issue is this on?". Books are largely binary in "do I carry this or not", while periodicals are "I carry this, but not issues six months back" (or whatever), and I have to constantly keep checking, for instance, "what issue is WONDER WOMAN on?"

Based on my progress today, I'm going to tentatively believe that I can accomplish all of this over 3 weeks or less, and my HOPE is I'll be able to "go live" with MOBY on or about 8/1. (I actually *think* I can get it done in around 10 days, and *could* be "live" by 7/15, but I'm still going to settle for 8/1 or later, because "pad" is always better)

So that's what I'm doing, work-wise, for the 11 of you that care. Lots of pain now in exchange for some powerful tools for the future.

I'll try to get in 1 or 2 reviews this week, but don't count on it, given the above.

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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Rob had to help his sister move this week, so I did two back-to-back full days at the store today (well, "am still doing", technically), which I haven't done in a while. It is really good for me, honestly -- got caught up on buckets of stuff in filing and sorting and making sets or whatever. But I'm now very very tired.

James Kochalka came by on his way to his event tonight at Giant Robot, and we chatted for a bit. He's a really terrific guy, and he did some really color nice sketches in two volumes of his books on the shelves. I'm not going to tell you which books they are, in the hopes that they'll end up with some unsuspecting soul whose day is then utterly made.

I've installed all of the POS hardware now at this point, with the sole exception of the "pole display" (will actually be countertop) -- the bit that shows the customer how much is due, etc. Didn't really want it underfoot for the next x weeks it's going to take to get everything finished before POS launch.

I'm not sure I hooked it all up CORRECTLY, however, since I don't really have the software yet to test it all. I have a demo version of MOBY downloaded and installed, but the PDF manual that came with it is a couple of builds out of date, and I can't really piece together what I'm doing on my own. I had sorta hoped I'd've been able to get away without training, but I think now that's a bad idea.

Problem is, that's going to add MORE time to the implementation, since I either need to go to St. Louis, or have them come here. Plus it'll be another, say $500, for travel and lodging that I didn't want to spend. Ah, c'est la guerre.

The next major step is going to be the evil one -- building our initial inventory file. There's something close to 10,000 individual items we carry (not counting single back issues, or sets or quarter books, or whatever), and even if it only took me 1 minute to get each item into a database, that's something like 20 8-hour days, right?

What I'm trying to do is to arrange to get the "pre-populated" database BEFORE I actually get the final version of MOBY, so I can massage it in excel or something -- it's much easier to use Excel to "globally" change 2-3 parameters for all of the, say, ESSENTIAL volumes to be what I want, then it would be to rebuild all that data from scratch. I'm waiting to hear what my real options are here, because I'll cry if I have to build this thing from scratch.

Until then, I'm kinda in limbo -- many people are commenting on the new computer, but it's kind of just an internet-surfing paperweight at the moment, since I can't do any POS with it just yet. I'm sure I'm beginning to inculcate some bad habits (NO SURFING AT WORK, DAMN IT!), but hopefully by Monday I'll know the shape of what my next 2 or so months shall be.

It's really crazy running 2 parallel systems at once -- running stuff through the cash register at the same time I try to set up POS, and I'll be really REALLY glad when the system is fully in and running, and a lot of the stupid time wastes in my week will go away (to be replaced by new ones, I'm sure)

Anywhere, so that's where I'm at.

(in case you cared)

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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I hate hardware installation -- even with a fresh system... so many wires and stuff to trip over and wind through and trying to make sure that everything is all compatible.

I suspect it is even worse when, like me, you're not actually putting in the POS *yet*, so you have to keep the space for the cash register and all of the "analog" systems at the same time you're trying to set up the new stuff.

I'm likely about a month or so before I even try to ACTUALLY put in the POS -- I'm waiting to hear back from MOBY about what I can expect with the database before I start making with the inventory and all of that. I've downloaded the demo of MOBY from Bitter End, but I haven't installed it as of yet, trying to get all of the hardware pieces sorted first.

I picked a cheap Dell computer (it really was a good price, on the catalog sale), and it's working just fine. What's funny is that, except for the video card, it's faster and smarter than my "home" computer, which is mostly a gaming rig from Alienware. And it cost about a fifth of the Alienware (nearing about 4 years old now... got it right before Ben was born)

Dell's peripherals are damn awful, I have to say -- this keyboard and mouse feel like a child's toy, though the monitor seems decent enough. I'll be getting a new POS-oriented keyboard in a week or so (with a touch pad mouse built in), and that can't happen soon enough.

I picked out most of the rest of my hardware based on recommendations from other retailers on the CBIA, the internet-shopped for most of a week before finding the cheapest vendor.

Some of the hardware I can't precisely test yet -- I've hooked up the receipt printer to the cash drawer, but without installing MOBY, I'm not positive they actually work. Next week sometime!

The first thing you have to do with a new computer is scrub off all the useless software crap they come preloaded with. That's why they're so cheap, I guess -- kickbacks from the software companies.

I also got a regular laser printer from Dell, but I was flabbergasted (FLABBERGASTED) that it didn't come with the USB cable it REQUIRES to hook up to the computer. Next week for that I guess, too.

I've also hooked up the barcode printer, but I don't have the right size labels yet, so setting that all up correctly is going to take some time too. Using the starter labels it came with gave me indifferent results, but they're not the same size as the labels I'll end up using, so I don't want to invest a lot of time in programming it until I get the right labels. That could be today's FedEx, but dunno. I'll begin worrying about that for real tomorrow.

I haven't hooked up the barcode scanner yet, either, but that's more from not being sure exactly where it will finally end up more than anything else.

But yeah, the DSL was easy enough to put in (I can't believe how eensy the modem is!)

Spent yesterday and most of the morning downloading and installing virus protection, firewall, Firefox, then all of the websites I'll want to access from the store with the various passwords. I'm at about 9 hours now, and I'm feeling good about all of that stuff.

Still 9 hours, and POS is still a "soon" prospect, if you see what I mean? At least another 2-3 hours of hardware foolin' in front of me, but its lunch time, then I should get to some "actual store business" (not that this isn't, but you know what I mean -- it feels like I'm "fooling around" by blogging from work)

I'll do one review before the end of the (store) day, I think, but I need to cross off at least 5-6 more items off my "to do list" for today...

-B

Labels: POS, retailing

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Yeah, yeah, I suck, you're tired of reading it.

But I spent most of today installing (much of) the hardware for our new POS system at Comix Experience, and getting the new DSL up and running at the store. Yes, after 18 years, Comix Experience is actually going to enter the 20th Century.

What's funny is tomorrow will be the first without-Jeff Friday in a loooong time, and Jeff was kind of complaining about not having internet at the store, and tomorrow will also be the first full day of having internet, so, huh. That's more ironic than rain on your wedding day...

I've also been spending a lot of time setting up a Secret Future Plan for the Savage Critic, and, while we're probably a month away from saying anything real, I think it's going to make the place rock. Hard.

So, like, I might be kinda quiet for the next month, because I'm putting like 80% of my brain into Getting POS online (and another 10% to the Secret Future Plan), but I definitely plan on doing at least one post from the store tomorrow, just because I can.

Honestly though, I hope to reward you for your patience (and I don't want Graeme to think he's alone out there, darn it!)

-B

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We've participated in every Free Comic Book Day held so far, because its just a DAMN FINE idea. "The first taste is free" and all that.

Typically, we're pretty mellow about promoting it, preferring the national press to do the heavy lifting. This year was no exception -- zero advertising, no in-store promotion to our regulars, no press releases, heck I don't even put the FCBD window cling up until the week before, and even that's up on the high part of our windows which probably makes it harder to spot.

All of that lack of effort, and yet there were still definitely periods during the day where we had so many people in the store it was difficult to move around without bumping someone's ass.

Lots of kids, too. Lots and lots of kids. Many many many kids. Maybe more kids in 8 hours than we get in a whole month combined. So that rocked.

We were doing OK on FCBD stock until about 3 pm or so -- then we started running out of titles. We started with 35 or so different books, and ended the day with perhaps eight left available.

We don't set limits on what people can take -- we have a "don't be greedy" rule, or "take what you want to eat, eat everything that you take", or perhaps, "don't just take something because it is free"

90%+ of people adhered to this rule without even being told. Even the "leeches" (and most every retailer can tell you about leeches who only come in for whatever is "free", and are, y'know, rude about it) pretty much adhered to the Rule. Which was nice.

90%+ of attendees bought something (counting "a family" as "attendee"), and we had an EXCELLENT sales day. Not a record (that still lies with the Neil Gaiman signing for SEASON OF MISTS HC -- hard to beat selling a $25 hardcover to each and every person who walks through your door, really), but in the top five of all time, and beating last year's FCBD by around 20%.

All in all, a great day, a great event, and we made a WHOLE lot of people really very very happy.

-B

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Had some knocking-the-wind-out news on Friday, but mostly I had forgotten it was order form/sub form weekend. I should have comics related content posts on MOnday and Tuesday...

Meanwhile, here's the Top 20 of what Comix Experience ordered for June shipping (no specific numbers this time)...

1. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #4
2. ALL STAR SUPERMAN #8
3. COUNTDOWN #47 (I fell for the returnability offer here)
COUNTDOWN #46
COUNTDOWN #45
COUNTDOWN #44
7. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #10
DARK TOWN GUNSLINGER BORN #5
9. JUSTICE #12 (Both covers combined)
10. NEW AVENGERS #31 (taking Marvel on it's word...)
11. HELLBOY DARKNESS CALLS #3
FLASH FASTEST MAN ALIVE #13 (also returnability offer)
BRAVE AND THE BOLD #4
14. BATMAN #667
15. RUNAWAYS #27
MIGHTY AVENGERS #4
BOYS #7 (Shame that DC let a top 20 book go away)
18. X-MEN FINCH GATEFOLD VARIANT #200
X-MEN ENDANGERED SPECIES ONE-SHOT
WORLD WAR HULK #1



And here's the Top 20 by the I-think-more-important dollars


1. BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER #4
2. ALL STAR SUPERMAN #8
3. DARK TOWN GUNSLINGER BORN #5
4. JUSTICE #12 (Both covers combined)
5. SHAZAM MONSTER SOCIETY OF EVIL #4
6. COUNTDOWN #47
COUNTDOWN #46
COUNTDOWN #45
COUNTDOWN #44
10. EC ARCHIVES TALES FROM THE CRYPT VOL 2 HC
11. JACK KIRBYS FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS VOL 2 HC
12. ULTIMATES 2 VOL 2 GRAND THEFT AMERICA TP
13. JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #10
14. FRENCH KISS #20 (A)
15. NEW AVENGERS #31
16. WILL EISNERS SPIRIT ARCHIVES V22 HC
17. GRENDEL ART OF MATT WAGNERS GRENDEL HC
18. X-MEN FINCH GATEFOLD VARIANT #200
X-MEN ENDANGERED SPECIES ONE-SHOT
WORLD WAR HULK #1


Dunno if any of that's interesting to anyone...

-B

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I haven’t done a lot of charts here, mostly because the response is always so muted. I know only a small number of people have the Numbers Wonk gene, but if you’re one of those people, here’s a peek behind the curtain of Comix Experience, so you can see how things work. That’s because it’s paperwork day here at Casa Hibbs, and one of the things I’m working on is the April subscription orders.

Unlike a lot of stores, we ask subs to order month-by-month. You don’t say you want “Batman” – you say you want “Batman #665” followed by “Batman #666” and so on.

The following list is our top 40 sub orders for the month of April 2007. The deadline to turn this in was February 14th, so most of our customers made their decisions 6-8 weeks ago – this especially means on books that are on #2 or #3, sub counts tend to be lower as customers haven’t SEEN #1 with their own eyes yet. People tend to be willing to “take a flyer” on a new #1, much less so on the #2 and #3. Once you hit #4+, these numbers get increasingly accurate.