Listening to a number of comic retailers lately on various podcasts, a lot of them are still singing the same song about trades being the wave of the future and how people are moving towards trades so their stores are moving towards trades. At the main comic shop that I frequent, I’d say their linear footage for trades is roughly 2/3rds of the linear footage for new monthly comics. They’re obviously building a nice stock of trade paperback collections, hardcovers and original graphic novels.
In the new Tilting At Windmills, retailer Brian Hibbs makes what he thinks is a surprising discovery about his selection of trades:
One of the reports I’ve been running a lot is the “dead items” one, where you can set a time period to look for how often an item turns, and I’ve been pretty shocked and mortified to see how poorly some things move. There was no easy way to get to this information in a pen-and-paper world, and it is just a few mouse clicks away now.
What kind of flat-out shocked me is that something approaching half of the trade paperbacks we carry have not sold a single copy since we’ve installed the system. Now, admittedly, I’ve been telling myself that my goal was “two turns a year” as a minimum for anything to stay on my rack, and we’ve only got four months of solid hard data (so, two months to go!), but I’m really starting to see just how big the anchor is that’s slowing us down. Come February, I’m probably going to get extremely ruthless about what to start cutting away before we drown in the sea of SKUs being unleashed upon us.
There’s a couple of things to take away from this. First, an electronic Point of Sale system is going to be extremely beneficial to a lot of retailers whether it’s the Diamond supplied POS or whether it’s another system like Hibb’s uses. Stores will now have a better understanding of what’s actually coming in their door and what’s going out of it instead of relying on the gut instincts that the small business owner has relied on for years and years. Now that gut instinct can either be supported or disputed by hard numbers.
Second, are trades the future? I’m not denying that it’s a great thing to have a lot of back product easily and readily available and in print so that when I want to get some Neal Adams Batman, instead of hunting through back issue bins, I can go out and get the Ras Al Ghul trade and enjoy that. But while there’s a lot of that stuff out there that any store can buy, what are they actually selling? My comic shop has about 300-500 GNs on display. They had that this week. They had that last week. They had it last month. Like Hibbs, how much of their inventory is tied up in dead stock.
But if most shops start seeing this, what happens to the diversity of comics? Will we see only comics and trades of the top sellers when we walk into almost any comic shop? I know which shops around me have a fantastic array of books if I want to go browsing but what’ll happen when they realize that copy of P. Craig Russell’s The Rings hasn’t moved in over a year? Will they not order the next PCR release and will I miss it?
This all seems to be a circular argument getting back to if you know you want something, preorder it. Tell your retailer that you want it. I use a selective combination of LCS, DCBS, Amazon, Borders and Barnes & Noble to stretch my buck and get the best selection at the best price so I don’t want to pre-order everything because I know there’s stuff I know I want to shop around for.
Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got to go track down a copy of the latest Age of Bronze that I forgot to pre-order.