Creating Comics, Part 3: Comic Book Marketing

I might as well start today’s article off with two scenarios: one of what marketing is about, and one about what it is not.

Scenario A: A publisher plunks $10,000 into the printing and production of his new title, The Adventures of Oscar the Super-Powered Scottie, an all-ages title about a pet with super powers which he is self-publishing under the “Scottish Terrier Comics” imprint. The first issue of the book is solicited through Diamond’s Previews magazine with a full page ad (~$7500) and the publisher hires a PR firm to gain some mass media attention for the book, and even hosts a launch party at San Diego’s Comic Con International. The total cost for all of these activities is another $7,500. The book is priced at $2.99, patterned after the industry standard.

When orders come in, the publisher is dismayed to find that he has only sold 4,600 copies of the book, and re-orders seem to be extremely light. What’s more, orders for issue #2 seem to be stalled at 3,200, while orders for issue #3 are even lower at 2,800. Three issues and other expenses have brought the book’s price tag up to $45,000, but it’s only realized about $15,000 in eventual revenues. What’s more the publisher has thousands of copies of the books left, most of which he’s going to have to store in a warehouse until he can sell them.

The publisher hires a marketing consultant, whom he asks to help him improve sales of the books. The marketing consultant studies the problem, looks at the publisher’s business model, and reasons that short of relaunching or repackaging the product, there is nothing that can be done. The publisher is stuck with at least $30,000 in debts and is forced to make some tough decisions about the viability of the product line.

Scenario B: A publisher wants to get into the comic book game, and she has a great idea for a book called The Adventures of Oscar the Super-Powered Scottie, an all-ages title about a pet with super powers. She starts by building a business plan and researching the comic book market carefully. After collecting information from the Internet and from talking to various publishers via phone and email, she concludes that publishing her book as a monthly comic book is not a smart move since the production cost for a single book is much higher than her average expected returns. She discovers that the children’s book market, while crowded, has relatively few comic books written specifically for kids, and decides to publish her book as a graphic novel instead.

Her total costs on production and printing run around $20,000. She prices the book at $9.99 to make it cheaper than other graphic novels, but comparably priced to other children’s books. Since she knows through research that the bookstore market will return, on average, 30-35% of her orders, she plans to only ship 66% of her initial orders to bookstores to cut down on returns. She also keeps her print run close to her order numbers so she isn’t stuck with a bunch of extra books, deciding that she can always print more if orders are high. She toys with the idea of calling her imprint “Scottish Terrier Comics,” but realizes that placement in Previews is determined alphabetically and that her listings will get buried towards the back; she opts for “Doggone Comics” instead.

The publisher toys with the idea of hiring a PR firm, but decides instead to use a grassroots approach by sending free copies of her book to parent/teacher organizations and influential librarians. She also hires her nephew to build her a simple but professional website where she can promote and sell the book directly to customers. She decides against a full page ad in Previews and works instead on contacting retailers directly and asking them to carry her book by giving them her ISBN. Her total marketing efforts cost her $500.

Initial orders come in lower than expected, around 2,000 copies total. 500 of these are ordered from the comic book market and are non-returnable; the remaining 1,500 are ordered from bookstores. The publisher ships out 1,000 copies to her distributor and waits for a request for more. Three months later, the distributor requests another 1,500 copies to fill orders, and reports 10 returns. They also report that many bookstores have direct orders for the title from customers. The publisher ships out 1,500 copies and eventually receives 100 copies back. In the meantime, she manages to sell 500 copies directly from her website and another 1,000 by visiting local schools and talking to students about creating a comic book. In total, she’s sold around 6,000 copies, but she’s generated over $30,000 in revenues.

A vs B: In the first scenario, the publisher was operating based on many assumptions. For instance, he assumed that because he created a book, people would buy it. He also assumed that because he created a comic book, he needed to release it in the style of other comic books. He assumed that his book would sell better (and perhaps it did!) due to spending his money on his Previews ad and his PR campaign. He assumed that his sales would stay consistent when, in fact, they did not.

And on that last assumption, let me offer a word of advice to would-be publishers, something that you’ll only learn from someone who has some inside knowledge of the comic book industry. If you are releasing a monthly comic book, chances are good that you will not see a growth in sales until your fourth issue. The reason for this has to do with the way retailers order comic books, and it’s important to know.

If I am releasing the first issue of a book in March, it will appear in the January issue of Previews. Retailers will typically order the first issue the heaviest because it will give them an indicator of how popular the series is. But the problem is that the second issue, due out in April, will be ordered during February, and the third issue, due out in May, will be ordered during March. Unless the first issue comes out at the beginning of the month and sells extremely well, chances are good that retailers will place the order for the third book before they’ve tested the performance of the first. Thus if a first issue does attract some interest, retailers won’t take it into account until they order the fourth issue, which will appear in Previews that April.

Had the publisher in the first example done his market research, he would have known this. But then, that’s exactly why he failed; his thought process was to create and sell a product to a market he didn’t understand, thinking that advertising and a PR campaign would see him through. What I want you to understand here is that this is exactly how many publishers approach the comic book industry (and even the broader publishing industry) — and it is exactly why so many fail. Marketing is more than sales and promotion; it’s a whole range of activities that begin at the conception of a product.

The publisher in scenario B applies these activities constantly throughout her business. She takes the time to craft a business plan and spends a large amount of time involved in market research. She realizes that the idea she had for a product is a dead end, so she refines the idea to fit into a more viable form. She doesn’t waste a lot of money on unnecessary promotion. She spends more on production and printing initially, but less overall, and she sells fewer copies to make higher profits. She also diversifies her selling channels so that she’s not relying solely on comic book stores to sell her products; she’s relying on bookstores, website sales and school sales as well.

When people come to me and ask me how they can “market” a book, they’re generally asking the wrong question, because they’re already decided on all of the questions involving the product, the price and the place, and they just want to know how they can promote it to magically make it sell better. I can offer some tips on how to promote a comic book, sure; in fact, they’ll be the focus of tomorrow’s article. But good promotion can’t sell a bad product, no matter what salespeople tell you.

I once heard a rep from video game accessories manufacturer Pelican say “there’s no such thing as a bad product; just a bad price.” That is probably the stupidest statement I’ve ever heard in business. There is such a thing as a bad product, and it’s almost always borne out of a company creating something based on its employees’ ideas about what a customer wants rather than talking to the customer directly. The electronics industry in particular suffers from this problem because companies are so concerned about getting new technology out the door before their competitors that they don’t take the time to find out what customers actually want.

The comic book industry is terrible about this as well. Too many publishers put out books because the creators think they’re “cool” and not because they’ve bothered to find out what customers want from the product. This is part of the reason that the manga market is killing the North American comic book industry in the bookstores; consumers wanted stories available in pocket-sized volumes with stories that weren’t about superheroes. Marvel responded with its atrocious Mangaverse and DC responded with its ho-hum Teen Titans line. Both were sorry imitations of manga that came from publishers who didn’t understand why people were interested in the genre in the first place. And though Marvel and DC continue to do well with their superhero comics, they’re both unable to sufficiently expand beyond what they’ve been doing for the last fifty years. Many other publishers have messed up as well:

–Crossgen was one of the biggest new things in comics at the turn of the millennium, but they got too big too fast and wound up cannibalizing their own sales. Their solution to every problem was to add more money, and their doors closed not long after because their marketing strategies were not built around sustaining growth.

–Dreamwave Productions was the other hot new thing at the beginning of the 21st century, putting out beautiful books like Darkminds, Warlands and Shidima, all of which had a cool anime style and amazing color effects. And then they got the Transformers license and got even bigger. A few years later, they closed their doors because they were spending far more than they were making.

–Alias Enterprises arrived in the summer of 2005 with a massive wave of 9 launch titles, ranging from mature supernatural fiction (Elsinore, Lethal Instinct) to all-ages (Lullaby, The Imaginaries). The company also brought back The Tenth Muse and The Legend of Isis, two titles from earlier in the decade. In under a year, the company canceled all its books and announced that it would be publishing Christian comic books exclusively. It has since ceased operation.

–Speakeasy Publishing came on the comic book scene quickly and vanished suddenly less than two years later. Though the company seemed to have strong fan support online, its books did not sell well, and the company abruptly canceled several books it had just picked up with little warning.

–Devil’s Due Publishing broke off from Image Comics in 2003, confident in the strength of their G.I. Joe books. They made a few solid gains with their Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books, but then they plunked a bunch of their time and money into a superhero universe called Aftermath, which bombed within months. This allegedly caused the company to lose a lot of footing with the retailers who were stuck with unsold copies of what they were assured would be a hit.

–Many people have predicted the eventual death of Image comics over the years, but the company is still alive and kicking. It’s not for a lack of bad decision-making; things have looked extremely sour for the company on many occasions over the last 15 years. What’s kept them alive is that they’ve taken a smarter approach to publishing and that they’re worrying less about market saturation and more about the quality of their line. Good for them!

All of these companies made a crucial mistake in their efforts: they failed to incorporate the marketing process into the creation of their books. Instead, they looked at the comic book market and thought, “Surely, if I publish books about the things I’m interested in, people will buy them.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you want to properly incorporate marketing in a comic book, use this evaluation tool before you start production:

Comic Book Marketing Evaluation Tool

I. Target Market (Place)
-Who is in my target audience?
-What sorts of books do they usually read?
-What genre should it be?
-How well do those books sell? (Useful link)
-Does my target audience primarily shop in comic book stores?
-At bookstores?
-Online?

II. Product
-Are monthly comic books the right way to go with this?
-Are graphic novels a better option for this?
-Does this book need to be in color?
-If it’s a manga-style book with around 200 pages, no.
-Anything else, probably yes.
-How many pages should it contain?
-32 printed pages with 22 pages of story is standard.
-How many issues should it be?
-Maxiseries, miniseries or ongoing series?
-Does my genre fit this format?
-Can I find seasoned professionals to help work on this?
-Will I be able to afford them?
-How long will it take to produce my book?
-Will the bank balk at my slow rate of return?

III. Price
-How much do books like mine cost?
-Remember that books sold to retailers are sold for 45-65% discounts.
-Can I afford to charge that and stay in business?
-If I raise the price, will I scare away sales?
-Have I asked anyone else, or am I guessing?
-Can I use an economic model to help me out here?
-Am I charging too little?
-The difference between $2.99 and $3.50 adds up quickly!

IV. Distribution (Place)
-Am I selling my book through Diamond?
-Will they accept it?
-Should I publish myself or go through someone like Image?
-Will it add enough to my sales to be worth the extra cost?
-Can my printer deliver directly to my distributor?
-How long is the wait between receipt of books and shipment to retailers?

V. Promotion
-Do I have an up-to-date website with relevant information about my books?
-Is there old info I need to update?
-Are there any dead links or old images?
-Is my website easy to find in Google and other search engines?
-Do I need to fix my meta tags?
-How can I make retailers aware of the product?
-Press releases
-Promotional mailings
-Street date
-Preview copies
-How can I make consumers aware of the product?
-Interviews
-Previews
-Street date
-News articles

(The tool is by no means comprehensive, but use it as an outline to help you develop a marketing plan!)

And to round things off, here are five traps to avoid as you begin marketing your book.

1) Don’t print to sell Base your printing numbers off your orders. Don’t overprint to get a volume discount and then get stuck with 48,000 extra copies of a book that only sold 2,000. You laugh, but it happens.

2) Don’t advertise. It’s expensive and wasteful. Promote and publicize instead. See my Marketing 101 section for more tips on this.

3) Don’t pick a lousy name for your company. Put thought into the name of your imprint. Avoid “X” as the first letter in the title. Remember that Previews lists publishers alphabetically. It’s no coincidence that so many publishers have names beginning with “A,” “B,” “C” or “D.” (Army Ant Publishing and Cutscene Comics, for example!)

4) Don’t assume people want to buy your books. You have to persuade them with a cool concept, good production values, timely publication, and great promotion.

5) Don’t refuse to listen to fans. People will tell you what they think, whether you want to hear it or not. Listen. You don’t have to follow their advice, but you should be aware of what they like and don’t like about your product. Marketing is as much about building long-term relationships as it is about getting those first sales. Long-term customers are the most likely to stay loyal if you start to suck, so cultivate them and listen to what they have to say.

-SJJ

1 Comment

• 

  By Mat N., March 3, 2008 @ 4:38 pm

  Great articles on here. It’s nice to see someone writing intelligently about the business side of comic book publishing.

  -Mat N.

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