[Marketing 101] – 3 Tips For Selling Books In the Face of a Recession

Today, I read two articles that offered distinctly different messages about consumers.

The first was a report that the film The Dark Knight set a box office record during its opening weekend, both in terms of its midnight release revenues and its overall revenues for its first day. This is great news for the people involved with the film, since the economy is on the brink of a recession and people are spending fewer dollars on entertainment options right now.

I love this quote from the story:

“If you’re worried about mortgage payments and gas prices, when you’re sitting in `The Dark Knight’ for two and a half hours, you’re not thinking about any of that stuff,” Dergarabedian said.

The second article talked about how consumers have changed as fuel and food prices have risen… and questioned whether or not these changes are permanent. The article cites a case of a woman who opted to buy some shoe glue to repair a damaged sole rather than go out and spend more money on shoes. Here’s what she has to say:

“We weren’t big spenders, but now we are watching our money more,” said Radtke, of Manitowoc, Wis., whose husband works in construction. “Even if I fell into a pile of money, I still wouldn’t be spending a lot.”

“That’s great, Sean,” you might be saying. “What does this have to do with publishing?”

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[Comic Book Publishing] – 5 Ways Comic Books Can Cheat Death

In my previous article, “5 Reasons Comic Books Must Change or Die,” I offered several elements that are contributing to the death of the comic book industry. But today, I’m going to outline some ways that comics can change for the better… and cheat death to live on in the digital era.

But first, let’s take a moment to gain some perspective. According to CBGXtra.com, In May, 2008, 7.08 million copies of the top 300 comic books were sold, with the top ten accounting for 15% of the entire market. ICv2’s analysis says that both comic book and graphic novel sales are slowing down, and that the quarter overall has been weak. I should add that these numbers are not representative of what fans are buying; these are repesentative of what retailers are ordering. Many of the retailers I’ve spoken to claim to only sell around 50-60% of all of the books they order in the first month. That means that sales to readers are closer to the 3-4 million range.

There’s no question that these numbers are better than the numbers 10 years ago, when 6.99 million copies were sold in May, or the numbers from 5 years ago, when 5.63 million copies were sold in May. (Comparing actual dollar sales is not a fair analysis since books have gone up 33% in price over 10 years.) But that’s nowhere near the 11 million copies that sold in September, 1996, when Diamond first took over distribution to the direct market. And, for what it’s worth, 1996 was one of the years when the industry was in a sharp decline.

In other words, the comic book industry managed to turn itself around from extinction, but ultimately, the industry is stagnating. That means earnings will level off, investments will dry up, and retailers will go bust. The industry may have righted itself for the short term, but in the face of a declining economy, it may have simply delayed its demise.

Fortunately, there are ways that the comic book industry can plant new seeds for growth. But what I need to make clear here is that the current industry, with its overemphasis on superheroes and collectibles, may prove hostile and infertile to these new ideas. The next generation of comic book creators will need to look outside the established direct market, and they will likely have to carve out a new niche of their own. The next generation of comics may simply be a larger part of the publishing industry as a whole, fragmented into different genres and scattered around bookstores with their respective topics. And as digital options become more and more available, it’s quite likely that successful indy books will start out online, and not in print, in the near future.

But a lot of this will come at the expense of the next generation of creators separating themselves from the icons of the industry. So, with that said, let’s look at my own vision for changes the medium can use for growth over the next ten years:

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[Comic Book Publishing] – 5 Reasons Comics Must Change or Die

A friend recently told me that comic books are going through a renaissance lately, and that they’re on their way back to becoming mainstream.

“Really?” I asked. This was news to me — from what I have seen over the last decade, sales in the comic book industry are growing marginally at best, and they’re nowhere near the points they reached in the 1990s.

But my friend argued that the success of movies like Iron Man, Hellboy II and The Dark Knight this summer indicate that comics are back at the forefront of popular culture, and that the upcoming Watchmen film is only going to improve comic books’ position. I’ve read similar arguments on websites and in entertainment columns lately. But the idea that comics are making a comeback because comic book characters are showing up in other forms of media is both naive and misguided.

Now, personally, I would love for comics to make a comeback — I’m a big fan of the medium, and I think it has a lot of untapped potential. But the problem is that comics, as they’re currently produced, are not attractive to consumers for a number of reasons, and unless the industry is willing to change, what we know as comics today will likely disappear down the road. It’s a sad thing to say, but it’s true. And there are many reasons behind it.

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[Resource of the Day] – How To Sell Christian Books

Today’s Article: Selling Books to the Christian Market
By: Bette Filley
Via: Independent Book Publishers Association

Believe it or not, my entire journey into the world of comic books and publishing began with a Christian comics-themed message board on Yahoo! Groups. There was a time when I was very serious about Christianity, and I wanted to produce books for that market. But as I grew a bit older and wiser, I realized three things:

First, the more I studied the history of Christianity and the religions that influenced it, the less I identified myself with the modern form of the religion. Having this sort of “doctrinal disagreement” would make it difficult for me to get books published in this market if I chose to stick to my principles.

Second, I realized that the Christian bookstore market wasn’t really about books anymore; it was about selling a wide array of Christian-themed gift items and inspirational CDs, with a few books on the side. The competition in the market was getting fierce, too, since chains like Family Christian Stores were using their distribution power to put mom and pop stores out of business.

Third, I realized that producing books for this market was the equivalalent of “preaching to the choir” — and the preaching that people wanted to hear wasn’t even all that good. For example, a popular book in Christian bookstores is Lee Stroebel’s The Case For Christ. The book is marketed as a sincere, skeptical analysis of Christianity that offers proof that the religion is true. But the problem with the book is that Stroebel only interviews people who are sympathetic to his viewpoints, and when he asks the “tough questions,” he doesn’t press his points or question the answers. Any answer he receives is good enough. Sadly, a lot of Christian books I’ve read fall in that category, and I couldn’t see myself, particularly with my unique perspective on some Christian doctrines, writing for that audience. I’ve always believed that it’s better to be a light in the dark than to see who can shine the brightest.

So that’s why I found this article very interesting — a piece about how publishers can sell books to the Christian market. Not surprisingly, the author recommends avoiding the Christian book market and looking for opportunities elsewhere. But I was surprised to see some of the places she recommended taking these books…

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[Resource of the Day] – Is a Creative Commons License Practical For a Publisher?

Copyright law is complicated, and it’s really showing its signs of age now that the Internet is in common use. I have a copyright notice at the bottom of every page of this site that states that this material is covered by US copyright law, and that it may not be reproduced for any reason without my consent. I do that to protect the integrity of my work — I’ve spent hours preparing some of these articles, and I don’t want an unscrupulous person to be able to reprint my work, not attribute it to me, and then get away with it when I find out about it. Copyright law says that as the author of the work, I automatically have the right to control how it’s used. And that’s great.

I really don’t mind if my work is reprinted or used for noncommercial purposes. Every now and then, I hear from someone who’s in a writing group or who is teaching a workshop who wants to hand out my Comic Book Writer’s Guide. I need to revise it, but hey, they’re welcome to it, as long as they’re not charging anyone for it. My only stipulation is that they credit me and reference the URL of my website.

But there are loopholes in this system that allow people to use my work for commercial gain, whether I like it or not. For example, if someone wants to parody a piece of writing I’ve published, they are legally entitled to do so… so long as it’s not longer than the original piece and contains enough original writing that it’s clearly a different piece of work. If someone wants to write a biography about me and use large chunks of text from individual articles on this website, they’re permitted to do so, without my consent, under the “fair use” guidelines. (Here’s a detailed explanation of what those provide.) And if someone wants to take my work, change just enough of it that it’s original, and republish it without attributing me, they’ll probably be able to get away with it under the law, because I have to prove that they actually plagiarized my work in order to stop them from using it. That’s a problem.

And there are flaws, too. Most people who want to read my work will read my website. But what if someone wants to make a copy of an article I wrote and file it away for reference? If my copyright language does not state that they’re allowed to do so, and carries that ominous line, “All Rights Reserved,” they’re violating my copyright. The same is true if someone emails an article to a friend, or copies the article onto their own website in “mirror” fashion, with full attribution, just because they’re concerned that my site might go down and the article might be lost. Even something as benign and useful as the Wayback Machine, which archives the entire Internet, regularly violates the copyright of millions of authors without their knowledge.

To face some of the challenges presented by the information age, some folks got together about six years ago to create a “Creative Commons License” (or CCL) system that would allow writers, musicians, graphic artists, photographers, software developers, and other creative people to distribute rights from their copyrights to individual users through a free licensing system. On the surface, it seems like a really good thing for anyone to use, but it does have its own set of problems. The question I’m going to address today is whether or not a publisher should consider using a CCL for his or her printed work. The answer might surprise you.

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[Resource of the Day] – What the Law Says About Fan Fiction

Article: Friction Over Fan Fiction: Is This Burgeoning Art Form Legal?
by Grace Westcott
Source: Literary Review of Canada Online

Unlike a lot of folks in the comic book industry, I’ve never been a big fan of fan fiction — writings by fans that take place in an established universe with established characters. But I’m not necessarily sympathetic to the views of fantasy and sci-fi authors who have railed against fanfiction (such as this passionate essay from Raymond E. Feist). No, my beef with fanfiction is that it’s creatively lazy; it involves taking someone else’s characters and ideas and using them to create a derivative work. It’s hard to grow as a writer when you’re simply imitating the work of others, and it’s even harder to grow when you refuse to create ideas of your own. It’s one thing for children to include Spongebob Squarepants and Pikachu in stories they write, because they’re still learning the basic skills needed to create a story. It’s quite another thing for an adult to write a slash fic featuring Sirius Black and Severus Snape engaging in a bondage-themed tryst.

I suppose that one might argue that the folks currently writing Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are writing professional fanfiction, and that by my reckoning, they’re being creatively lazy too. I suppose that case could be made, but the difference is that those folks are getting paid for their work, by the people who currently own the copyright. The work has to be of a certain quality, and one it’s published, it becomes a part of the “canon” of the story. As such, I don’t have a problem with professionals picking up gigs to write established characters. I would, however, have a problem with those same professionals spending their free time writing fanfics on the side.

But lest you think I’m anti-fanfic, let me assure you that I do think that there’s a time and a place for them… and that publishers are unwise to ban them entirely. With that said, I think it’d be wise to first look at the legality of fanfics, and then to talk about how a publisher can use them as a marketing opportunity…

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[Resource of the Day] – Can Giving Away Ebooks Boost Sales of Print Books?

Today’s Article: Neil Gaiman: Giving Away Ebooks Sold My Print Books
By: Cory Doctorow
Source: BoingBoing

I saw this piece on BoingBoing, but go ahead and check out Neil Gaiman’s blog as well to read more about this story. Basically, Neil Gaiman’s publisher, Harper Collins, decided to give away free ebook editions of American Gods via software called “Browse Inside”. The result: sales of the novel surged in independent booksellers, and probably in big chain stores as well (though it was apparently difficult to deduce this since a product promotion was running at the same time). And as soon as the free ebook promotion ended, sales dropped.

So the publisher was giving away free ebooks, and customers were going out and buying the print edition. On the surface, that doesn’t make any sense at all. What the heck was going on?

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[Resource of the Day] – Why We Buy

Book: Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping
by: Paco Underhill
Website: http://www.envirosell.com/

My recent article on consumer behavior has led me to start reading through some books on the subject. And while this might not seem to be an extremely important topic for a small publisher to consider, I’d suggest that understanding the way consumers examine products is an important consideration when a publisher is trying to determine how best to package a product or how much support to give to retailers.

Paco Underhill is a peculiar sort of marketing researcher — instead of gathering data from polls, he goes out into retail stores, installs hidden cameras, and has members of his field team tail customers and take detailed notes about the manner in which those customers shop. Over the last few decades, he’s developed a system that he calls the “science of shopping.” Personally, I’m not certain that his methods are actually scientific; observation techniques can contribute to science, but many of the recommendations Underhill makes to his clients in the book are based on his desire to improve outcomes rather than his desire to discover if those outcomes are truly effective.

But the book raises some interesting points, and I won’t discount what Underhill suggests merely because his techniques aren’t scientifically sound. Much of what he relays is anecdotal, explaining the layout of a store and the challenges it faced. A mall-based drugstore, for example, had its sodas located in coolers in the back of the store, causing teenaged mall employees to rush through the store during their breaks and tear down a central aisle where older shoppers would often stand and examine pain relievers. Though the product was convenient and visible, the constant flow of fast-moving teens made the older shoppers uncomfortable, and resulted in low sales for these pain relievers. Once the pain relievers were moved elsewhere, they attracted fewer customers, but saw greater sales since the customers were more free to take their time selecting and comparing products.

Underhill’s book is full of this sort of story, and it’s easy to see that he has developed an intuition for understanding consumer buying patterns. One of the things I’ve taken away from reading the book is that the approach many consumers take towards buying goes against the practices some publishers like to follow. And that’s what I’d like to discuss.

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[Resource of the Day] – Why Cartoony Doesn’t Cut It For Kids

It might surprise you to know that from the ages of 8-12, most kids prefer photographs to comics, live-action television to cartoons, and non-fiction books to fiction books.

It surprised me when I first learned about it during my research for Army Ant Publishing. And I found out about it in the worst possible way, too — I had already come up with the idea of starting a comic book company for kids, and I wanted to make my first story a cartoonish adventure series featuring my dog, Ramses, a spunky little pup who would be smarter than his owners, but always thwarted by his love for peanut butter.

But unlike a lot of people who want to start companies, I wasn’t content to develop a product and then test it with children. So, I started researching what children were into, and when I visited my mother’s second grade class for a monthly young author’s writing workshop I was teaching, I would ask kids what they were into.

I got the responses I expected, of course — the kids loved Spider-Man, and Pokemon, and Spongebob, and all of the things that marketers work so hard to get in front of them. A lot of them were obsessed with video games, and many of the girls were into Hannah Montana and shopping at Club Libby Lu. But what surprised me was that many of the children were also interested in animals and nature. They enjoyed nonfiction books, and when I looked at the books they enjoyed reading, I noticed that they enjoyed the books with realistic artwork over those with cartoonish artwork.

This was very interesting to me, especially once I started seeing articles such as this piece from Newsweek, which talks about a publisher that gave the “Little House on the Prairie” books a makeover to suit the tastes of modern children. The publisher decided to replace the classic Garth Williams illustrations on the cover with more photorealistic covers that conveyed a sense of adventure. Other publishers of literary children’s books followed suit. The article even quotes two children who approve of the change:

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[Business Planning] Seven Ways to Find Demographic Information

If you’re in the process of starting a new business, or if you already have one and you’re trying to expand it, chances are good that you’ve come up against one of the toughest questions in the process:

“What are my customers like?”

Big companies always seem to have exactly the right answer when they’re asked this. “We’re very big with the 18-24 male segment, though we can skew as high as 34,” a marketing rep might say. “We’ve seen a lot of growth in the East Coast market, and we’re noticing a particularly large amount of interest with men who have at least 1-2 years of college under their belt. An emerging secondary market comes from young professionals who like to read, but who don’t have the time to get into full-blown novels.”

Huh? How did they find all this information, and how do they know it’s accurate? Are they polling all their customers somehow, or do they have some secret source of demographic information that the rest of us don’t know about?

I used to wonder about that too, but then I took a class on marketing research. Now, since I was old enough to start filling our product registration cards and to say “no” to people trying to get me to take a poll in the mall, I’ve been aware of the field of marketing research. And, like most folks, I’ve even been resentful of it, at times, because it seems like a practice that only big companies with too much money can afford to engage in.

I won’t say my class turned me around on this viewpoint entirely; marketing research is extremely expensive, and it really is something that most small companies can’t afford to do on a regular basis. But the class piqued my interest enough that I’ve joined the Master in Marketing Research (MMR) program at SIU-Edwardsville starting this fall, and I know enough about the field now that I can dispel some of the myths… and tell you how even a small company can use basic marketing research tools to describe his or her customers.

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