Things I don’t want to write about.
1. The Amazing Spider-Man comic with Obama that’s coming out this week.
Seriously, I don’t even want to deal with it. We ordered based on what we thought we could sell, and on the information Marvel gave us (and they did give us enough info on the comic itself ahead of time), not based on media coverage that may or may not have materialized. If there’s still demand, we’ll have a second printing the following week. If demand continues, we’ll continue getting reprints if Marvel keeps supplying them.
We’ve had some phone calls for it, but not a whole lot. ‘Course, I wasn’t in the store on Monday, so maybe the phone rang off the hook all day. I don’t know.
But we’re not going to bump orders way up on a comic that’s been generally trending downward in sales, in a month where comic sales are usually sluggish for us, in the hopes that real-world news will create more one-shot customers that only come by for the hyped comic, and never come back. (Like they did on, say, the Captain America death issue. Sales sure scaled back on that title right quick.)
Yeah, maybe we missed out on the hundred dollar eBay sales and the “investment opportunity,” and maybe someone will pop into my comments to tell me how he, I don’t know, reshingled his roof with the money he made reselling this comic on the secondary market. Hey, good for you. I don’t care.
So, again, we based orders on information we had on hand, not on potential hype (which, by the way, started after we finalized our numbers on this comic). This may be a conservative way of doing things, but this isn’t an industry that, on the whole, really encourages, or rewards, or can even support, a whole lot of risk-taking. Because I’m sure if we ordered a metric ton of copies of a comic via direct sales in the hopes (or on the promise) of media attention, and it fizzled, the publisher would surely let us return the unsold copies…right?
Right?
Our preview of Wednesday, courtesy Employee Tim:
NOTES:
1. I’m not as angry about this as I sound, honest. I’m more bemused by it all.
2. Yes, I know publishers sometimes will offer items on a limited returnable basis to encourage orders. That’s more the exception than the rule.
3. I actually think Obama meeting Spider-Man is a cool idea, given that our President-Elect’s a Spidey fan.
4. “Our President-Elect’s a Spidey fan” is a very strange thing to find myself typing.
