So yesterday I get this e-mail. It’s from a guy who has heard about the DC relaunch and would like to know about some titles. He’s never been that into the DCU before - always found it to be intimidating to get into, what with the tangles of continuity you sometimes need to comb through to get to the story. In this e-mail, he requested a couple of bits of information. He was interested in Batman, and wanted to know which Bat-book I would recommend - and once I made that recommendation, he wondered if we’d be able to set up a file for hi of one or two books. I responded like I usually do in these cases: by staying in the store late and banging out a sheet of overly verbose descriptions of the books he was wondering about. The process took roughly half an hour, and ended when I got to the end of the Batman specific books. I told him that I’d like to hear what he thought about the books before recommending anything further, just to get a sense of his tastes before proceeding, and offered this help both through e-mail, depending on what he had the time to do.

This morning, I opened an e-mail and was greeted with a reply. Inside amongst other various bits of flotsam and jetsam, was a phrase that surprised me:

“Thanks so much for your really detailed response and eagerness to help - that’s something I’ve not really felt from other stores in town.”

…really? Really?

God dammit, this will not stand.

Sellling the New 52 - Part 01:

The New Customer Shuffle

A bit of context for those of you who aren’t local. In the city of Edmonton in which I ply my talents, there are 12 full comic book stores. At least. Start ups will often pop and recede, tattoo parlours will start ordering from Diamond, and I honestly can’t remember if there aren’t a couple in the suburbs that connect to our city as well, but for the sake of argument, let’s say there’s 12. That’s a shit ton of stores for a city that has roughly 800,000 people. Far too many.

I have no earthly idea as to how this city sustains all of those comic stores - though to be fair, it has seen its fair share of shops meet an untimely demise. In the five years that I’ve lived here, I’ve witnessed the closure of two and the near closure of two more. I know of at least one that will be gone by the end of the year for certain, and another few who will have to fight hard to stay open for much longer. Which, in the end, is good for me, but holy man, the stories I hear. Now granted, my audience is a bit skewed. More often than not, they are coming to the store for a reason, and that reason has nothing to do with location. With such a large quantity of stores in the city, it just can’t be. So they arrive, broken hearted, having tasted the local flavour, only to find them to be lacking. The reasons are wide ranging and varied, though tend to differ depending on what shops they’ve been to. In some places, they are ignored. Others, they are treated rudely. But the thing that gets me, that just irks me more than anything, is hearing things like I got in that e-mail.

Why. Why would a person not be able to find help in a store when prompted. I mean sure, I understand that we all get weird questions. I’ve been asked for any number of strange and disgusting things, and I’ve watched someone’s face go from hopeful to “well then why the fuck do you even exist” when I tell them we don’t carry bestiality pornography, but that’s not what this is. This is someone walking into a comic store, who genuinely wants to try something new, who is being told that he is not worth the time it would take to explain such things.

Look, here’s the deal. For years the comic book industry has been selling to the same group of people. For years. And over time, as attention is splintered and fractured by new and exciting things, that audience has shrunk. Now, to respond to this, publishers have often published books that play off of that nostalgia - and they are usually greeted with better sales than when they try to run with someone new and different… because the old audience doesn’t want new things. Because of this, too much of the product on the stands today are old ideas recycled through new lenses. With each new take, with each new writer and creative team, we are shown slightly different angles, and we think, wow! This is something new!

But it’s not. It’s old, and we like it because… well, because it’s our thing. But look. We can’t survive on current readers alone. Which is why we need to constantly be pushing for different things, constantly supporting different concepts, fresh ideas, in whatever way, shape or form we can. And when a new person arrives at our doorstep, we do not turn them away. We do not.

I’ve been trying to go over the reasons why a shop wouldn’t give this guy the time of day, and I can maybe suss out what’s happened. What it might come down to is a balance of sales vs time. A person would look at his request for information on all the Batman books and look at the part where he’s willing to commit to just one or two titles, and balk. On the surface, it appears as though this will be a whole lot of work, for very little reward - which certainly can be true. Many stores don’t bother saving any comics for people unless they have more than, say, five monthly titles on their file. To them, it’s not worth the time or effort taking care of a file smaller than that - whether it be due to the time it would take, or the space.

Now, I’ve always been of the opinion that a store needs smaller files to survive. And yes, those customers who have 100+ titles on your file pretty much single handedly keep you in business - but one day? Something might happen to those guys. I’m not saying that it will, I’m just saying it’s a possibility. Or they might get married, or have a kid or buy a new house, or find a new hobby, or whatever. The fact is, while catering just to your biggest file customers is great for your short term business goals? It will do shit for you in the long term. Which is where the small files come in.

When anybody starts getting into anything, chances are, they’re going to start off small. This is especially true with comic books. When you walk into a store, you’re hit in the face with a lot. Heck, I needed space for 77 new facings of product that shipped this week, and that only accounts for the single issue comics. There’s a lot of information floating around, and without a proper guide, a new reader won’t find a good place to start. They need a guide. As a retailer, it is your job to be that guide. You need to be there to answer their questions and tell them where to start. Or more simply: if a person asks you about Batman comics, you tell them about the Batman comics. You take some time, you walk them through, you recommend a book, they buy the book, and they go from there. Just because a person isn’t dropping cash into your lap, doesn’t mean you ignore them. These people, more than your regular customers, deserve all the help you can give them. I mean, always, always, always treat all of your customers well, but don’t focus on the people who exist. For the most part, they already know what they are doing. Yes, tell them about the new books coming out, yes make recommendations to them, but do the same for new people. Because those new people? Are going to be the folks who will be supporting you a few years down the line. And that’s pretty gosh darn important.

THE NEW 52

So why am I going on about all this? Well, for one, it just happened and I’m kinda’ mad. I mean, yay for us, we’ll probably get a new customer, but god dammit retailers, we talked about this. At that secret meeting? Where we all agreed not to be dicks so that we could sell some comics?

Anyway, the other reason I bring this up: the big New 52 initiative from DC. Maybe you’ve heard of it? DC is relaunching their entire line of superhero comics, with an eye towards grabbing new readers and coaxing back old ones. And do you know who’s job it is to sell those comics? No, no, it’s not DC. Their job is to make product that we can sell. Retailers are the ones who will have to sell these books. And god dammit, there is absolutely no reason why we can’t do this. There is no reason why this push shouldn’t allow up to move so many more comics.

I know that it might be impossible, but I’m setting a goal to sell roughly double our pulls for DC comics by the end of the year. And man, am I trying hard to make that happen. But it’s not just schmoozing up your current customer base. While they’ll probably gladly plunk a few dollars down to try something new, they’ve all got budgets, and you can only push those so far before they break - which is bad. Every shop has had those customers that start to fall behind, who start to leave more and more books in their file, after which they suddenly just disappear off the face of the earth. I know one of our guys in particular spent about a month fretting over his stack, before telling us to put it all on his credit card, muttering over and over “my wife is going to kill me, my wife is going to kill me, my wife is going to kill me…”

That guy is gone now. We haven’t seen hide nor hair of him in years, and if I had to hazard a guess, his wife’s floorboards are probably brimming with the results of his budgetary mistakes. And nobody wants that. And so with this big push, I’ve been going elsewhere. I’ve been standing out in front of our shop in the moments when nobody is inside, handing out the free preview copies of The New 52 we have to passers-by. I’ve been telling my friends about the changes, been carrying around copies of the freebie in my carry bag, offering it to anyone who seems the slightest bit interested. I’ve been concocting plans for something huge we want to do on August 31st (which I won’t go into until I can confirm a few things with our DC rep)… we’re not going into this quietly. We’re doing anything and everything we can to get new feet into this store, doing anything we can to make sure that this amazing opportunity is not wasted.

And the fact that other stores don’t seem to be doing this? It’s just astounding to me. But hey. All the more power to them, I guess. We’ll see what survives the waves of this launch, and we’ll see just how many of those 12 comic shops are left standing after the next year or two.

TO BE CONTINUED…

As I noted above, while it’s important to focus on new customers, you shouldn’t do that at the expense of your main customers - which is why in a few days time, I’ll be posting about the system I used for getting everyone’s file ready for September. Yes, it’s a little late to really capitalize on (if it appeals to you, that is) but hey, at least it’ll be up.

Now? Naps. Or more accurately, a lot more work, and then Captain America.

Fuck yeah.