by Rich Johnson
You’re interested in reading comics again. You went to see a Marvel or DC movie, and you had flashbacks to when you were a kid and how much you loved comics. The movie was Spider-Man: Homecoming. You really liked the kid who was Spider-Man. You remember watching the Tobey McGuire and Andrew Garfield movies and even the MTV animated series. You don’t want to buy single issue comics like you used to, you’re not a collector, you just want to read a good Spider-Man book.
Someone recommends to you a book they’ve read called Spider-Man: Blue by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale. They tell you it takes place early in his Spidey-career, but the art is beautiful and the story is good too. And your friend tells you that you don’t need to know about the “continuity” of the characters over these past few decades. They call it a stand-alone story. Great, sounds perfect.
You go to the local Barnes and Noble and don’t see it on the shelf. You venture into the local comic shop and it’s not there either. You check Amazon on your phone, and they refer you to a third-party seller for a used copy. You ask the clerk at the comic shop. They tell you that there are four books by that creative team and in addition to the Spider-Man book they have Hulk: Grey, Daredevil: Yellow, and Captain America: White. They tell you, “Unfortunately, none of them are available. are out of stock with no reprint date.” You’re bummed. You were getting excited about all four books and were thinking of buying at least a couple of them.
You go home empty handed. The store doesn’t make a sale, all because a well-received book with a well-known and talented team attached isn’t in print. Yeah, I know I am being dramatic. In the real world the clerk might have made a recommendation for a different Spider-Man book. But for the sake of my argument, he goes home dejected and cries himself to sleep. Okay?
[Editor’s Note: Incredibly, when I was looking for a cover image for Spider-Man Blue on Bookshop.org, it didn’t even show up!]
Comic shops and bookstore rely on publishers to have books in stock so they can order them and sell them to customers. It seems like a pretty simple formula right? But doing that requires someone to manage the inventory.
A strong backlist is essential for a publisher to build. It is their bread and butter. Backlist can account for 80% or more of a publishers’ sales. Having the right amount of books available at the right time is nothing short of a juggling act. But it’s a necessary juggling act.
Backlist management can be a computerized algorithm or someone monitoring inventory levels and sales trends. You look at how many copies a book has sold for the past few years and average it out. And you look at the unit sales for the same period of time. Book X sold 5,000 copies per year on average over three years. Depending on how many months or years of inventory you want to hold will depend on the print run you set.
But you also need to factor in events; the author has a new book coming out that can drive their backlist. A movie of a book is going to be released. When the trailer for Watchmen broke, the sales of that book went through the roof. It was already a strong seller for DC, but the trailer pushed it to a new level. Eventually that will level off. That’s true for more recent titles like Invincible and The Boys. A new TV season hits and sales go up.
When a book is tied to a television show, it becomes a little tricker because the sales are the biggest for the first season and they slide with each season. To make things more difficult, keeping a four-color graphic novel in stock is more complex because they are usually printed overseas because it’s cheaper. It’s easier if you are publishing black and white prose books because many of them are printed in the United States and a reprint can be turned around in days. When you print overseas (usually in Asia) the turnaround time is now months, not days. You need to account for weeks of shipping on the water. And then you need to rely on it clearing customs quickly. You also face the challenge of the shipment getting offloaded at the port and it getting loaded on a truck destined for the warehouse.
How do comic book publishers handle their inventory? Let’s take a look at how DC and Marvel keep books in print.
For years I had buyers at the major chains complain to me how Marvel managed their book program. I was told that Marvel’s approach to their graphic novel program was to treat the books like they were magazines, in-and-out sales. Marvel would sell out of the print run and not go back to press. The title would be out-of-stock for months or years and then they would print a totally new edition of the book with a new ISBN. Changing the ISBN is a problem for online and chain bookstores. It makes it harder to keep track of historical sales. It can also cause confusion when there are multiple listings for a book.
The reason Marvel did this I have been told was Issac Perlmutter. He was notoriously cheap and didn’t want to tie up money with inventory that might just sit there for a while. Now that Perlmutter has been gone for some time, I ask the question – is it any better? Are key Marvel books in print? Are they staying in print? Is Marvel keeping their Premier Collection in stock? How are the Epic Collections doing?
I ask this because we need Marvel to have a healthy backlist program. Under the Perlmutter system there was money lost by everyone. We need to have new readers come to the table.
What about DC? With all the corporate turmoil are they still keeping books in stock? One of the things I helped institute at DC was a never out of stock list. These were the books that sold year after year. They included Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, Batman: The Long Halloween, Kingdom Come, Sandman, The Death of Superman and as Vertigo grew, many of those titles went on the list as well.
I’m happy to say that Marvel did put the Loeb and Sale books back in print. First in hardcover and now in paperback. Is it too late? Can we get that guy back in a store to buy these? Well, we can hope that he checked his local library and he was able to get them there.
My questions are, has Marvel gotten better keeping these evergreen titles in print? Has DC with all the corporate turmoil maintained the way they have historically managed backlist? Please leave a comment to let us know!
Rich Johnson has worked for Waldenbooks, Scholastic, DC Comics, Lion Forge, and Diamond Book Distributors and was the co-founder of Yen Press. He is currently the founder of the publishing and media consulting company Brick Road Media, LLC. He has been an adjunct professor at both Drexel University and Pace University and is the author of four art books about Marvel Comics for Universe/Rizzoli and has a forthcoming book from Inside Editions.
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