People love free stuff. It’s a problem for publishers.
Now that you have recovered from the face palm moment there, allow me to expand on that line using one broad example and one personal data point. The look at the broad example is not personal, but it’s a look at a largely failed promotional effort.
Free Comic Book Day has been going strong since 2002. On that blessed day, people can wander into a comic shop and choose from a selection of comics given away for free by the retailer. The store owners buy the comics at a very low cost and use the annual event to raise awareness of their store, the medium, etc. For the retailers, it is as busy as Christmas but with all of that hubbub crammed into one long Saturday. A retailer I spoke with yesterday said FCBD was easily his best day of 2010.
As a side note, when I owned and operated First Federal Comics in Austin Texas, I participated in an early FCBD. That year, it was tied to a Spiderman movie, so I called up long-time Spidey fan and Marvel artist Sam de la Rosa. He drove up from San Antonio and signed his Spiderman comics and did sketches for the day as we gave away comic books and had a grand time talking about the medium with a bunch of new fans. It was a huge party. Monday it was back to business as usual.
Lately, I stumbled into the question of whether Free Comic Book Day really works as a promotional tool? The overall sales numbers point to failure. A look at the one year numbers from January 2010 to January 2011 show more than a 20% drop in unit sales and dollar volume. There is an annual fall off from December one year to January the next, but this is a comparison of like numbers. There are a variety of reasons that could contribute to the collapse in the sales figures- like the state of the overall economy, the closure of stores, tighter ordering policies from retailers in the face of the ‘new normal’, event fatigue, etc. But, its not a snap shot of a healthy market. Click the link below for the full grim picture.
Hard numbers do not exist for digital distributors who have no compelling reason to disclose their current level of success. As the print numbers plummet, the digital numbers are a question mark.
If FCBD is a thank you event for customers, then it works well. Defenders will make that case that the market would be worse except for that promotional tool, but those statistics are unknowable, unproveable. Perhaps FCBD does all that it can by driving up sales numbers on the first Saturday in May.
The material released on FCBD is of such variety, that there is something for every reader. In the past, I looked for the latest Love and Capes by Thom Zahler or the latest Mouse Guard. In the past, the big two publishers have reprinted key stand alone comics with their most popular characters. This year, DC appears to be abandoning that practice to offer a teaser of their new event called Flashpoint, which launches 15 different mini-series this summer. Time will tell if the new approach by the new management will pay off, but looking at the falling numbers, you have to wonder how much retailers will be willing to gamble in a down year.
If anything, 2011 feels like we’re heading for an inflection point. The comics market needs the new customers that FCBD promises, but after 8 years I wonder if they are coming.
Now for the personal data point. I write for clients and as a self-publisher I’ve stuck a toe in the ebook world. As a guy who wants to sell more books, I stitched together a collection of three short stories about a detective character named Quinn. That character is the lead in the Tokyo Bound collection, so I put in a nice afterword in the promotional collection about how I liked writing the mysteries again after a break to write Whedonverse comics for IDW and politely urged people to buy the other short story collection. I slapped a cover on the thing and posted it on WOWIO and put a zero dollar price tag on the pdf version. The collection titled Young & Foolish is still available for free from that digital distributor. (It’s not available in the Kindle store, but that is a story for another day). After giving away 400 digital copies of the book, the sales of the second collection, the one requiring a $3 investment on the part of the reader are flat. That needle did not move.
There are a load of reasons that could be the case such as– people have not read the promo book yet, the prose is weak or a bad fit for the reader, readers have other free books to get to, etc. The fact remains that the promotional collection was given away and the higher sales of other similar material did not result. For a parallel, digital comic distributors report a record number of downloads. When you drill down into those statements, you will find that the free material does a booming business and the paid material draws digital cobwebs.
I do not think that we should abandon Free Comic Book Day. And when people want to give away their content, they should be able to do whatever they want.
But for industry types, the statement remains about people liking free stuff. The question for the markets is how to capitalize on that fact and sell material through the direct comics market and the new digital newsstand.
Writers like Joe Konrath prove that there is a solution for writers selling ebooks through the Kindle store. But due to the file size restrictions, it’s a prose only solution.
Where is the solution for the direct market?
