Mile High Comics Website Marketing Strategies and Variants Information I promised in my last newsletter that I would provide you with some explanations of our current Mile High Comics marketing strategies today, especially as regards variant editions. I will begin by making the blanket statement that there really is no reason for our website to exist today, except as a variants superstore. If that seems an outlandish statement to you, follow along with me, and I will explain as to why I believe my statement to be absolutely true. First, consider for a moment that I conceived our website based upon the premise that we would sell all the comics every created, in an ever-expanding database. Given how many comics had already been published by 1996, I seriously believed that we would be the only ones capable of accomplishing (and then maintaining) this Herculean documentation task. What I did not anticipate, however, were three major factors: 1) the growth and exponential expansion of public forums for selling comics, such as eBay 2) the fact that these public forums would allow many of our best customers to become our competitors 3) that some individuals would choose to replicate all of our hard work of building up our database and website, thus avoiding most of our set-up costs, and then use our own creations against us I could go into long detail on each of these three factors, but the bottom line is that our internal cost structure has not allowed us to always be competitive on price on common comics. To illustrate what I mean, consider for a moment if the San Diego Comic-Con dealer's room had infinite capacity for expansion, and that the con added hundreds of new vendors at each successive show. If that were the case, even if we dramatically improved our display and merchandise each year, our sales would probably still decline. Why? Because the percentage growth in new customers would almost always be less than the percentage growth in new sellers. If you have a doubling of comics vendors each year, while the number of fans only increases by a far smaller percentage, then then overall market quickly splinters. More importantly, this market fragmentation falls the hardest on the fully integrated, larger comics sellers. To compound my Comic-Con nightmare, if all the new sellers in that infinite dealer's room were allowed to set up at the convention at a lower cost than all the pre-existing sellers, they could then easily undercut those pre-existing seller's prices. Simply put, while the range of purchasing options for fans would grow each year, the actual revenues for most the pre-existing sellers would continuously decline. If price is the only determination by which fans choose to make their purchases, smaller sellers would almost inevitably offer the best range of bargains, as they have neither the same operating costs as larger sellers, nor the knowledge. To explain what I mean about knowledge, you would think that a seller being unknowledgeable about comics values would create many disadvantages for most sellers over the long term. The truth is, however, that seller ignorance is the number one driving element in the comics market today. I cannot tell you how many times that I have walked into the dealer's room at a convention and seen a weekend warrior selling off his collection, with many of his best issues priced at 10% of market. It should come as no surprise that these guys make a ton of money during the first hours of the show, but then quickly run out of all their desirable comics. Simply put, if someone prices their comics at rock bottom they will generate lot of sales quickly, but then never be able to restock. On the flip side, however, if they are only at the show trying to sell enough comics to make their next house payment, then this strategy can easily achieve its (one) goal. If they have no long term goals (or any operating costs...), then giving away their comics at a tiny fraction of actual market value just doesn't matter. Except, of course, that their ignorant dumping of great comics for a pittance damages perceptions of true market value, and also hurts the prospects of all the comics dealers at the show who are trying to earn a living. Now flip my San Diego analogy around, and insert "eBay" as the hypothetical marketplace. Everything that I just mentioned about the nightmare of infinite growth of vendors within a convention dealer's room, is actually occurring on eBay. I have not looked for a while, but the last time I checked, there were over 8,000 individual comics sellers on eBay. Many just offered a few dozen issues, but since they have no operating costs, and oftentimes little knowledge, the sum of their offerings severely impacts our website through their sheer numbers. All of the above having been said, I think you can now better understand why I made the blanket statement earlier about our main comics website being somewhat obsolete. You do need to know, however, that all that I have just written does not yet tell anything close to the real story. There is an X factor that provides our website with functional viability, uniqueness, and an almost infinite survival capability. That factor is our ability to gauge the true scarcity of certain rare comics, and most importantly, variant editions. Of particular importance to us these days are cover price variants, newsstand editions, British/UK editions, DFE signed and variant comics, publisher created variants, and later printings. We began seriously focusing on these more unusual printings of comics about two years ago, and they now constitute over half of our daily sales. Why? Because many of the variant issues that we list on our website are truly rare, and also because it takes so much sophisticated comics knowledge to stock and price them, that no other organization (or individual) can even come close to our level of proficiency in this one area. To give you just one small example of what I mean by both true scarcity, and also our degree of proficiency, let me mention that just this morning that Will Moulton (who handles creating the all individual item listings in our database) told me that our head buyer, Pam Brandle, had located 10 previously unknown DC UNIVERSE editions stashed in one of my long boxes from my last East Coast buying trip. Given that we have entered over two million back issue comics into our online database over the past 24 months, the fact that not one single copy of these 10 DC UNIVERSE editions has ever appeared before is a clear testimonial to their incredible scarcity. Catwoman #17 (Direct Edition) Catwoman #17 (DC Universe Edition) Catwoman #17 (Newsstand Edition) In case you are wondering why these strange variants are so rare, as near as we can tell, DC UNIVERSE editions were printed for inclusion in multi-packs of comics sold in certain chain retailers, such as Wal-Mart, during the early 1990's. While many of the comics sold in DC's pre-packs were DC UNIVERSE editions, not all of them were, so our trying to figure out just how many different issues DC printed with this unique logo on the cover is a continual struggle for us. Complicating matters even further, the typical buyer of a pre-pack of DC comics in a chain store was both young, and also not a serious collector. As a direct consequence, the number of surviving DC UNIVERSE variants is far less than we would expect to see, even as compared to the relatively scarce newsstand editions of the exact same issues. If newsstand editions from 1994 are 1:10 variants, then DC UNIVERSE variants are closer to 1: 200 variants! This should leave few questions in your mind about why no other comics dealer is even trying to stock them... To be continued...