Thirteen months ago, I was a guest speaker at the Frankfurt Book Fair, in
Frankfurt, Germany. The topic I chose to speak on was "Comics and the
Internet," an area in which I have a fair amount of experience after my
years of operating milehighcomics.com. The overriding theme of my talk
was that the Internet has the potential to cause great benefit for the
comics industry, but also a significant amount of harm. With that thought
in mind, I stated that figuring out how to magnify the benefits, while
mitigating the harm of the Internet, would be the greatest challenge to
comics publishing over the next ten years.
The primary benefit I see for comics publishing from the Internet is the
ability of the various publishers to reach tens of millions of potential
new consumers utilizing this great new tool. There has simply never been
such an inexpensive method for reaching an incredibly huge mass audience.
This realization has to be tempered, however, with the thought that the
very low cost of communicating via the Internet has led to an incredible
competition for people's eyeballs. There are now tens of thousands, if
not hundreds of thousands, of websites that provide entertainment of some
form on the Internet. Normal people only have a limited amount of time
that they can spend on entertainment in any given week. That being the
case, how can we convince them to purchase tangible comics after seeing
some sort of stimulus for comics online? Frankly, answering this question
is the key to the survival of comics as we know them today.
For those of you who are not aware of the current realities of comics
publishing, unit sales have been dropping steadily for a decade. Even
for the largest publishers, many new comics being published today fail
to recover the cost of their creation. The prospect of ancillary benefits,
such as sales of trade paperback reprints, are now the primary revenue
stream that keep many titles from cancellation. Frankly, this is an
untenable situation. Relentless cover price increases, combined with
hoping that a title will be popular enough to reprint as a trade paperback,
is a poor long term strategy for the industry. Eventually cover prices will
rise so high that consumers will revolt, and that becomes the end of the
game.
While I do subscribe to this pessimistic assessment, I also see the
potential for redemption. At this year's Frankfurt Book Fair I had an eager
young man travel from Paris to meet with me. He had just written his
business school Master's thesis on the possibility of opening a
nation-wide chain of comics stores in the USA. All his numbers looked
quite good, until you realized that he had no idea of the difficulties
and associated costs of trying to keep multiple comics shops operating
in tandem. I explained the facts of life to him, and after some initial
depressing discussions, we had a free association session about the future
of the comics industry, which lasted over two hours. What came out of that
wide-ranging discussion was a mutual recognition that there was a clear
need for the publishers to provide their past titles online for fans to
read, preferably for only a nominal charge. It seems logical that if fans
could read several back issues of a title in order to acquaint themselves
with the primary plot lines, they would then have a far greater positive
disposition toward buying the next installment in printed form.
The one question this then begs is why the publishers don't dispense with
paper entirely, and simply offer new issues online for a higher price than
the back issues. Sadly, this may be the future. It all depends on how much
the fans of today (and tomorrow) are wedded to holding a 32-page booklet in
their hands. Or, more importantly, are there at least 30,000 fans per (four
color) comics title who are willing to pay $3 a copy to keep that title
publishing? With the exposure of the Internet, I believe that could easily
be true. In fact, I could see sales numbers rising enough through an
efficient utilization of the existing Direct Market retailing structure
to such an extent as to possibly even justify lowering cover prices. But
this all depends on a number of factors and trends over which none of us
have any control. That's what makes being a comics retailer these days
such an exciting and terrifying proposition. Given the wrong confluence
of circumstances, the entire comics industry could implode within avery short period of time.
The positive side to this equation is that this may also be the dawning of
an entirely new age for the world of comics. If the publishers reoriented
their marketing with the thought that the 1,000+ active comics shops in
America could be the brick-n-mortar representatives of their online
publishing ventures, then a symbiosis could be created that would have
staggering potential. Frankly, I have been amazed that the larger comics
publishers have not come to the realization that they have all the tools
available to them right now to completely turn around the comics industry.
As near as I can see, all that is lacking is the vision, and the managerial
will by those currently in power, to bring these wonderful potential new
marketing programs to fruition. Where are the great leaders when we need
them? I would hate to think that everything that we know and love about
comics may vanish forever because those who could make the difference are
too blind, or too wrapped up in making a quick buck, to save the comicsindustry. Only time will tell if those who have the capacity to save
us will have the courage to lead us into a new era of comics
publishing.
To be continued...
Please send your e-mails to
chuck@milehighcomics.com, and
your letters to:
Mile High Comics, Inc.
Attn: Chuck Rozanski
2151 W. 56th Ave.
Denver, CO 80221
|