Article 10: Indirect Action

With Diamond setting a new threshold for minimum orders, the small press could be frozen out. But are small press comics wasting their time trying to conquer the direct market, and has FINDER's Carla Speed McNeil found a better way?
10 October 2005

A few weeks back, Diamond ruffled feathers with their announcement of a new policy, raising the minimum orders for books. On top of that, if the minimum wasn't reached, Diamond wouldn't even fulfil the orders that were received.

Now, personally, I'm ambivalent about the latter part. On the one hand, I'm not desperately keen about the idea of ordering something and not getting it. On the other hand, I'm even less keen about buying the first part of a story, only to be told that I'll never be able to buy the rest of the story. If I'm not going to be able to get the full story, I'd probably rather not have issue #1 either. So, swings and roundabouts.

More interesting is the threshold, which comes to $600 wholesale. For the average $2.95 comic, that's around 500 copies - a figure that would fall way short of even making the top 300. Not exactly a sky-high threshold, but enough to pose a problem for some of the small press.

In some quarters, it was suggested that Diamond, having seen off all their competition and established a de facto monopoly, had a moral duty to carry everything. But Diamond are a business, not an arts foundation, and you can only expect them to go so far. It would be unreasonable to ask them to carry any scribbled minicomic that was submitted to them - not to mention the fact that it would bloat the catalogue to even more unwieldy proportions than it already has. They have to draw the line somewhere. The question is where.

On the other hand, the point has a degree of validity. Diamond effectively control entry to the direct market, and at the very least they shouldn't use their monopoly position to erect undue barriers to entry. Books down below the threshold are loss making, both for Diamond and for the publisher. But, it is argued, the prospect exists that some of those micro-sellers will grow. By setting this threshold, Diamond might choke potential classics before they get off the ground. BONE and CEREBUS both started off with tiny sales and grew to sustainable levels. But then, that was many years ago, in a marketplace far, far away. The best example from recent years appears to be FINDER, which, thanks to critical acclaim, grew from tiny sales to...

Well, it depends how you look at it. The serial comic sells pretty badly. The trade paperbacks do respectably. The FINDER product as a whole, yes, has grown in sales from a tiny base. This much is true.

But that still doesn't quite address the underlying point. Because it's not enough simply to say that the current system provided a route for books like FINDER. You also have to ask what other routes are open to them if you take that route away.

Against that background, it's interesting to note that FINDER itself has chosen to abandon the direct market for its serial format. Instead, creator Carla Speed McNeill has announced that FINDER #38 will be the last issue of the regular series. After that, the book will continue in the form of a free weekly webcomic, to be collected in periodic trade paperbacks - because the trades are doing just fine.

If even McNeill, a comparative success story of the direct market micropublishers, has calculated that she'd be better off not bothering, one has to wonder whether anyone is truly going to be prejudiced by being kicked out of the direct market on threshold grounds, at least under current market conditions. Let's not forget that these are loss-making comics, not just for Diamond but for the publishers. If you can make a living off a comic selling $600 a month, you're going some. There are only two logical reasons to publish at that level. One, you're an "art for art's sake" type, and you simply don't care about the money. Or two, rather more plausibly, you're hoping to make a profit in the future and you're hoping that direct market distribution will raise your profile and allow you to grow.

But is this truly a realistic hope? It's genuinely difficult to think of books in recent years that have started off at such a tiny level of sales and grown to a level that made the whole exercise (economically) worth the effort. Even for books like FINDER, the value of the serial publication was primarily to build word of mouth and thereby advertise the trade paperbacks. The mainstream superhero audience doesn't remotely care about books selling at that level; the indie crowd would probably rather buy your trade. And chances are even they've never heard of you, so they probably won't be ordering your comic even if Diamond deign to carry it.

If the purpose of the exercise is advertising, then McNeill's approach makes perfect sense. If you want people to read your comic, then charging them $2.95 and expecting them to order it from Previews through a process of psychic divination is a poor way to go about achieving it. Giving it away on your website, on the other hand, is a rather good one, ideal for word of mouth purposes. Even if the whole exercise bombs, chances are it'll still be cheaper than paying for a physical print run, so at least you mitigated your losses. If it succeeds, then hey, you've got an audience for the trade paperbacks.

Okay, granted, a fair chunk of that audience won't actually buy the trade paperbacks, because... well, they already read it for free. But a fair chunk will, and because you're working with a larger audience, you're still selling more copies in the long run. Besides, there are still practical aspects to webcomics that will lead a lot of readers to pick up a hard copy in the long run.

The web also offers access to a much broader audience than the typical direct market customer base. Chances are your small press book was never really aimed at that audience in the first place, so why bother targeting them when you can go for the general public on the internet?

In recent years, it's very difficult to think of comics that have succeeded with a business model of "launch in the direct market from nothing, and grow". But it's rather easier to think of comics that succeeded with a model of "start as a free webcomic and sell the collected editions". New comics actually break through in that way. More than you can say for the direct market.

For many small press comics, the direct market route appears to be adopted more in hope than in rational expectation. It's less than evident why small press creators should even waste their time with trying to break straight into the direct market, if other options are available to them. If you're going to make a loss promoting your product, after all, you might as well spend the money on something that has a track record of working. In recent years, the direct market doesn't have that track record. Why not just give the comics away? At least it's been known to work.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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