Article 10: Room To Grow?

While DC looks poised to pour ever more energy into the bookstore market, retailer Brian Hibbs has argued that there remains untapped potential in the direct market. Paul O'Brien looks at the latest research.
21 November 2005

We stand on the dawn of the third age. Or at least, such is the view of DC's Publisher, Paul Levitz.

Speaking at DC's recent RRP conference with direct market retailers, as reported by Brian Hibbs, Levitz laid out his perspective on the comics market. The first age of the market was the newsstand model. The second age was the direct market model. Levitz believes that we're on the verge of a third age, the shape of which remains to be seen.

One can reasonably infer, however, that this glorious new era will feature a much greater role for the bookstores. After all, it's the massive growth in that sector that has prompted Hibbs' views in the first place. And one can also reasonably infer that Levitz's trend is not great news for the direct market stores.

Understandably, then, Hibbs does not find this very encouraging. More to the point, though, he thinks DC is barking up the wrong tree. He argues that a focus on the bookstores is misplaced, because DC would actually do better in the long run from working to grow the direct market. Instead, in his view, DC "wants and/or has been directed to put more resources to the less efficient channel".

This is a somewhat unusual view. The conventional wisdom is, broadly speaking, that the comics industry retreated into the direct market after being driven off the newsstands; that it's been playing to an insular audience ever since; that the direct market is largely hopeless at promoting anything but long-established superhero comics; that the success of manga digests in the bookstore market has reached a new and broader market; and that this is, ipso facto, a good thing.

But then, conventional wisdom is what you end up with when you stop thinking. And Brian Hibbs thinks about this stuff a lot, for obvious reasons of self-interest. So let's consider his points.

First of all, Hibbs points out that the growth in bookstore sales has to be viewed in context. Comics used to sell virtually nothing in bookstores, which is hardly surprising, because there was so little for them to sell. The increase in bookstore sales coincides with the expansion of bookstore-friendly product and therefore shouldn't come as a surprise.

So far, so chicken-and-egg. But Hibbs goes on to argue that the bookstores are not in fact any better at generating new customers than the direct market. Yes, new customers are appearing, but that's because the bookstores are basically new outlets for comics. According to Hibbs, new direct market outlets also generate new readers. He cites data from consultant Mel Thompson, apparently showing that 65-75% of a new store's eventual sales volume comes from completely new customers.

Now this is intriguing, not to say counterintuitive. It goes stubbornly against the conventional wisdom that the direct market is absolutely insular, and it begs the question of why existing direct market stores don't continue to bring in new readers in the same manner.

The details of Thompson's research aren't wholly clear from his website (although it's eminently possible that I just can't find the right article). In a PDF primer on The Comics Market in 2005, Thompson explains that his proprietary research indicates massive untapped demand that could be met by new stores opening in areas presently unserved. "When a properly located, merchandised and operated specialty comics store has opened, it has drawn the majority of its business from customers who had not previously been regular comics purchasers", according to Thompson.

Now, to some degree, this does make reasonable sense. The direct market has only around 4,000 stores, and of them, only around 2,500 are full-blown speciality comics outlets. They can't possibly cover the whole USA between them, which means there must be opportunities out there for comics stores to set up outwith anyone else's catchment area, and serve a readership that isn't presently buying comics because there's nobody around selling them.

But there's also a hell of a qualifier. How many new stores do you have to discount as not being "properly located, merchandised and operated"? Rather a lot, it turns out. According to Thompson, "The failure rate for the typical amateur-run, under-capitalized comics store is high - we estimate that for every ten stores which open in a given year in an area that seven to nine close". He attributes these failures to lack of business skill, and there's no doubt that that's a huge factor. But one has to wonder just how many new stores actually qualify as "properly located, merchandised and operated", given that 70-90% evidently don't, and how representative those plucky few actually are.

And even if you accept the assertion, how far does that really take you? It means that the direct market could potentially achieve massive growth if only the quality of retailer was much, much higher. This is fine as a theoretical proposition, but is it truly a realistic prospect? The bookstores, in contrast, are run by people who have a much clearer idea of how to run a business - and, in consequence, are better placed to realise their potential.

Hibbs goes on to argue that a specialist store will always outsell a generalist, because of a greater knowledge of the product. The bookstores, in contrast, could "lose interest in us tomorrow if cookbooks or something suddenly got hot". This seems a little doubtful, since if comics continue to sell, bookstores will continue to stock them.

The wider proposition, that specialists will beat generalists when all else is equal, seems rather doubtful as well. It is certainly true that a good specialist can offer a depth of knowledge and skill within his field, but it does not follow that customers are actually looking for that knowledge and skill. There are speciality bookstores in a number of genres, not to mention speciality music stores and even some speciality cinemas (and, more to the point, cinema publications). But they've never truly challenged the dominance of the big generalists. You have to reach a certain level of fandom before the services that these specialists can provide truly become of interest to you.

There is also a serious question as to whether the marketing of comics is best served by bracketing them as a medium, rather than by putting them in a bookstore and presenting them by genre. As Hibbs rightly observed, many of the readers attracted by SANDMAN were looking for other stuff like SANDMAN, not necessarily other comics. For that matter, many readers of superhero comics are more likely to diversify into sci-fi and fantasy novels, DVDs and collectibles than into different genres of comics. A full-service comics store will offer a wide variety of comics, united simply by the fact that they're comics. Is this really a classification with any resonance to anyone other than those with a technical interest in the medium as an end in itself - the comics equivalents of film buffs?

Most importantly, though, even if Hibbs is right in everything he says, it is still an argument that a good specialist will beat an equally good generalist. Unfortunately, most of the specialists are not very good, and most of the generalists are rather better.

It is all very well, and quite possibly correct, to say that the direct market could achieve great things if only the retailers were much more skilled. But they are not, nor are they imminently likely to become so. It isn't enough to say that the direct market has a theoretically greater potential - the better question, and the one DC seem to be asking themselves, is how much of that potential is likely to be achieved.

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

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