A Socialist Agenda

Just a post about organization.

Process (Feb 3rd, 2023)

This one doesn’t have much to do with comics

A lot of folks have been asking me about how I went from writing nearly nothing for a year and a half, to rocking out fourteen bits of content in the first month of the year. The answer has two parts. First? My brain seems to be holding together well for the first time in a long time. Second? I am back on my meticulous agenda building bullshit, and the whole process keeps me sane. I’m going to share a bit of that process right now, so you can understand a bit about how I keep things on the rails.

This is a look at my (admittedly, slightly redacted) agenda book, where I keep track of my life. I chose a Tuesday to show a glimpse of what a day of processing looks like at the store.

First, you’ll notice the different colours. I chose green for our work stuff, because out of the options, it evoked the calmer of our store colours the best, and I wanted the store tasks to be associated with a calmer colour than red/burgondy - which I use for my personal online deadlines.¹ Blue became the anchour for home life things, as it is my partner’s favourite colour, and purple would up being my “media consumption” notation, because… well, because it was the only decent colour of pen left that worked. So there’s that.²

This agenda, is my life. It keeps me moving, and helps me stay sane. When you’re a small business owner, there’s a lot to keep track of, and many things can fall to the wayside. Even with this system, I tend to miss more than I’d like. But on top of that, I’m the chair of the business district that the store resides in, and I write these columns on the side. Oh, and I watch far too much wrestling. Far too much.

This was a system that I’ve honed over several years, in several permutations. At an early stage, the process looked like this:

The pens I was using were a lot brighter, and the red posts were meant to be urgent. This worked well, but didn’t quite feel right.

I have this thing with notes and tasks - if what I write down is out of place or messy, my brain completely rejects it as a task worth focusing on. The act of writing things down clean gives my brain a clean place to start from, and it appreciates the help.

These are my current agenda warriors. The tip pens and ink brushes that give my days direction. That write down tasks like “write for your damn Substack, you goon” in varying degrees of professionalism, depending on how close I am to deadline. That write things like “dishums” instead of “dishes” because the though amused me for a day.

I’ve never been good at taking compliments, so if you ever want to praise my productivity, you can direct them to those tools you see above. I basically do their bidding, as best I can.

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In the interest of including something about the industry today, I want to talk about how my shop has been doing.

Variant Edition is a collaboration between myself and my partner Danica LeBlanc. It is the product of the push and pull of two people, creating something more than we could both do on our own. Lately, we’ve been lucky enough to have the voice of Andrew Foley in the mix, adding more flavour to the entire project. Things haven’t always been easy, but lately, they’ve been pretty great.

We ended last year up growing 16% year to year, while accomplishing a sales milestone we’d been aiming at for quite some time. Our December was up by a whole ass 80% year to year (and holy heck, did we feel that). Our January was up by 35.9% from last year. More than that, we have some customers who buy in bulk that have cut back in orders considerably over the past few months, which cause us to check how our profits from sales looked like - and those were up by a whole 59.7% in January.

These good times have continued to roll, as we encountered a Wednesday that had roughly half the product a Wednesday usually brings to the files and shelves of our store. We ended up having a sales day that was roughly 28% better than our average Wednesday. That is ridiculous. Things like this don’t happen.

And yet. The numbers are there. They’re there with nothing happening out of turn. We don’t do back issues, so there hasn’t been any wild big ticket sales, and we are woefully deficient at manga, so we can’t even attribute our climb to that (and yes, we need to get better at selling manga). The work paying off. Our philosophy about selling comics, paying off.

This is why I want to write The Indirect Market. I truly think that I have something to offer folks. I think that there is a way forward, and we’re walking the walk at Variant Edition.

To that end, I’ve started crafting my next article for The Beat, and it provides the basic roadmap forward. It will go up on Tuesday, February 14th, and will focus on getting bigger, by thinking small. Until then, there will be regular content here, as we chronicle this wild time, and take extended looks at how we got ourselves here.

Talk with you soon.

-B.

1. The red used to be a lot harsher, but I found pens that toned everything back a bit to keep my tasks from yelling at me.

2. You won’t see any prose or comics media in my “media consumption” area, because that stuff is all accounted for separately.