The Triumphs and Tribulations of the Modern Market

A couple trips through the mind of retailers.

Short Stack (March 5th, 2023)

Just a pile of digital flapjacks for you to consume. There are no themes, only vibes.

Playing a bit of catch up after today’s prepared post didn’t come together, and Diamond went and made an interesting announcement regarding their shipping rates to retailers (more on that over at The Beat tomorrow). But the machine requires blood, yes? Here’s a few drops.

ONE | There’s a wonderful deep dive into the year that was 2022 from comic and graphic novel heavy retailers over at Publisher’s Weekly, put together by the one and only David Harper of SKTCHD fame. It hits upon a lot of what’s been going around this year: things were good, but extremely stressful. Every gain seemed to come with some strings attached - so while general numbers were up, the spending of time and money often outstripped those gains.

Something that also features in the article is the idea of too much product being released in the past year - and that is entirely true. With the graphic novel market experiencing wild gains over the past few years, every publishing company has set up an arm and is producing content, to varying degrees of success. Stores that used to pride themselves on carrying a wide variety of content are now finding themselves swimming through a sea of that variety - and it becomes harder to narrow down what might hit.

A lot of this comes down to my whole thing about “small thinking” as a business. I think Variant Edition ended the year on great terms because we decided to disengage with books or titles that were “just good”. Folks have always come to comic shops for a particular experience, and the folks coming to ours enjoy the way we curate our space and our content - so we continued to focus on that.

Now don’t get me wrong - we still have quite a few books that we rather wouldn’t at this point in time, and we’ve been struggling with all the ways the industry has changed. We’ve been lucky to have a great point of sale that doubles as our website and ordering system on hand that has saved us hours upon hours of work each and every week called Bookmanager, which I insist every comic shop owner look into. It doesn’t solve all of your problems, but I do feel like it is the best thing on the market for independent book stores. More details on that in the days to come.

Anyway, read through that article if you want a really good lens at market points outside of the narrower one that I present here.

TWO | On another end, the latest Comics Pro meeting went down, and Comics Pro president Jenn Haines spoke about how the meeting went - and the feel was fairly optimistic. She does also talk about Diamond’s shipping announcement, and how the company framed the change, which sure is something. Both of these give a sense of what is happening. There are some… far more unvarnished takes behind the scenes (not necessarily from the people in the articles), but that goes for anything, honestly. At the end of the day, retailers are wary, but optimistic about the future. They’re looking for ways things can be better. I’m hoping over time, I can at least offer some options with some upcoming articles.

And that’ll be it for today. Apologies for the late post - but if it is any consolation, it means there’s even MORE content that will be ready as this week continues.

Talk with you soon.

-B.