When Robot 13 debuted at the 2009 MoCCA festival we sold hundreds of comics to fans who read about our book on the internet and sought us out. Of all those fans, one specific fan stood out to me- not because of how he looked or even anything he said to us, but because he decided to take it upon himself to MAKE his local comic shop order Robot 13. And when I say “make,” I really mean it; he liked the book so much, he took his copy to the store and started showing everyone who worked there and asked them to order the book. From what I was told, each person passed the Fanboy along to another person, figuring they would get him to give up and leave them alone… but they didn’t know how determined our Biggest Fan was. While I don’t know every detail, I will say that the following day we were visited by the buyer of the store, young Fanboy in tow, who basically came to ask us if we could ask out Biggest Fan to leave the people at the store alone. We did exactly that- our Fan stopped pestering the store employees, and we ended up getting a nice order…

Today’s lesson in Failure is simple Capitalism: You Have To Sell Before You Can SELL.

Now, before I go one step further, I want to make one thing perfectly clear- Do NOT, under ANY circumstances send someone to a Comic Shop to harass the workers there into taking your book! Pissing off store employees and especially STORE OWNERS is the quickest way to NEVER have your book carried by a specific store, no matter HOW “big” you might get. The reason this situation didn’t backfire and bite us in the butt is only because we honestly didn’t know the kid was going to do what he did and we didn’t come across as having put the kid up to it. Had the buyer in question thought for one minute this was OUR doing, and we would have been done for.

While strong arm tactics are a definite no-no, encouraging fans who want a book to ask NICELY and even excitedly for a book is a fantastic idea. In fact, if you are putting out an Indy book, you absolutely NEED a personal touch with retailers.

A couple of weeks ago, I went into detail about specific things you could do to generate press coverage for your Comic. Coverage by the Comic’s Press, whether it’s by the larger websites or smaller niche blogs, can be very helpful in spreading the news about your work to Comics FANS… but when it comes to Retailers it’s a whole different ballgame. Yes, many Retailers read all the same Comic sites as you do, but a good Buyer will separate what they personally like from what they are willing to buy for their store.

Most Comic Store owners are Fanboys at heart- after all, there are a thousand better ways to make a living then by selling Comics. You HAVE to love Comics to even entertain opening a store- meaning that to some extent, Comic Store owners follow the Comics scene. There is a HUGE difference, however, between what might interest a Retailer from a personal standpoint and what they will actually ORDER for their store, and THAT is what I would like to spend some time discussing today.

On a very basic level, what motivates a Comic Store owner to buy one book over another is the same thing which motivates any successful Store Owner, and that is “Whatever Sells.”  How a good Comic Store owner knows this is the same way a owner of a local grocery store knows what to put on shelves, and it boils down to 3 things: History, Special Marketing and Customer Feedback.

History is pretty self explanatory- anything that has a track record of sales will get ordered first. Ever notice how you can go into almost any Comic Shop in the country and find Batman on the shelf? That’s because Batman has a proven track record. People know what Batman is and while the popularity of Batman fluctuates, there are enough people in the country who buy every issue that store owners will buy it every month. The longer that track record is, the more resilient a title is to being dropped too. An Indy title may start strong, but if it drops off a bit it is exponentially more likely to be dropped from a retailer’s orders than something like the Hulk…

Special Marketing can mean a couple of things to Comic Shops- Large “Events” like Blackest Night are a good example, but they are not the only thing that does. Think about when Captain America “died,” or when Archie finally chose Veronica… I mean Betty…

In any case, when someone outside of the traditional Comics press talks about a comic book happening, it has more weight with shops. While there are a variety of reasons why this is true, one thing that I think factors into the equation is that press outside of venues that cover only Comics don’t have a vested interest in the Comics business. If MTV covers a Comic, for example, it’s not strictly because Comic Fans want to know about that book, and it also means that the audience for that coverage has reach beyond people already going to comic shops.

Customer Feedback is also a pretty simple concept- people ask for a book and the shop owner buys it. Not all requests for Book “A” will get that book into a store, and it may only result in getting a 1 copy order for that specific person, but people who frequent a store matter to the Retailer. If they know you visit their store regularly and buy your comics there, they want to keep you happy within reason.

That phrase, “within reason,” is something that needs clarifying. To some Retailers, “within reason” means they will order a book for you if it’s available through Diamond. The reason for that is pretty simple- Since most Retailers get the bulk (if not all) of their products from Diamond, their shipping and invoicing is consolidated and it costs them less money than ordering from half a dozen or more sources. The issue that many Indy creators have with that is that Diamond has a minimum order quantity they will take and THAT means that you can’t do a small print run and go through Diamond…

Please understand that by saying this, I am not implying that the Retailers who take this position are doing something “wrong.” They have to make a profit to keep their stores open, and for many of them in our current economy the savings they get from consolidating their orders is seen as critical.

On the other hand, there ARE plenty of retailers who WILL order items outside of Diamond. Getting any of those retailers to take a chance on YOUR comic, though, does take some doing….

First, you need to remember that just because a Retailer is willing to try ordering Indy books doesn’t mean they don’t operate like a business; They are just as concerned with what they believe will sell as the next guy, so getting a Retailer to buy into why YOUR book will sell for them is your ultimate goal.

When we first started talking to stores about carrying Robot 13, we had no History with them, the coverage we did have was 99% from Comic sites and nobody was asking them yet to pick up our book. Not yet understanding everything that I just outlined above, I started off my pitch talking about our positive reviews, what the book was about and giving them a glimpse of how cool the book itself looked. Knowing what I do now, it’s not surprising that my spiel fell on deaf ears, and it was an outright struggle at the beginning to get stores to carry the book.

While we had a few breaks that fell our way all at once, the one that I think turned the Blacklist ship away from it’s eminent collision with the iceberg was a conversation I had with a Retailer who took it upon himself to let me know where I was going wrong. He explained to me that Retailers can judge for themselves if a book is “cool” or fun to read- they want to know why they should believe a book will sell for them. His advice to me boiled down to the Quality Vs. Quantity argument, and that is we should work hard on making a couple of store owners as happy as we could and use that as our “proof” that Robot 13 will sell.

With that in mind, we worked with the stores who were already willing to take a chance on Robot 13- mostly stores that we had personal contacts with already along with a few that came to us and were interested in hearing more about the book. While we didn’t have a tremendous budget, we decided produce a variety of buttons with the R13 logo and other images from the book for stores to give away. We also made some personal appearances when that was possible, coming to stores and doing signings. And in every case, I kept asking stores how the book was doing- not just to see if they wanted to re-order, but to make sure they knew that we wanted to support them in any way we could.

The result of all that work was clear- over time, we slowly built the number of stores who carried Blacklist books, going from half a dozen to almost 80 stores within six months. While I can’t take the credit for bringing every store into the fold, I can say that every store which took a chance on us made it that much easier to sell the idea to the next guy that we had a book that would sell. To be fair, some places sold more books than others, and there are definite reasons for that… which is a whole different discussion for another day.

What I can say, however, with 100% authority is that when you have no history or track record, there is no such thing as overnight success with Retailers. You have to earn their trust one store at a time in most cases, meaning that while you want your first book to do well, you NEED every book to be better than the one before to build on any good will you have engendered. It also means that if you are working slowly and building  relationships with individual stores it will take time and effort. It also means that you will have to have reasonable interpersonal skills and be willing to listen as well as talk, and that you will do whatever you can to be of service to the people selling your book on the retail level…

Failure in this is extremely simple, in that what I am suggesting is hard, requires a lot of effort and time and is not a sure thing even if you do everything “right.” Treating Retailers like a Fanboy on a message board or even simply not giving a Retailer a reason your books won’t end up in their quarter bin can doom you before you get off the ground…

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