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Post by Deleted on Apr 8, 2015 13:06:39 GMT -5
I'd assume this is a loot crate thing, or some similar service.. no way this is that popular of a property! Now that's an intriguing thought. If a company like Loot Crate, in selling its own variants of a #1, can have that kind of an impact on the industry, that opens the doors for some serious king-making in comicdom. Lootcrate was responsible for a comic having a print run of 750,000 not too long ago. |
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2015 15:39:18 GMT -5
So an interesting tidbit about the LootCrate bump surfaced in a recent article on BC about the subscription services like Loot Crate. So not all those issues we see on the Diamond chart form Loot Crate bumps are actually reaching end customers-only maybe a quarter of them. full article hereSo like boosted orders for variants through Diamonds, the sales figures do not mean that many people are actually seeing the book, just that that many are being ordered, and most will sit unread and unpurchased by end customer sin a form of comic book limbo until one day those boxes of unsold comics get liquidated somewhere and wind up in bargain bins and odd lot salvage stores (was just in a store called Ollie's last month that is a salvage/odd lot bulk clearance type store and they had a pile of several thousand nineties comics bagged up 10 to a bag for $8-most likely from bulk purchases form defunct comic shops). So increased exposure for Loot Crate choices, sure, but not as much as we were led to believe form order numbers. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 18, 2015 17:05:34 GMT -5
Weird, I wonder what motivation Loot Crate would have for doing that.. planning a future Loot Crate 2 or 3 years down the road? That's a big risk for not much return. Obviously the plan isn't to hold them until they're worthless and then dump them.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 18, 2015 20:47:05 GMT -5
Weird, I wonder what motivation Loot Crate would have for doing that.. planning a future Loot Crate 2 or 3 years down the road? That's a big risk for not much return. Obviously the plan isn't to hold them until they're worthless and then dump them. I can think of two possibilities and they are not mutually exclusive. One-they had to hit a certain number of copies ordered to get the unit cost low enough to work with their subscription model and still be profitable for them, and 2) their business plan factors in growth and believes that as their subscriber base grows, new subscribers might have interest in buying older month's offerings via a webstore of some sort and they ordered extra copies of everything to make those available down the line so future subscribers can order the goods form their initial year's worth of offerings. They could also be used as incentives down the road when growth slows-join Loot Crate now and with your first month's subscription get a free exclusive Loot Crate variant cover of one of our past offerings.... Their are lots of business models that could account for it, the question is the cost/benefit analysis-is the up front expenditure now going to pay off down the road or will tying up the capital the early stages of their business life come back to bite them in the ass, as cash flow is the #1 killer of new businesses. If it does come back to haunt them, you will see those copies out in the wild at bargain prices as they get liquidated to pay off debtors. -M |
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shaxper
CCF Site Custodian
Posts: 22,867
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Post by shaxper on Apr 19, 2015 7:53:14 GMT -5
Doesn't sound all that different from Warren printing an ungodly number of their issues back in the '60s so that fans could still order the back issues a decade later. Creepy #1 and Eerie #2 still sell for surprisingly little on ebay.
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Post by wildfire2099 on Apr 19, 2015 7:59:12 GMT -5
I guess that makes sense if your business has the capital to tie up in stock... that way they can make the money (By selling new issues of older things) rather than the value going up in the secondary market. Seems like a bigger risk than the comic book market as it is now can take to me, but obviously we don't know the details, so maybe it makes sense.
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Post by fanboystranger on Apr 19, 2015 10:55:02 GMT -5
Maybe it did not help that the animated movie flopped so badly. The omnibus is still in print, though. Or that Marvel has no evergreen trade policy, they print a set run, sell it out and if it sold out quickly enough possibly go back to print on it, unlike say DC or Image that has some trades continuously in print for years on end. If hey have unsold stock at the end of the year for most trades, they liquidate it to Diamond who does end of year clearance through the Star System catalog. They do not want to keep books in storage to sell long term, they'd rather blow things out if they don't sell within the window they set. -M This is sort of a compromise for retailers that were upset with Marvel's quick release on their collections. Basically, Marvel thinks that having a book go out of print creates collectability for their collections, something that in theory makes up for unsold individual issues. Then they have a firesale at the end of the year so retailers can get their hands on their OOP collections at a severe discount. I don't think it's really worked out that way for most Marvel collections, though. You see a lot of them on places like Amazon marketplace for $3 or less. DC trades tend to retain more of their value over years ($7/8 in the marketplace). |
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Post by clutterstuffmichael on May 11, 2015 20:36:51 GMT -5
Or that Marvel has no evergreen trade policy, they print a set run, sell it out and if it sold out quickly enough possibly go back to print on it, unlike say DC or Image that has some trades continuously in print for years on end. If hey have unsold stock at the end of the year for most trades, they liquidate it to Diamond who does end of year clearance through the Star System catalog. They do not want to keep books in storage to sell long term, they'd rather blow things out if they don't sell within the window they set. -M This is sort of a compromise for retailers that were upset with Marvel's quick release on their collections. Basically, Marvel thinks that having a book go out of print creates collectability for their collections, something that in theory makes up for unsold individual issues. Then they have a firesale at the end of the year so retailers can get their hands on their OOP collections at a severe discount. I don't think it's really worked out that way for most Marvel collections, though. You see a lot of them on places like Amazon marketplace for $3 or less. DC trades tend to retain more of their value over years ($7/8 in the marketplace). As an author and self-publisher myself (in a field unrelated to comic books), I can say that this is the basic publishing model. Anytime any book is published, the vast bulk of copies sells within a relatively short period of time. Occasionally a book will grow in popularity through extremely positive word of mouth, but that is actually quite rare. Once that initial sales peak passes, the sales for any book will plateau off at a low level, and eventually fall to nearly nothing. If a publisher can accurately predict the actual volume needed to get through the peak, then wise business practice would call for printing that number. Holding stock that may *never* sell is wasting money. Getting rid of all leftover copies at the end of a given period of time is the best way to cut one's losses. More than a few publishing companies have switched to print-on-demand publishing for exactly this reason. If you print exactly enough to cover sales, then you have done away with all loss. Print-on-demand costs are slightly higher than the old way, but still better than renting a warehouse to store unsold copies. |
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