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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2022 9:44:27 GMT -5
I loathe the idea of bringing Conan into the modern Marvel universe, but that's not what this thread is about. Isn't Marvel screwing themselves? When they eventually lose the license, aren't they then prevented from reprinting years' worth of stories featuring some very popular Marvel characters? AFAIK, that always happens when a company loses a licensed property. I'm sure they thought about this, so maybe there's something I'm missing.
I'm not saying that there's a news story today saying Marvel is losing the Conan license, so if you're enjoying Marvel's Conan, don't panic.
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Post by thwhtguardian on Feb 4, 2022 10:42:47 GMT -5
Long term profits don't seem to be something Marvel really cares about, unlike DC there are few Marvel collections that they reprint year in and year out. I'm no insider but it seems to me that as long as they feel they're getting what they paid for out of the Conan property now I don't think they're worried about potential losses from collections later on down the road.
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2022 13:41:42 GMT -5
The licensing issue is already in play. Savage Avengers (and most of the other stuff featuring Conan) is pretty much the only current Marvel book not available on Marvel Unlimited, and isn't among the Marvel stuff offered on platforms like hoopla. I assume it's because Marvel doesn't have the digital rights to it to offer it on their subscription services or in packages to other services, and Conan properties said no to offering it to library platforms like Hoopla otherwise. When the license was at Dark Horse, there was Conan material available at Hoopla, but right now the only Conan comics on Hoopla are the Dynamite Red Sonja/Conan x-over issues and the Ablaze Cimmerian stuff.
You can buy the current stuff digitally from Marvel.com but it is not available through Unlimited. The only exception seems to be The Avengers: No Road Home event mini.
Personally I thought the license for Conan may have been winding down with the regular series ending, Savage Avengers ending, a lack of ancillary stuff, and such, and with the solicits for King by Aaron feeling like an ending for the Conan character's arc, but then they just announced the launch of a new Savage Avengers series today, so who knows.
But almost all of the material they have published has been collected as it comes out and Marvel doesn't do evergreen printings for the vast majority of their stuff, and I doubt stuff like Savage Avengers would have enough demand to get more printings down the road anyways, and if someone gets the license to Conan after Marvel, they would ge tthe rights to the material which would be in demand from both Marvel and Dark Horse that features only Conan, so I think it's a non-issue for the most part.
-M
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Post by thwhtguardian on Feb 4, 2022 15:10:54 GMT -5
The licensing issue is already in play. Savage Avengers (and most of the other stuff featuring Conan) is pretty much the only current Marvel book not available on Marvel Unlimited, and isn't among the Marvel stuff offered on platforms like hoopla. I assume it's because Marvel doesn't have the digital rights to it to offer it on their subscription services or in packages to other services, and Conan properties said no to offering it to library platforms like Hoopla otherwise. When the license was at Dark Horse, there was Conan material available at Hoopla, but right now the only Conan comics on Hoopla are the Dynamite Red Sonja/Conan x-over issues and the Ablaze Cimmerian stuff. You can buy the current stuff digitally from Marvel.com but it is not available through Unlimited. The only exception seems to be The Avengers: No Road Home event mini. Personally I thought the license for Conan may have been winding down with the regular series ending, Savage Avengers ending, a lack of ancillary stuff, and such, and with the solicits for King by Aaron feeling like an ending for the Conan character's arc, but then they just announced the launch of a new Savage Avengers series today, so who knows. But almost all of the material they have published has been collected as it comes out and Marvel doesn't do evergreen printings for the vast majority of their stuff, and I doubt stuff like Savage Avengers would have enough demand to get more printings down the road anyways, and if someone gets the license to Conan after Marvel, they would ge tthe rights to the material which would be in demand from both Marvel and Dark Horse that features only Conan, so I think it's a non-issue for the most part. -M I've often wondered why Marvel doesn't keep things in print like DC. It's not from a lack of easily digestible stories to cherry pick from, there are all kinds of classic stories that I think could easily sustain repeated printings and not that long ago they seemed to be creating new books (the various season one books) to specifically keep in print...but they just seem like they don't care about the book market which is just weird. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2022 15:41:32 GMT -5
The licensing issue is already in play. Savage Avengers (and most of the other stuff featuring Conan) is pretty much the only current Marvel book not available on Marvel Unlimited, and isn't among the Marvel stuff offered on platforms like hoopla. I assume it's because Marvel doesn't have the digital rights to it to offer it on their subscription services or in packages to other services, and Conan properties said no to offering it to library platforms like Hoopla otherwise. When the license was at Dark Horse, there was Conan material available at Hoopla, but right now the only Conan comics on Hoopla are the Dynamite Red Sonja/Conan x-over issues and the Ablaze Cimmerian stuff. You can buy the current stuff digitally from Marvel.com but it is not available through Unlimited. The only exception seems to be The Avengers: No Road Home event mini. Personally I thought the license for Conan may have been winding down with the regular series ending, Savage Avengers ending, a lack of ancillary stuff, and such, and with the solicits for King by Aaron feeling like an ending for the Conan character's arc, but then they just announced the launch of a new Savage Avengers series today, so who knows. But almost all of the material they have published has been collected as it comes out and Marvel doesn't do evergreen printings for the vast majority of their stuff, and I doubt stuff like Savage Avengers would have enough demand to get more printings down the road anyways, and if someone gets the license to Conan after Marvel, they would ge tthe rights to the material which would be in demand from both Marvel and Dark Horse that features only Conan, so I think it's a non-issue for the most part. -M I've often wondered why Marvel doesn't keep things in print like DC, it's not from a lack of easily digestible stories to cherry pick from...they just seem like they don't care about the book market which is just weird. A few things. Demand. Marvel prints to order in the direct market, with some extras for the book trade. If there is no demand from the direct market, there are no guaranteed sales to cover the production costs of the books. Warehousing. Marvel will not warehouse books. Adds too much to the cost to make any book profitable. It's not that they don't care about the book market, its that its not profitable enough to keep books in stock to service just that market. If they sell initial print run through, it's profit. If they don't and have to warehouse, it's a loss. They do go back to press, but only on those things where demand keeps the books moving without warehousing, and allowing some books to go fallow for a bit adds to that potential demand. -M |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Feb 4, 2022 15:42:56 GMT -5
I've often wondered why Marvel doesn't keep things in print like DC, it's not from a lack of easily digestible stories to cherry pick from...they just seem like they don't care about the book market which is just weird. A few things. Demand. Marvel prints to order in the direct market, with some extras for the book trade. If there is no demand from the direct market, there are no guaranteed sales to cover the production costs of the books. Warehousing. Marvel will not warehouse books. Adds too much to the cost to make any book profitable. It's not that they don't care about the book market, its that its not profitable enough to keep books in stock to service just that market. If they sell initial print run through, it's profit. If they don't and have to warehouse, it's a loss. They do go back to press, but only on those things where demand keeps the books moving without warehousing, and allowing some books to go fallow for a bit adds to that potential demand. -M But DC does it. It doesn't seem like a profit thing or else DC wouldn't do it, it seems like a choice for some reason which is just weird. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2022 15:51:36 GMT -5
A few things. Demand. Marvel prints to order in the direct market, with some extras for the book trade. If there is no demand from the direct market, there are no guaranteed sales to cover the production costs of the books. Warehousing. Marvel will not warehouse books. Adds too much to the cost to make any book profitable. It's not that they don't care about the book market, its that its not profitable enough to keep books in stock to service just that market. If they sell initial print run through, it's profit. If they don't and have to warehouse, it's a loss. They do go back to press, but only on those things where demand keeps the books moving without warehousing, and allowing some books to go fallow for a bit adds to that potential demand. -M But DC does it. It doesn't seem like a profit thing or else DC wouldn't do it, it seems like a choice for some reason which is just weird. DC doesn't warehouse. They go back to press with books that continue to sell in the book market. A lot of their stuff is out of print because it wasn't profitable enough to keep in print. DC keeps things like Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Preacher and Sandman in print, but try finding some of the Starman omnibus editions, or some of the Showcase volumes, or the Golden Age Spectre Archives, or... DC operates on the same principal as Marvel, they just have more stuff that performs well in the book market to keep in trade. In fact, a larger percentage of Marvel material has seen print in collected form than DC. DC still has large swaths of runs of major characters that have never been collected (articularly Bronze Age material for Supes, Bats, GL, Flash, Wonder Woman, etc.). Most of what DC keeps in print is standalone books or standalone series, or key Batman runs. Everything else goes out of print just like Marvel. Marvel doesn't have a to of that kind of standalone series or products to fuel evergreen books. It's not what they do as a publisher. Evenwhen they did stuff like Epic and Icon, they didn't maintain collected edition rights in perpetuity, they had first print run rights and then they reverted to the creators. But outside of those handful of standalone series, DC does no better than Marvel in keeping stuff in print. -M |
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Post by wildfire2099 on Feb 4, 2022 22:12:37 GMT -5
Long term profits don't seem to be something Marvel really cares about, unlike DC there are few Marvel collections that they reprint year in and year out. I'm no insider but it seems to me that as long as they feel they're getting what they paid for out of the Conan property now I don't think they're worried about potential losses from collections later on down the road. Agreed... Marvel doesn't keep anything in print... not even Epics. Why would they for less classic stuff? |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 4, 2022 22:21:24 GMT -5
We all know DC has a number of staples as evergreen sellers. However, what have they produced in the last 10 years that have joined that list? 15? Has anything new been kept in print since they moved to Burbank, sold their warehouse and dumped all their backstock to Ollie's? DC had a leg up with evergreen sellers, but their track record for the last decade of creating new evergreen sellers has been no better than Marvel. In fact, Marvel's deal with Scholastic has kept more newer vintage Marvel books in print than new DC collections have been kept in print in the same time period. Marvel's track record is trash with keeping books in stock, but DC has become trash with keeping any new collections in print since Vertigo stopped producing standalone series that resonated with mass market audiences over a decade ago. Holding up DC as an example of a company that does it better than Marvel is an outdated concept these days.
-M
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Post by thwhtguardian on Feb 5, 2022 8:32:57 GMT -5
We all know DC has a number of staples as evergreen sellers. However, what have they produced in the last 10 years that have joined that list? 15? Has anything new been kept in print since they moved to Burbank, sold their warehouse and dumped all their backstock to Ollie's? DC had a leg up with evergreen sellers, but their track record for the last decade of creating new evergreen sellers has been no better than Marvel. In fact, Marvel's deal with Scholastic has kept more newer vintage Marvel books in print than new DC collections have been kept in print in the same time period. Marvel's track record is trash with keeping books in stock, but DC has become trash with keeping any new collections in print since Vertigo stopped producing standalone series that resonated with mass market audiences over a decade ago. Holding up DC as an example of a company that does it better than Marvel is an outdated concept these days. -M I don't think it is, every book store I go to has more DC titles than Marvel and it's not just Year One, Watchmen ect. but semi-modern books like Batman and Son, Night of the Owls, Batgirl of Burnside, Lemire's Swampthing, Super Sons and then trades for books that just wrapped up. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2022 10:13:30 GMT -5
We all know DC has a number of staples as evergreen sellers. However, what have they produced in the last 10 years that have joined that list? 15? Has anything new been kept in print since they moved to Burbank, sold their warehouse and dumped all their backstock to Ollie's? DC had a leg up with evergreen sellers, but their track record for the last decade of creating new evergreen sellers has been no better than Marvel. In fact, Marvel's deal with Scholastic has kept more newer vintage Marvel books in print than new DC collections have been kept in print in the same time period. Marvel's track record is trash with keeping books in stock, but DC has become trash with keeping any new collections in print since Vertigo stopped producing standalone series that resonated with mass market audiences over a decade ago. Holding up DC as an example of a company that does it better than Marvel is an outdated concept these days. -M I don't think it is, every book store I go to has more DC titles than Marvel and it's not just Year One, Watchmen ect. but semi-modern books like Batman and Son, Night of the Owls, Batgirl of Burnside, Lemire's Swampthing, Super Sons and then trades for books that just wrapped up. Again, how many of those are kept in print and how many are initial printings that haven't sold yet? I doubt many of those are printings beyond the first, or are new larger deluxe books combining previous editions that will not be collected again and sell more to people upgrading editions than to new purchasers of the material. If they are part of the distributors initial purchase, they aren't being warehoused or kept in print by DC, they just haven't sold through the initial purchase yet. DC may get larger initial purchases form the book trade because they historically perform better than Marvel in that market, but that doesn't mean DC is doing any more to keep those books in print or creating evergreen sellers, as those will go out of print as soon as those initial purchases dry up. -M |
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Post by thwhtguardian on Feb 5, 2022 16:51:37 GMT -5
I don't think it is, every book store I go to has more DC titles than Marvel and it's not just Year One, Watchmen ect. but semi-modern books like Batman and Son, Night of the Owls, Batgirl of Burnside, Lemire's Swampthing, Super Sons and then trades for books that just wrapped up. Again, how many of those are kept in print and how many are initial printings that haven't sold yet? I doubt many of those are printings beyond the first, or are new larger deluxe books combining previous editions that will not be collected again and sell more to people upgrading editions than to new purchasers of the material. If they are part of the distributors initial purchase, they aren't being warehoused or kept in print by DC, they just haven't sold through the initial purchase yet. DC may get larger initial purchases form the book trade because they historically perform better than Marvel in that market, but that doesn't mean DC is doing any more to keep those books in print or creating evergreen sellers, as those will go out of print as soon as those initial purchases dry up. -M Having worked in book stores in the past turn overs on graphic novels were huge so I highly doubt that books from ten plus years ago are still kicking around as left overs from the initial purchase...DC is just better at keeping things in print than Marvel. Who knows why Marvel isn't interested in being competitive in that market, but it is a flat fact that they aren't and it hasn't changed. |
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Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2022 17:22:16 GMT -5
Again, how many of those are kept in print and how many are initial printings that haven't sold yet? I doubt many of those are printings beyond the first, or are new larger deluxe books combining previous editions that will not be collected again and sell more to people upgrading editions than to new purchasers of the material. If they are part of the distributors initial purchase, they aren't being warehoused or kept in print by DC, they just haven't sold through the initial purchase yet. DC may get larger initial purchases form the book trade because they historically perform better than Marvel in that market, but that doesn't mean DC is doing any more to keep those books in print or creating evergreen sellers, as those will go out of print as soon as those initial purchases dry up. -M Having worked in book stores in the past turn overs on graphic novels were huge so I highly doubt that books from ten plus years ago are still kicking around as left overs from the initial purchase...DC is just better at keeping things in print than Marvel. Who knows why Marvel isn't interested in being competitive in that market, but it is a flat fact that they aren't and it hasn't changed. I get a fair number of DC trades, both new and used, most from Amazon, and outside of the handful that were known evergreen sellers, I've seen very few (and none from the last 4-5 ears after they moved to Burbank and got rid of their warehouse) that the indicia indicated were anything other than first prints. Granted my experience is statistically irrelevant because it's sample size is too small, but I have seen no evidence books are getting multiple printings outside of the score or so evergreen sellers that DC has maintained for years. I do know that there is a huge laundry list of DC books that have gone out of print, and a large number of series that DC stopped collecting before runs were completed (like Ostrander's Spectre) and volumes that got cancelled and never saw the light of day after being initially solicited because sales were too low to make them viable, neither of which speaks to them wanting to keep books in print or being willing to support that market beyond books which are traditionally already successful for them. -M |
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Post by Icctrombone on Feb 6, 2022 7:59:29 GMT -5
This Savage Avengers book is an easy speculation item for the future. Collect the issues , slab them , and it will be a good gamble for shooting up in price 10 years from now.
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Post by codystarbuck on Feb 17, 2022 1:18:22 GMT -5
Generally speaking, books are returnable for credit, with the vendors. There is no incentive for booksellers to sit on unsold copies. They will remainder them out, if nothing else.
I worked for Barnes & Noble for 20 years. The average lifespan of a new book (not bestsellers and not perennial sellers) is 6 weeks. After that, all bets are of and bookstores will clear out stuff, if it doesn't sell. At B&N, we would give them 90 days, before sending them back. If a book continues to have strong, reliable sale, our buyers might set a "model" for the title; usually the equivalent of a month's sales. If the on-hand quantity of a modeled title falls below the model level, we would automatically order more.
We had more modeled DC titles than marvel; but, that was largely a factor of availability. DC and Warner kept their books in print longer; so, we could resupply. Marvel was notorious for only releasing initial printings and not going back to press on titles, regardless of sales. They were more focused on the Direct Market model, while DC had far longer experience with the general book market, via Warner bros and its subsidiaries.
The book market did change, by the 20-Teens, as the loss of Borders, the economy, and digital led to a reduction in overall real estate devoted to books, reducing the amount of backlist titles we carried (with said space being turned over to toys and games). Even reliable genres, like Mystery and Romance had their shelves thinned, with lower selling authors reduced to mostly their latest and even the big names reduced to the latest and their earliest and biggest long term selling books, but much of their catalog not represented. Even guys like Stephen King were cut down by a half to 2/3.
Digital gave publishers a more cost effective manner to provide backlist titles and more of that is found in digital format than print.
I've been gone from B&N for 8 years now; so, I don't know how much still holds true (especially with their newer owners); but, I suspect that not much has changed, except maybe even less print product on-hand.
Leaving that aside, there are other factors that influence the book printings, beyond sales, like trademark maintenance. Watchmen will never go out of print or DC will lose control over the book, based on their contract with Alan Moore. They will keep that sucker going, even after his death, just to throw a middle finger at his heirs, if nothing else.
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