The Publicity Juggernaut Behind Book Trade Graphic Novels

Some Things just Sell Better Outside of Comic Shops

Most folks really don't understand how the comic book industry works. But they do spend a lot of time looking at the sales estimate charts at both Comichron and Bookscan, certain those estimates prove their point: that creators they don’t like don’t sell, and they can’t understand why their work keeps getting published.

I've gone on at great length elsewhere (and was even profiled in Forbes Magazine about it,) with regard to what a load of bunk I think Bookscan is. I'll post more about that later.

Anyway, many people in comics are very myopic about how the Young Adult graphic novel juggernaut pushes books outside the comics market. This juggernaut moves trade paperbacks in a way the comics market simply cannot. You can look at a comic like Squirrel Girl, which may be moving less than 14,000 copies to comic book shops, but in bookstores and at the Scholastic Book Fairs it can be moving twice that, making it a profitable project for Marvel, despite what some want to believe.

The comic bore the brunt of the production cost, the trade paperback is where the profit is.

There are only about 3000 comic specialty shops, but there are tens of thousands of venues for selling trade graphic novels outside of that closed circle.

Below, a letter Houghton Mifflin gives out to its creators that outlines how they promote a YA book. This letter is over ten years old, and I don't think I'm stepping on anyone's toes by putting it here. I also don't think much has changed in that time. 

(I'm not posting the pages and pages of hilarious baby step advice they send their authors about using social media. That train has left the station.)

Note they send out catalogues to "...15,000 decision makers in schools and libraries". SCHOOLS AND LIBRARIES. Five times the number of comic shops, and we haven't even talked about trade bookstores yet. There are many books which make the majority of their sales to libraries.

Most comic book publishers who aren't Big Two can't come near this kind of market penetration. I'm sure some indies don't even know this kind of market penetration is possible.

But the next time you see someone online going on and on about how those pesky girly Marvel Comics don't sell in comic shops - they don't even seem to realize other venues exist.

Houghton Mifflin published MANGAMAN a graphic novel by Barry Lyga and me which did a modest five figures in the trade but sold almost nothing to comic shops. It won some awards no one in comics ever heard of. In order for a comic book to make the same money as MANGAMAN, a hardcover GN, it would have had to sell about 90,000 copies, making it a solid revenue comic for the month of its release.

But none of those people who claim GN's aren't selling outside comic shops know that.

Whatever.

And while I can't tell you exactly what it sold (because that's proprietary information,) I can tell you Amazing Fantastic Incredible Stan Lee sold nearly 100 X the number of hardbacks into trade bookstores as it did in comic shops.

No fooling.

While I never saw any royalties on this one, you can bet it made someone lots of money.

The down side to all this is the threshold for success in book publishing is much higher than in comics publishing, and projects on the edge - projects that would be a success in the indie trade - get abandoned pretty quickly by the big boys.

But just because something isn’t moving top numbers in the comics trade, doesn’t mean it’s not moving.