ComicsPRO Releases First Position Paper

If you read this blog regularly, you know that Star Clipper is a member of ComicsPRO - the Comics Professional Retailer Organization. ComicsPRO considers itself the comic book retailer advocacy group and one of the purposes of the group will be to release opinions (called 'Position Papers') on various subjects that affect retailers.

We finally released our first Position Papers - this time on Variant Covers. You can read the whole thing over at Newsarama and check out the commentary, too. I think most folks who've sounded off agree with us, but of course you can't please everybody.

My position on variant covers is pretty simple - I'd rather not have them, they're a pain in the ass to deal with and generally have little to no impact on how we order our books. Of course, the publishers will probably continue to print variants because they tend to positively impact a publisher's bottom line. How? By encouraging retailers to purchase larger quantities of regular cover books to reach the numbers required to qualify for a 1:50 or 1:100 variant cover. The retailer will regularly eat large volumes of unsellable regular covers for the chance to make a large sale on a variant cover. Usually, though, the overall profitablility of the line drops like a rock when a retailer takes a chance like this. So in general, variant covers help retailers like us, who already order and sell large quantities of normal covers (because the variant is just gravy) but hurt smaller retailers who are trying to score big on a single book.

So why would I be against them in general? Well, using variants as a way for publishers to increase their sales on a book only skews the sales numbers on a title in a way that doesn't reflect the volume that is actually selling to end-users (readers). It's wasteful, because a large proportion of the books are never sold or read and in the long run it hurts smaller retailers by negatively impacting their profitability - and I'm very interested in the long term health of the industry.

This is also an issue with 50/50 variant splits. Books like Justice League of America, which routinely ship with two covers - usually a good and a crappy one. Star Clipper *has* to order them on a 50/50 basis, but I know I will probably sell 1 cover 2-3 times better than the other cover. The publisher knows this and is hoping I'll increase my overall order so I have enough of the good covers to satisfy my customers. So I'm actually forced to order more of a book than I know I can sell or risk making my customers angry. The publisher tries to soften the blow by also offering rare variants (1 in 10 or 1 in 50) so for me to recover the profitability of the line, I have to sell the variants at stupidly inflated prices. I'd much rather be able to order the covers efficiently - in the quantities that I know I can sell (at cover price).

Of course since we're basically forced to play the game, we're going to price the variants for what we can sell them for, and we try to be competitive with other retailers - but I'd rather they were just gone.

Anyway, read the position paper for yourself - I spent several hours working on it, after all. I'd love to know what you folks think. BTW, I don't mean to take the credit for writing this position - it was a group effort of the 'Position Paper Committee' over at ComicsPRO which includes 7 or 8 folks - most of whom contributed a great deal to the paper.

-b