Broken Frontier

I did it.  I promised I wouldn’t do it. But I did.  The one thing I swore I wouldn’t do.  I sent out a press release with the words “Sold Out” in the title, when I still have books sitting in my office.  I’m staring at them now. Laughing. Taunting.  But, technically, it’s true.  We sold out.  At Diamond.  On the distributor level, there are no copies of issue #1 of Elk’s Run available anymore.  That, is a sell out.  The fact that I still have books sitting here is in no way directly related to that.  There’s a bit of a silent agreement amongst the comics community.  “Sold Out” doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does. And that’s… okay.

Technically, Elk’s Run #1 “sold-through.”  But, nobody knows what the hell that means, so it’s much easier to say “Sold Out at Diamond Comics Distributor.”  Here’s how it works:  Diamond collects orders from retailers at the end of the solicitation period.  Then, they look at those orders, and make a call on whether or not to order some “safety” copies.  This can range from a few extra copies to 20 or 30% of your total order, depending on what they think the book can do.  This is by no means a given, as I know of plenty of people who sell precisely what the retailers order, and not a book above.  But, a book that Diamond feels confident in, or that has good buzz around it, will oftentimes get the benefit of the doubt.  With Elk’s Run, the distributor ordered around 30% above the actual orders on the book. 

So the book goes out to stores, and, with last minute promotion and word of mouth, a lot of retailers who might not have heard of the book, put in late orders (which at this point are now called “re-orders.”)  Then, Diamond fills those re-orders out of the over-ordered stock.  Add in to that actual retailer re-orders for once the book comes out, and retailers find that they’ve under-ordered, and if you’re lucky you deplete a good amount of that extra stock.  We depleted all of it, and did so within 5 days of release.  For an independent book, that’s pretty outstanding.  Trust me. 

There are the other kinds of sell-outs. Let’s use Marvel as an example.   Marvel will “sell out” a book almost instantaneously, because they strictly do not overprint, so whatever excess Diamond finagles goes almost instantaneously.  That doesn’t mean that there are no books available anymore, just that they’re all out to retailers.  And, if you’ve been to a comic shop recently, you’ll notice those hidden long boxes of Amazing Fantasy #1, or whatever big book Marvel is pushing this week.  Retailers are more or less forced into ordering these books, because first, Marvel won’t reprint them (for the most part) so if it IS a hit, and you don’t have it, you’re screwed.  Secondly, they tie them into incentives and variants that is where retailers can make some decent extra bread. It’s really pretty ingenious on Marvel’s part.  It’s a great way for them to launch series with unknown characters and questionable market appeal, and it has done wonders for their business as of late.

There’s a pretty distinct difference between the first type and the second type of sell-outs, and more often the not, when it comes to “the little guys” selling out is more likely the former than the latter.  It’s a bit of trickery in a sense, but it’s mostly a semantics thing. 

Can you tell I feel guilty?  I must, or else I wouldn’t have written this all confessional style.  Ultimately, it’s not a bad thing, or even a disingenuous thing.  It’s another weapon in the arsenal of promotion that comic creators have to take in order to survive in this market.  We’re from a long history of speculators and collectors, and making things more difficult to find can help build the shelf life and position a book takes in retailers minds. It’s about making a book into a “must have” rather than a “wait and see.”  It’s the same technique that made books like 30 Days of Night and Dead@17 into bonafide hits, and it’s here to stay.