Joe Krolik of Comics America in Winnipeg, Manitoba focused on new readers in his Free Comic Book Day promotion:
It's interesting to note the reaction to FCBD this year. From scouring various forums and interpreting the comments, I find that by and large we as retailers are still preaching to the choir. Most commentary I've seen either comes from fans who busily went from store to store trying to assemble a complete set of this year's FCBD books, or from retailers who were happy to see their REGULAR CUSTOMER base come in and get free books as a reward for their patronage. NOT the purpose of the program folks!
In our case we coupled FCBD as a two-day event for both July 3 and 4 with our traditional 4-day event celebrating both Canada Day and the Fourth of July. We purposely did not order most of the books, limiting things to five of the main items plus the Tokyopop Sampler. We still had some quantities of the last two year's books to mix in with this year's offerings as well. We spent just under $1,500 on newspaper advertising over three days promoting the combined events, and distributed in-store flyers for 10 days prior.
The result was attendance by many parents with their kids in tow looking for the free comics. But the important thing is that I would estimate fully 80% of those family groups had never been in our store before, and perhaps most of those had never been in any comics specialty store (this from the commentary in conversation as we spoke to people).
Also, we did not restrict anyone as to the quantity of books they could take. In fact, some parents sheepishly asked if it was all right to take one of each book. We received only a few comments about, 'How come such and such book wasn't there?', mostly from store regulars, and politely informed the individuals of the purpose of the program. The most popular item: The Tokyopop Sampler. Most folks couldn't believe that a book of that size was free.
My comment to publishers, if Tokyopop is willing to make such a great book-sized sampler completely free to retailers, why shouldn't the other publishers make their offerings completely free? Tokyopop got it right. Since the event, we have seen return business from fully two thirds of those from the 'never-befores,' as well as several new customers who got word-of-mouth. That's the idea of the program. Who cares about regular collectors getting full sets of the books? We want NEW READERS. New readers mean new customers... potentially REGULAR customers, and the younger the better because that's the future of our marketplace.
Now, as to subs: You will find that there will ALWAYS be customers who go for the low-priced option, and the pitfalls that go along with it (see other previous comments re post office mauling, etc.). Good. They'll eventually figure it out and come back to the more reliable source for full service and selection.
If you go back to the boom of the late 80s-early 90s you'll see that both DC and Marvel advertised subscriptions. So what? Does that mean to say that Time magazine should defer to their newsstand dealer base and not offer subscriptions at deep discounts direct to readers? Nonsense. It's their right to market their product as they see fit in a free economy (and yes, I know that newsstand dealers get Time fully returnable whereas we don't get comics that way, but they also don't get our deep discounts).
If we as retailers would spend as much energy to continue to grow the market by promoting our businesses as we do worrying about things like this, we'd see better results.
The opinions expressed in this Talk Back article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
