Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by retailer Steve Bennett of Mary Alice Wilson's Dark Star Books in Yellow Springs, Ohio. This week, Bennett talks about how he's solved the manga buying problems at Dark Star:
When I started thinking about this column I had every intention of making it about how retailers should sell more manga, but unfortunately annoying facts kept getting in the way of my opinions. Every month in Diamond Previews there's dozens of publishers with literally hundreds of titles in a dizzying array of genres that are intended for different age groups; even ordering a fraction of them is an easy way of getting stuck with piles of unsold, unreturnable merchandise.
I won't lie to you; Dark Star sells a lot of manga, but a lot remains unsold. For every hit series there's a dozen misses and with each hit there's the need to keep all of the earlier volumes in stock. And when it comes to the actual ordering... I like to think I know what I'm doing, I mean, I read a lot of manga and on staff we have someone that reads even more than I do. But it still amounts to guess work; ultimately, you just don't know what's going to sell until it gets there.
Still, manga is profitable for us but we're always on the lookout for ways to make it more profitable, and think we've found a way via book distributor Baker & Taylor. Their 40% discount will probably be less than what you can get from Diamond, but it comes with the option of returnability -- up to 10% of your previous twelve months purchases.
And if you sign up for their First Call program you could get an additional 2% on top of that when you order titles with a NYP (Not Yet Published) status.
There's free freight for as little as ten books and you can order even one copy and still receive your full 40% discount. You'll probably receive graphic novels from B&T later than Diamond, but you can do what we're doing; ordering enough copies of manga for your regular file customers (some of whom keep track of their release dates via the Internet) from Diamond and then put copies from B&T on the shelves.
Interested retailers should go to Baker & Taylor's Website, where you can read the terms for yourself (I probably should stress that just because merchandise is returnable is no excuse for anyone to over order) and access Baker & Taylor's Imagery, their graphic novel catalog that includes a list of the Top 25 Bestsellers and helpful tips for retailers interested in carrying manga. You'll also find out it's not just manga that's available through them.
