Sharpening the Sword is a regular column by retailer John Riley of Grasshopper's Comics, a 1,300 square foot comic and games store in
Time to catch up! A lot has gone on since my last column. We went to GTS, came back with nowhere near enough time to prepare for FCBD, got through a hectic FCBD and then an injury put me out for a few weeks as I tried to recover from it all. So this week, I’m just going to try to go over a few things I’ve been thinking about for the past month, because there’s just been a tremendous amount going on right now.
First of all, this is just a weird time in general. Here, gas prices went up 28 cents in three days! As a result, over the last month we’ve seen a number of very interesting trends that are sure to affect retailers in some way this year. The Department of Transportation reported the largest decrease in the rate of driving in
Also over the past month we had the Iron Man movie totally overwhelm the box office to not only massive receipts but great reviews. That helped again propel comics into the forefront of peoples’ minds and led to another great FCBD. This was followed up by a generally positive review of the Indiana Jones film, and everyone seems to be stoked for the comic movies yet to come. So on the comic side of our business I’m pretty enthusiastic. We’ve got a lot of great books coming out, trade paperbacks continue to be strong, and the media is helping us tremendously in keeping our wares in the public eye.
What’s bothering me right now though, can best be summarized by looking at the recent announcement that Tenacious Games, the company behind the Spoils CCG, will be shutting down. The posting that Tenacious released about their problems during their second round of financing clearly walked us through their financing decisions and how what seemed like good decisions, ended up in retrospect to be disastrous. Publicly, they’ve placed the blame squarely on their own shoulders, but what I can’t help wonder is if this is a situation where ultimately the retailers let this company down.
What do I mean? Well, personally I believe that this was a company that actually did a lot of the things that retailers wanted. They produced a very high quality game with great mechanics. They packaged it in 12-count booster boxes to encourage box sales as an impulse purchase and merchandised it in a way that made it more attractive in stores as opposed to the Internet. (Being able to buy a “box” for $48, puts a lot less pressure to purchase online than a $140 box does). And when it came to pre-releases they worked hard to get the product into a wide range of stores before it could get to Internet retailers.
But their biggest innovation was their “Open Beta” program. In order to build a market for their game, they literally gave it away. Prior to the first set being released they offered free tournament kits to any retailer who wanted one. The kits came with enough cards to hold a free tournament in your store. Players came in, played for free, got prizes, and were able to keep the cards as well! Retailers were able to get one kit a week, and all they had to do was report their tournament results to qualify.
I know that some retailers surely don’t agree with me. Maybe you didn’t personally like the game, or their smaller box size. That’s OK, I don’t like all of the games I sell either, but you have to admit that at least they were making an attempt to do things that would help the retailer. So why do I say that ultimately the retailers may have failed this company? Because I’ve questioned quite a few retailers to see how they did with this game and specifically with the free tournament kits. I loved the opportunity to build a market for a new game with absolutely no risk and no out of pocket expense. It’s something I would like to see other companies try. But at this point every retailer I’ve spoken with seemed to do the same thing: they never opened their kit, never tried or learned the game, and then proceeded to sell the kit on eBay.
Unfortunately, I get the feeling that retailer buy-in is missing for other manufacturers as well. For the first time at the GAMA Trade Show this year I left the show with fewer major products than I started with. Of course I did find a tremendous amount of new products to add to my store, but the major manufacturers, manufacturers who need a good amount of retailer buy-in to keep their larger organizations going, all seemed to be cutting back on product lines and retailer promotions. And I know that for many of these programs, retailers have either failed to participate, or participated but didn’t follow the promotion as it was intended. The result is the same: we’re not seeing some of these programs anymore. And in some cases, we’re not seeing the manufacturers anymore either. Case in point: the mass market showed us that Halo ActionClix was an incredibly successful product; yet most direct market retailers didn’t even try it.
Ten years ago I self-published an all-ages comic book with a friend of mine. We put a lot of work into it and ended up getting an Eisner nomination for Best New Series, as well as two Russ Manning nominations. We spent a small fortune on promotion, including full-page ads in Previews. But as retailers ourselves we knew that we needed to take the risk out of the transaction. So we sent out about 8,000 copies of our book to every retailer in the country. We knew that the only way retailers could see the quality of the book was to give them the actual book. After two years we stopped publishing, because despite everything we had done, according to the information we got from Diamond, 95% of retailers had never ordered a copy. We never expected to be in a huge percentage of stores, but considering the critiques we were receiving, we though we should be in more than 5%. We stopped publishing because we couldn’t figure out any way of penetrating that 95%. Things haven’t changed much today. There are many successful books being published today that wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the book market, because their creators have been quite vocal in telling me that less than 5% of their print runs are actually going to comic shops.
Sure, in the end all the retailer buy-in and support won’t save a bad product or company. but when we fail to investigate new publishers or manufacturers, see what they’re about, learn about their products, and attempt to promote the products we view as worthwhile, we are failing to support the manufacturers and publishers that are essential to our industry’s health. When a manufacturer comes up with a great promotion we need to support it by properly participating in it. Because if we don’t, there are only a few things that can possibly happen: they’ll cancel the product or promotion, take it out of the hobby industry to the book market (comics) or mass market (games), or they’ll leave. And every one of those options leaves us with fewer products to sell. And in these economic times, we can’t afford that.
It’s not easy to show support. It takes effort. It’s a lot of work. But let’s face it, when we fail the manufacturers, we’re ultimately failing ourselves.
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.