Rembert Parker of Reader Copies in Anderson, Indiana read the recent article regarding DC's successful Blackest Night Ring Promotion (see "'Rings' Promotion a Home Run") and had this to say:

When I first saw the news about DC's promotion of the various rings for Blackest Night I was just as excited as some of my customers became.  But there was one problem: in order to get the first ring we had to order 50 copies of Blackest Night #1 and then pay something relatively minor to get the rings ($8 for a bag of 50 rings).

Excuse me?

The best-selling title in the store's history was Gen 13 #1, which only broke over 100 copies because we found out about the variant covers and ordered enough to get them (and even the base comic was quickly selling for above cover, so we had no problem unloading them at shows).  The only other comic I can remember selling more than 50 copies of was Civil War #1, and that was because we ordered a ton of them instead of participating in Free Comic Book Day that year and everybody everywhere seemt to under order the comic (clearly that was a lucky decision for us).  We can sell about 25-30 copies of the main Blackest Night comic and less than half those numbers for other tie-ins, so there was no way we could participate in the promotion, especially when there were so many other comics required to get all the different colored rings.

Had DC followed Marvel's lead and merely required that we exceed our orders for some best-selling title from the past we would have been able to get the rings, but no luck this time.  I felt as excluded as I normally do looking at variant incentives that require 50, or 100, or (gasp!) 200 copies of the normal comic (and the latest weekly mail from Marvel even included a variant offer that pops in at 300 copies).

I can't help but wonder how many stores actually qualified for that promotion; is the interest in the program coming primarily from customers who can't get the rings because they don't live in a major metropolitan area where stores routinely order that many copies of a comic?  I know that several of my customers bought sets of the rings for about $10 off the web.

An incentive that occurs at ten copies of a comic may be sufficient to get us to increase our orders to the next multiple of ten (as happens every month with comics from both Marvel and DC), but numbers as large as the rings required are simply out of reach, particularly when our store has to pay for the rings in addition to buying stacks of comics we'll never sell.  Those minimum numbers make these "incentive" rings seem more like a reward for having a large customer base rather than an incentive to increase our orders.

ICv2's suggestion that more promotions along those lines may be coming is only a hopeful suggestion if the minimum ordering limits get lower... a LOT lower.

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.