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 begins a discussion of how a store can differentiate itself against major competition.

I didn't like the movie You've Got Mail (a.k.a. 'the e-mail movie') for both personal and professional reasons, but not any stereotypical 'great big man hates them chick flicks' attitude.  Here's a real confession for a heterosexual man: I like romantic comedies, especially when they're done well.  Like the one You've Got Mail is based on, 1940's Shop Around the Corner, which is about a couple of wage slaves toiling in a Budapest luggage store who loathe each other by day but unknowingly lovingly correspond by night. 

Among the many unnecessary changes in this pointless update is modern Hollywood's snobbish notion that people don't want to see people who actually work for a living on the big screen.  So Meg Ryan and Tom Hawks couldn't be mere bookstore register monkeys; she had to be the owner of a small, inherited independent store that specialized in children's books the way he had to be the multimillionaire CEO of a mega-bookstore chain. 

But the movie became personally offensive when it came time for Tom to open his latest mega-store across the street from Meg's Mom & Pop operation...and she doesn't do much more than feel sorry for herself.  Sure, the odds against her were staggering, but by the time I'd gotten to the theater lobby I'd come up with half a dozen things she could have done to keep her business going:  Internet sales, adding toys and DVDs based on the books she carried, more in-store events (story hours, signings by authors, etc.), and stressing the personal services her store is willing to perform, just to start.

So maybe now, while most of us are experiencing an upswing in both comic sales and interest in comics, it's time for more comic shops to experiment with different product lines.  You've probably already thought of the most obvious ones: Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards, roleplaying games, toys, t-shirts, etc.  But one of the problems with the direct sales system is that it's a closed circuit; the same sort of merchandise comes in every week, which is bought by the same customers.  Even if you're going great every Wednesday there are six other days in the week; maybe you should start thinking about the people who aren't your customers.  Yet.

Of course I don't know your store, the neighborhood its in or who your clientele is, so again I'll be writing about my situation.  I take enormous pride in our large current comic selection, our wonderfully eclectic collection of back issues, and our 40,000 used books, but for a lot of people we're 'the store with bumper stickers.'  It started out simply enough; Dark Star got a lot of people who were (sometimes quite literally) being dragged inside, who didn't share their loved one's passion for comic books.  So we thought it might be nice if they had something to look at while their temporary abductors were off scouring the racks.

Bumper stickers, we thought; funny, political, eccentric ones.  So we put a spinner of them by the window, which was seen by tourists and soon one became two, which has become three, which led to having two large displays of magnets and pins by the cash wrap area.  And the thing is, we can never have enough of them; no matter how many we order they sell out just that fast.

Then we started getting a handful of new books; these didn't go quite as fast, but as it became known that Dark Star carried them, sales steadily improved.  So we carry most New York Times bestsellers, humor books by Bill Maher, Louis Black and David Sedaris, and our all-time in-store bestseller, Zombie Survival Guide.  We must have sold fifty copies of that one and literally cannot keep it in stock.  Sure, people can drive a half hour and get the same books for up to 20% off from some big chain store, but there are  people who actually prefer to support independent booksellers.

Yellow Springs also has a captive customer base: Antioch College students and local residents who don't have transportation to make regular treks to big chain stores.  So for them we've been selling both new general interest magazines and anything with an SF or horror bent (Heavy Metal, Fangoria, etc.) for years.  Then we noticed that in spite of being an incredibly gay-friendly town, no-one (including three bookstores, a drugstore, and a grocery store with magazine racks) was carrying Out, Curve or The Advocate.  So we started getting them, people bought them, others saw them and started requesting other magazines.  And so we started carrying Ms. Magazine, Adbusters, Gothic Beauty, Giant Robot...