I don't know why I'm all worked up about it but the cancellation of the Minx line of graphic novels really left me scratching my head. I worked in book retail for a lot of years. During those years I put a lot of time and effort into cross promoting good comics and trying to get the kids that were dumping cash on YA stuff like Gossip Girl and Twilight to check out comics. It was hard. There were good comics I think that audience could get behind but they were hidden away in the graphic novel section. Not even the fast selling manga section. The.... shudder... graphic novel section. It's like shelving Miley Cyrus CD's in Jazz and expecting the girls to find it.
Then DC put this Minx line together. I was sent some ARC copies and promotional materials before the launch. I liked what I saw and I was excited. I thought these books were a step in the direction toward breaking into that YA girl's market. They looked like YA girl's books. They were YA sized. Good stories. Good art. I thought they could pull it off. But apparently it did not work out. DC has pulled the pug.
Better bloggers than I have covered this over the past couple of days.
There is plenty of "armchair quarterbacking" about why it failed. Myself included.
I posted this at Occasional Superheroine:
As soon as the first boxes came in and I saw that the thin little books would be shelved in graphic novels I knew it was going to fail. The books are small YA format and are totally lost in the GN section. Plus, they just can’t compete with manga. I tired. I created end caps for them but they were in the wrong part of the store. Could I have put them in YA? Sure. But it would have gone against the shelving code on the sticker and would have conflicted with the title look up computers so, no, not really an option. They might have had a chance if shelved with Gossip Girl and similar books in YA and that would not have taken marketing dollars. That would only have taken a phone call to Borders and N B&N to make happen. Just a call to say “hey, these books are YA so can you change your stickers to put this line of books in YA?”. It would not have taken a major marketing initiative on Random House’s part. Just a phone call. My advice to DC and all publishers is to visit a bookstore from time to time. Ask to talk to the shelvers. Ask to talk to the inventory managers. They know. They know where each book should be. They know which kinds of books the kids sitting on the floor in YA are reading and which kinds of books the kids sitting on the floor in manga are reading. Ask a bookseller. They won’t even charge you. (Yet.)
And emailed this to the Comics Reporter:
I feel a bit like a parakeet because I’ve already commented about this at Occasional Superheroine and Comics Worth Reading but I guess this issue has me a little worked up. I’m not this line’s target audience but I liked it and hoped it would work. I was in book retail at the time and was excited to have something I could recommend to the kids buying Gossip Girl and other YA stuff. I was an inventory manager at Borders during the time Minx was being hyped and when it rolled out and I can tell you lack of marketing was not an issue. It was the most marketed venture I saw during my 7 years with Borders other than the monthly marketing rolled out by manga publishers. (DC and Marvel don’t touch in a year the displays, shelve talkers, flyers, book marks, etc. etc. that manga publishers dump on bookstores in a week). Minx did a good job with the marketing. They just forgot to ask us to put the books in the right place. It’s that simple. You hit on it pretty good in your post. “My gut says that a bigger set of factors may have been more along the lines of what I would call structural: how/if to sell these books through Direct Market accounts, finding the right tone while still getting good books out of people, how to pay people for the investment of time in the projects necessary to make the books, where to shelve them in bookstores, how to keep them a vital concern within the corporate structure and competing interests of DC's overall culture.” Where to shelve them is everything. The spine is everything. Manga publishers understand this. Marvel and DC don’t have a clue. As I said at CWR and OS, it would not have taken any marketing dollars on Random House’s part to make this right. All it would have taken is a phone call to Borders and B&N to say, “Hey, this new Minx line is for a young adult audience so we would appreciate it if you would sticker the books to be shelved in YA. Thanks!” It would have taken anyone in inventory management about five minutes to log in and change the subject code in the company database. It’s no big deal. We did it all the time.
Regardless of the marketing or even the quality of the books I think a big part of the problem is that DC just did not have the patience to play the YA market in the way it has successfully been played before. These things seldom catch on overnight. YA (and similarly manga) usually have the most success when there is a series of books for the reader to invest in. This takes years and it takes word of mouth. I thought that was what the Minx line was after. I guess I thought wrong. Oh well. Another comics line down the tubes. It's a shame. They had a lot of good talent. I'm a little sad that some good cartoonists lost what could have been a good gig. I don't know why I'm so worked up about it. Maybe I just wanted to find out what happened to the Janes. Maybe I should drink less coffee.
Your best pal ever,
Shannon Smith
5 comments:
I worked at B&N for almost 7 years, and then in publishing for another 8.
As someone who's worked on both sides, I can tell you that it's a pain in the ass to get these guys to do anything that's against company policy. Who sets that policy? People who may or may not know how to sell books. If it isn't a bestseller, they kinda scratch their heads.
One pub I worked for had a book about Moms and Dads taking pictures.
I lobbied like hell to get that thing into the "Family and Childcare" section. The book didn't really belong in the hobbies section. It was an impulse buy. That's how we packaged it, and that's the only way it'd sell.
But nobody bought it. It got shelved in with all the big, black and white books on how to use your $3,000 Nikon to take glamour shots of naked women and it fizzled.
Shelving by target market instead of by content seems to make sense to most of us, but the overarching rule seems to be that you shelve by content and then call out something by a display...if the publisher's willing to shell out the cash.
The big two regularly ransom out space in the store, but that's another issue, entirely...
Yep. It was frustrating. I worked for Borders for 7 years. About five of that was as inventory manager. I don't know about B&N but we did have a pretty good process for requesting subject code changes. It was not hard but if they disagreed then it was a lost cause. I always looked out for little things like that because, one I wanted to sell books and two, I just like things in their right place. It's really critical to have a book in it's right place and a publisher can't expect B&N or Borders or Books A Million to just get it right. Publishers need to really look out for that kind of thing. There is a reason genre books are always best sellers. (Myster, horror, sci-fi, romance etc.) They are always in their right place and easy to find. As far as how to get that changed from the publisher's or writer's point of view? I don't know the easy standard answer for each store but it won't happen for sure if they don't ask.
True. But, unless it's a Random House or a Harpercollins, the publisher is just happy to have ANY shelf space. If you tick off the buyer, you run the risk of him/her going with another one of the 5,000 other titles out there that are vying for attention.
Or (as in the case I mentioned) the pub is working through a distributor, so the publisher may know where it should go, but the distributor doesn't agree. It sounds easy to say, "Then he should push for what's right!" but, again, you run the risk of them not pushing that title at all.
Some of these retail book outlets are murder to work with. In many ways, they hold all of the power. As an inventory manager, I'm sure you worked with book returns a lot. That's a great example.
Some stores issue returns at the corporate level just to balance the books. They get this huge credit and the publishers get a big fat negative to their bottom line. Not because the book was bad, or (in many cases) because it didn't sell, but because they're looking to pull in a good quarter.
Yeah. The return issue is a sad truth. A lot of newish books go back to fatten the bottom line. As far as getting it in the right subject code I don't know how much the buyers and inventory managment talk to each other. I can't speak for B&N or or BAM but at Borders, I never got the impression that inventory management and the buyers had ever met each other. It always felt like once the book were bought, the buyers washed their hands of the thing and left it up to inventory to figure out where to put it. We had a subject code change form we could submit when we found an out of place book. This was most commonly found for when similar named titles went wrong. Like an erotica book ending up in kids board books. Sellers, shelvers and in store inventory managers would have to really care about their sections to keep up with something like where a Minx book when though. Needle in a hay stack.
p.s. Sometimes new copies are already in the new shipment as you are scanning out the returns. It's a non stop circle of these books shipping around the country from store to store floating just outside of any individual store's official inventory.
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