So Mike Baron posted the following on Facebook:
My friends, the orders for Badger #1 came in and they were pathetic. One of the reasons is that retailers believe they have to purchase every Marvel and DC title, which are now flooding the market. My friends, if you believe in independent comics, do me a favor. Contact your local retailer and ask them to carry Badger. Thank you.
So let’s see what we can do.
PAD
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On it.
Got mine ordered! Looking terribly forward to this book!
I put my pre-order in last month.
Badger’s coming back?! Oh, man, that is awesome! Any word on Nexus?
On it.
(Now cue the inevitable “I’ll wait for the trade” people who somehow convince themselves that they’re “helping”)
Thee market has changed. It sucks in some ways, is better in others. The truth is creators have lots of ways to get their creations out to market and to those willing to pay to see it (online publishing to name just one). Blaming “those who wait for trades” for a titles lack of sufficient success is pointless.
It’s not as true as it used to be, but the logic went like this: If folks refused to buy the floppies (as they planned to wait for the trades instead), the publishers took the lack of sales to mean there was little interest in the series in the first place, especially if the sales decreased with each issue. It might be better for the series to be published as a graphic novel from the beginning, unless the book-cost and the unfamiliarity of the title (from not being seen on the racks at all in recent years) combined to put off casual buyers from checking it out at all. Having trained fans to ‘wait for the trade’, the publishers are now sowing the harvest of pre-programmed lack of interest, with creators being punished the worse for it.
“Creators” maybe, but not “publishers”. And when a titles MONTHLY success is what determines if there’ll ever BE a trade, then yes, the “trade waiters” DO contribute to a title’s downfall. Because here’s an ugly little fact most don’t want to admit: People who wait for trades? When it comes to sales figures, they don’t exist on paper. Anywhere. No way to track them. Print runs for trades are lower than monthly because the people who buy the monthlies don’t always buy the trades, and sales for trades are nowhere near the sales of the monthly title.
For them to risk making a trade, on a minimum print run, they have to think it’s worth their while. And if the sales figures are only 300-500 a month, they’re certainly not going to risk doing a print run of trades anywhere NEAR that based on people “promising to buy it”.
For this ideal “trade only” idea to work, to count “trade waiters”, publishers would have to change their entire publishing model to a pre-order system so they’d know in advance the bare minimum of trades they’d be GUARANTEED to sell, then renegotiate how the artists get paid (remember them? They’re part of the equation too) and then the creative team has to be able to grind out a graphic novel/trade paperback within a set time frame rather than a monthly schedule. You’re talking about an overhaul of a system that, for the publishers, has worked just fine for THEM.
I’m familiar with all the arguments for waiting, economics, etc. But the publishers DON’T “have to understand” your economic realities; they only need to understand THEIRS. And the simple fact of the matter is that fewer monthly sales DOOM a title. A titles publication success depends on the monthly sales, not the trades, and fewer people buying the monthly DOES contribute to a title’s lack of sufficient success. To say otherwise is just disingenuous.
I loved The Badger! Along with Mike Baron’s other works.(Still waiting for the last 5 issues of Sonic Disruptors!) 😉
If I was still buying comics, I’d be on this in a second!! But, alas, financial problems preclude me from such pursuits. 🙁
Started a hold box at my local store for the first time in about 25 years. Getting Badger plus all the Star Wars comics.
I ordered Badger quite healthily at my shop. I have one customer who would have gone all Badger on my butt if I DIDN’T order it for him. I think we need to put up some review videos on the YouTube to draw some attention to it.
I deleted a link that someone put to this website that was a column that centered on two things: how the columnist had never heard of Badger, and how unreasonable it was for creators to expect people to want to buy their books.
The columnist also commented on the paucity of advertising for Badger. I’ve published independent books. Still do. And I can assure you that promotion is the single biggest problem for the creators. Getting word out about projects is absolutely endless. There are people who purport to be huge fans of my work who, to this day, never heard of “Fallen Angel,” and that was a series I pushed everywhere. The recent publishing of three new “New Frontier” novels prompted Trek fans to declare they’d never heard of the series, and that’s been going for twenty years. Hëll, we live in a world where fans declared they’d never heard of Paul McCartney. Maybe they were joking, but I’m betting they weren’t.
People should buy Badger. It’s a good series and Mike’s work is always entertaining. And ignore idiot columnists.
PAD