Wag That Tail!

Sorry for the long time in between posts. I started a new job today, and I had to spend a lot of time last week doing last-week-of-job things.

Anyway...

If you haven't read this article yet ("The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson), do so right away. If you have any interest at all about comics, specifically the comics industry, it's something that should be very telling about why the standard American comic book industry is dying and the manga industry is thriving.

To sum it up (if you decide not to read it, and if so, shame on you), industries do better when there is a greater selection, regardless of how few the lowest selling product sells. For example (and an example that Anderson uses), Amazon.com and iTunes sell a lot of the top 10 books and albums. A ton of them. But that's not where they make their money. They do so by selling a lot of different titles. While Amazon sells 2 million (a guess) copies of the latest Harry Potter book and counts their money for weeks doing so, they make MORE money selling the bottom 100,000 titles, titles that may sell only 1 or 2 or 3 copies a year.

A lot of comic book stores -- the majority I'd say -- are Short Tail establishments. They sell their copies of Spider-Man and X-Men and Identity Crisis and what not, but if a comic sells only a copy or two an issue, they'll often stop carrying it completely (in fact Diamond Comics, the industry's main distributor, is following suit). It's as if something doesn't make a lot of money, it's not worthwhile, when in fact, those comics and graphic novels that sell only a copy at a time (instead of handfulls) make you mucho dinero over the months and years.

The industry used to be Long Tail. In the 50s, when romance and crime and horror were kings, sales varied widely between the best selling and worst. But companies didn't give up very easily or quickly on low-selling titles, because they knew that there were enough people out there buying them, that a larger and more varied publishing output was good for the industry. Marvel/Atlas of the 50s is a perfect example. They published a lot of titles and they published everything. From romance to sci-fi to cartoon characters to teen humor. And while they weren't the most popular titles on the newsstands, they never felt the need to stop publishing comics. You can't say the same about Fawcett or Quality, both of whom routinely outsold Marvel titles.

Fast-forward 50 years, and the largest and most popular publisher in comics, Marvel, is now your classic Short Tail publisher. Super-heroes, super-heroes, and more super-heroes.

Contrast that with their main competitor, DC, who is a Long Tail kind of place. They publish Cartoon Network titles, Vertigo, Wildstorm, and super-heroes. And while titles like Fables and Y, the Last Man (both excellent, by the way) fall near the bottom of the top 100 (this most recent month, they're 90 and 96), I suspect they make DC a lot of money through their trade paperbacks.

(Same goes for other DC/Vertigo titles that weren't top sellers when they were published on a monthly basis: Sandman, Preacher, and 100 Bullets have done extremely well in the trade format, making many multiples of what they earned when coming out as periodicals.)

And manga (and I group manga as one entity, instead of by individual publishers, which probably isn't really the best thing to do, but, oh well) has an incredibly wide variety of genres out there. Action, sci-fi, humor, romance, etc. And while some likely sell many multiples of others, they're still published, because it's a good business idea. Because if you sell 100,000 copies of your best title and 150,000 copies total of your worst 10 titles, you're a) making the same amount of money and b) entertaining a much larger audience who may come back and buy more of your books.

DC needs to stretch its Tail and add some romance titles. And Marvel needs to grow one.