With the ongoing and thoroughly depressing collapse
of the comic direct market, quite a few voices have started questioning
the need for the standard 20-page comic format. The graphic novel
is definitely coming in on it's own and online comics have their own
particular joys and horrors, but a few souls are starting to ask about
using the standard print magazine format again. It's not as if the
format is new (after all, Heavy Metal has been using that format
for nearly thirty years, with its predecessor Metal Hurlant
going back even further, and older readers may remember the uneven
but sometimes brilliant Epic from Marvel in the late Seventies
and early Eighties), but just because the format had limited appeal
before doesn't mean that it couldn't work now.
That said, though, some of the suggestions being made about successful
comic magazines are... well, naive. That is, they're good suggestions,
but they come from people who have no idea of the pit of horrors that
is the magazine publishing industry in this foul Year of Our Lord
2001. They're suggestions that don't take into account the incredible
amount of money and manpower necessary to get any magazine going,
and they're suggestions that not once ask about ongoing profitability.
These factors don't make the suggestions any less valid: instead of
deriding them out of hand, this essay intends to help answer these
concerns in the hopes that someone will find work-arounds to the standard
responses.
Right at the moment, the magazine industry in the United States is
in about as bad a shape as the comics industry, only the people in
the magazine business don't air the dirty laundry quite so much. The
distribution system is a mess still mired in procedures and policies
instigated back just after World War II, the number of venues that
sell and distribute magazines are steadily decreasing, and most Americans
can't be bothered to read magazines at all. That is, while industry
trades ranging from The Industry Standard to Variety
to Nature still command a reasonable readership, the number
of people reading magazines purely for pleasure are declining. The
only exceptions are mainstream sex magazines, with Cosmopolitan,
Maxim, and their clones marking the only noticeable increases
in magazine sales and circulation in the business. Everyone else is
right out of luck.
Part of the situation with magazine sales is due to a changing demographic.
With the Web and television offering more alternatives for a cheaper
price, not to mention a population for whom reading has long been
considered a chore, the successful magazines are the ones with as
few words as possible that get in the way of the pictures. Even for
those who have the inclination to utilize basic literacy in a contemporary
setting, the problem is finding time to read. In this category, the
best sellers are those magazines that offer content that can be read
on the bus, in a doctor's waiting room, or in the john. (This is what
I call the Crap Rule: most magazine articles should be just long enough
that the reader can finish it while taking a potty break, without
that break going on for so long that the reader gets in trouble for
excessive reading at work.) This is one of the reasons why self-help
and news magazines have expanded in the last twenty years, while fiction
magazines are relegated to a tiny portion of the general literary
landscape.
The other part of the situation comes from the assimilation and deconstruction
of the magazine market by superpublishers. AOL Time Warner and Conde
Nast are two perfect examples of large publishers that rule the magazine
industry like tyrannosaurs, and their predations directly affect everyone
else. The first influence comes when they observe a newcomer that
puts out an interesting and successful magazine and immediately flood
the market with competition. Even in the best of times, magazine racks
have a limited amount of space available, and the Big Guys have plenty
of influence in getting booksellers or magazine distributors to carry
ALL of their products. Ergo, if Conde Nast decides to put out five
new ripoffs of Stuff (and just out of curiosity, when are we
going to see a men's magazine with the honest titles of Dry Hump
or Masturbating Like Caged Apes?), five spaces for five different
magazines are going to disappear.
(This, incidentally, is the reason I laugh at apologists for the science
fiction industry about the relevance of SF magazines. If genre magazines
were anything but tax writeoffs or attempts to keep anyone else from
trying to horn in on a few spare shekels, don't you think that Time
Warner would have put out at least one literary science fiction magazine
by now? Hell, they don't even bother trying to compete with TV and
film SF magazines like Cinescape and Starlog, which
should tell you something about these magazines' audience recognition
or profitability.)
And before I forget, we need to take a look at those magazine sellers
themselves. As anyone with even the slightest interest in books already
knows, Borders and Barnes & Chernobyl have already altered the
bookbuying landscape beyond all recognition, which helps explain why
Publisher's Weekly regularly features articles on the latest
lawsuit concerning both chains' predatory buying practices. (Both
have been charged with working out deep discount deals with big publishers,
receiving a higher discount for books than what is being offered to
independently owned bookstores, and there by explaining how both chains
can afford their discounts on bestselling books. We don't have time
to go into that now.) Because these guys order more magazines than
most, their buying practices are going to affect what a distributor
wants to offer: if Barnes & Noble doesn't want to order a particular
magazine, the odds that a distributor is going to keep pushing for
it are pretty slim.
(Here's a corollary for the situation, this time using the school
textbook market as an example. Texas at the moment is one of the biggest
purchasers of elementary and high school textbooks in the United States,
and for years it was held hostage by Mel and Norma Gabler, a duo of
self-appointed book censors down in Longview who regularly critiqued
textbooks up for consideration in Texas schools. By the Eighties,
the Gablers had become a national joke, and not just because of their
ongoing efforts to remove evolutionary theory from science books and
sex education from every possible niche: in one of their most famous
incidents, they rejected a dictionary because it defined "bed"
as "a place where one or more people sleep". Even with this
idiocy, book publishers such as Houghton Mifflin knew that they had
to deal with the Gablers, and so books that were suitable for sale
in Texas were the de facto standard for the rest of the country. And
you thought that a comics market dominated by superhero fanatics was
bad.)
Backtracking to comic sales and making comic magazines, the biggest
consideration for anyone contemplating starting one is that the comics
business isn't the magazine business, and it never will be. Let me
explain.
Even though it's ill-serving today, the concept behind the comics
direct-sales market was a clichéd but accurate stroke of genius.
Before the direct market allowed comic shop buyers to order comics
directly from the publisher (or, as in the current system, from a
series of distributors), comics were treated just like any other magazine.
These days, comics are a non-returnable commodity: once a store ordered
its comics, those comics were and are non-returnable, and it's up
to the store to move them. If they sell poorly, well, the publisher
and distributor take no direct responsibility. (Actually, they do,
but only when the comic shops of the world realize that they're stuck
with thousands of copies of Silicone Implant Girl #1 and decide
to cut back on their next order. However, in most circumstances, the
store owner isn't allowed to ship back all of those unsold copies
and demand a refund or credit.) This tends to work because of the
perceived collectibility of new and old comics, but magazines don't
have that level of collectibility unless they feature nude photos
of celebrities taken when they were unknowns.
(In a recent interview in the magazine Nova Express, no relation
to the paper in Watchmen, Neil Gaiman related that the main
reason why most comics publishers don't bother advertising new comics
is because they're already sold under the current system. The comic
shops have already paid for those comics, so the only interest Marvel
or DC have in advertising new or ongoing titles is to get new or increased
orders in the future. In their perception, they'll only lose money
by advertising the first issue of Silicone Implant Girl, but
they'll run ads in their own comics in order to stoke enough interest
so that the shops will order the second and third issues. After the
third, generally people will keep getting it out of habit.)
In a typical newsstand situation, though, magazines are usually returnable.
Take a look at a typical magazine stand and look at the publication
date right below the magazine title: ever notice how the date on top
is always anywhere from two weeks to three months in the future? Well,
that's because the date is not for the potential purchaser. That's
to help the guy (or gal) who stocks the racks: that date is to denote
when that issue is to be pulled and replaced with the new one. (Comics
generally still work on that system, and this also ties into that
color-coded bar on the top of most older comics. It's all designed
to keep old product from hogging space that could be used by titles
that will sell.) That person then counts all of the copies left, compares
them to the number sold, and sends two reports out. The first one
goes to whomever is responsible for paying for the magazines sold
in the store, and that person usually cuts a check that goes back
to the distributor which ultimately gets to the publisher. The second
report is to the person or people who make new orders for magazines,
and they use that report to decide how many copies of a particular
magazine they should get next time. These latter folks are usually
pretty unforgiving: if they order ten copies of a new magazine for
a store and it sells only three, they'll usually cut back the order
to three and might consider raising the order to four a year or so
down the road. In the meantime, the magazine might become famous or
otherwise in-demand between issues two or three, which means tough
luck for the new readers trying to find a copy and tough luck for
a publisher who has to wait until the buyers decide to take a chance
again.
Anyway. Back to "returnable". After those reports go out,
the magazines themselves are supposedly returned to the distributor
handling them. Some places still cut off most of the front cover and
send that back to the distributor as proof that the copy didn't sell
and receive credit on their next order (paperback books get their
covers ripped off in the same way; many of these still end up in garage
sales and flea markets, as do the mutilated magazines). Others ship
back the whole lot to the distributor, who is then responsible for
tallying sales versus returns and sending the publisher a check minus
returned copies and the costs of shipping. Those returned copies generally
disappear (more often than not, they're sold in bulk to recyclers
who grind them into paper towels and toilet paper, right alongside
poorly-selling paperback novels and prayer requests to televangelists),
and the whole system holds together because the publishers trust the
distributors in their bookkeeping.
Now, other factors figure into the profitability of a magazine, starting
with the point of sale. Until relatively recently, newsstands and
magazine sellers were held responsible for any copies that were damaged
or stolen, which is part of the reason for the clichéd "This
ain't a liberry" newstand hawker attitude. About two years ago,
though, Barnes & Noble started keeping exact tabs on what magazines
and newspapers came in and which ones were rung up on their cash registers.
(This is why Barnes & Chernobyl won't touch magazine without one
of those little funny UPC codes on the cover, and why all comics sold
in comic shops have that "DIRECT SALES" notice on the top
of the UPC. The first is to keep exact track of what magazines came
in and left the store, and the second is so that some comics geek
doesn't pick up comics from his/her store and try to exchange them
for cash or credit at the local B&N.) That part wasn't so bad,
but then B&N decided that the chain was no longer responsible
for magazines that were stolen or damaged while in the store. This
meant that the cost of magazines that were rendered unsaleable because
some dolt poured coffee inside it while reading it in the store Starbucks,
magazines gummed by a customer's toddler, magazines with pages ripped
out by some fanboy who couldn't live without that pinup of Jeri Ryan
in the latest Femme Fatales, and/or magazines that walked out
the door in the backpacks of employees (and the latter is rumored
to be the number one factor for missing magazines at any Borders or
Barnes & Noble) were to be eaten by the publisher. Imagine the
shriek from Toyota if car dealers were to tell the company that the
costs of idiot Lexus test-drivers wrapping a 2001 SUV around a telephone
pole were to be assumed by the manufacturer, and then consider that
Lexus has a much better profit margin than most publishers. With that,
the lack of noise from publishers is deafening.
This said, the return on selling magazines is pretty poor. Even under
the best of arrangements, only about half of the cover price goes
back to the publisher. Most bookstores pay about or less than 50 percent
of the cover price every time a copy of a magazine sells, and that's
if the store can return unsold copies to the distributor. If the magazine
is nonreturnable, the stores generally pay 40 percent, and let's not
forget that the distributor gets a percentage on the copies that _do_
sell. And that's if the store decides to pay its bills in the first
place: Barnes & Noble in particular is notorious for paying its
bills if and when the company feels like it, so the money from a sold-out
first issue may finally arrive as much as three years after the magazines
arrived. (And unlike small stores that welsh on their bills, the big
stores have lots of lawyers that keep people from dragging the CEO
into court over $200 in magazines that were never paid for. The small
stores aren't perfect, either: I'm still owed money from Powell's
City of Books in Portland, Oregon for copies of a magazine named Tangent
that I sold to them on consignment back in 1997, and I have yet to
receive a check or even a letter explaining why they never paid.)
Because of the low return on magazines, the big magazines take advantage
of advertising to offset the dips in the revenue stream. The money
that AOL Time Warner receives from a copy of Time sold on the
newsstand is gravy: that issue was already in the black when it went
to the printer thanks to the full-page color glossy ads that infest
it. Time can justify the ad rates it charges because of its
planetwide circulation, and very few niche magazines make more than
operating expenses from selling advertising. Running advertising requires
its own little empire of ad reps to get it, though, and many potential
advertisers will probably look down on a comic magazine as being beneath
them.
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