Who would’ve thunk of Sean being a comic superhero?
Maybe we should turn our episodes into comics…
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The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
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And the next best way is to share!
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TRANSCRIPT:
So I’ve mentioned it before, but just in case you missed hearing about it – I used to work in comic books, and I actually was credited as the writer on a few of them!
These include Legacy issue #4, Imperial Dragons #1, Devil’s Keeper #1 and 2, Six-Gun Samurai #1-5, Dragonlance: The Legend of Huma #1, Malcolm Wong’s Dog Eaters graphic novel, Orson Scott Card’s Red Prophet #1-2 and Raymond E. Feist’s The Wood Boy. Oh, and I was the editor for at least a couple of dozen more, and worked on PR & marketing for quite a few books as well.
Don’t go looking for them. They’re not worth reading. Well, Imperial Dragons was pretty good. I wouldn’t have minded see that one take off.
The company I worked for, Dabel Brothers Productions, was an upstart indie publisher run by a family in Georgia that punched a little above its weight, notably getting the rights to bestselling author George R.R. Martin’s short story The Hedge Knight, which is the inspiration for the HBO series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms.
And yeah, I’ve got some first editions. This book was a monster hit. We went through three printings while I was there, including one at Marvel Comics!
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Another book I edited and helped promote was Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter, adapted by my own wife, going by her pen name so she wouldn’t cause any red flags if her name popped up in a search. The Anita Blake books kind of have a reputation for being pornographic nowadays, but the first five novels weren’t too racy at all and Stacie worked on was actually PG-13 at best.
Even so, you don’t want a prospective employer making decisions about you based on what they find on social media!
Oh, and this book was as big a seller as The Hedge Knight – maybe bigger! And comic book store owners were calling us and thanking us because we’d finally found a way to attract female book buyers into their stores. It was a really big deal at the time.
And I was the guy doing the PR & Marketing for these books, all of them, with my scrappy self-taught skills and willingness to try anything. Because, you see, I was in my 20s and a college dropout at the time. I’d never been to business school and I sure as heck didn’t know what I was doing.
But I learned a lot of lessons… and I’m going to share them with you today!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
Let me preface my comic book industry story by first telling you there’s a reason I left the industry, and it wasn’t because we were failing. I worked for two different studios during my time and the bigger of them, Dabel Brothers, worked with several different publishers, eventually including Marvel Comics and Del Rey Books.
The reason I left is because there’s very little money in comics. Marvel and DC both make all their money mostly in licensing and other ventures like TV and film. Comics are just the creative testing ground for new ideas. Hardly anyone reads them.
And all the other people trying to do traditional comics are usually doing them as a labor of love, not for fame and fortune. Most of the best comic book writers and artists would be completely unfamiliar to the average person, and most of the ones who are known the best work in other industries to make their actual money.
The money for comics is in graphic novels sold to kids and young adults. And those are primarily published by established publishers like Scholastic, not indie publishers like we were.
I could barely make any money in comics because comics have never paid well. The reason I wound up doing so many jobs was because I wanted to do them and no one else was willing or knew how. It wasn’t because I was the right person for the job. We couldn’t afford the right person.
Oh, and I should also mention I had a full-time job working at a video game store as a store manager through all of this. That was where my money came from.
So no, I don’t recommend getting into comics. Not even a little. Way too many people want to do it because it’s their dream job and most of them will never make any money fighting for tiny slivers of an already small pie.
But how did I get into comics? I knew a guy. He was a pro comic book artist who haunted message boards where wannabe comic book writers and artists hung out. He had a contest looking for a writer to help him with this book, Devil’s Keeper, and I submitted a spec script and won. He liked my ideas and execution and we became friends.
Where he went, I went, and that’s how I wound up with the Dabel Brothers and also at another publisher for a bit. I worked remotely and rarely saw any of these folks in real life. That’s how comic book companies tend to operate. In fact, many of our artists weren’t even in the US. Quite a few were in South America or the Philippines, submitting their work digitally.
But the reason the Dabel Brothers needed me and my friend was because they had landed this license to The Hedge Knight by convincing George R. R. Martin to give them a chance. He’s actually a very nice guy who had a background in television and understood that the little guys need a break every now and then, and so he decided to give them a chance to prove themselves with this short story that had been published in a fantasy anthology called Legends.
If you happen to look at this book, you’ll see several of the authors and stories in it also wound up having their work adapted by the Dabel Brothers studio. To me, this was a dream come true, because we were working with authors I’d read as a kid and who had made a big impact on me.
I even got to meet some of them, including Robert Jordan, who it turns out was using a pen name and sadly not related to me in any way. He talked about his own interests the entire dinner and didn’t let anyone else say a word. It’s kind of funny when you realize he was the guy who popularized fantasy novels being many hundreds of pages long with his series, The Wheel of Time.
Some of the authors, like Tad Williams, were really down to earth and cool.
Raymond E. Feist, who wrote some bestselling fantasy novels called The Riftwar Saga, had his kids in tow playing Yu-Gi-Oh! excitedly while he signed books. My wife got a kick out of them.
And when Marvel signed Stephen King to do a Dark Tower series, they introduced him to us after a panel discussion and I got to say hello. I don’t think we even shook hands. That was… OK, I guess. One of my many lame claims to fame from comics.
But as exciting as all of that was, most of my job was going online and trying to get people excited about these comics. We didn’t have Facebook or YouTube or anything like that. We had websites that covered comic book news, we had message board communities and we had a mailing list. Oh, and MySpace, which I did use to try to engage with people. That was about it.
Most of our fans found us through word of mouth or by hearing about us from the authors we worked with, and that was enough to help us to sell that magical number of individual comics we needed to sell to break even:
About 3,000 copies.
The comic book market was for a long time controlled by a distributor called Diamond Distributors, who had stepped in during a market crash in the mid-1990s and basically formed a monopoly on comic book sales. There were multiple distributors before that, but Diamond ran them out of business or acquired them.
Diamond’s rule was that any comic book shops they dealt with had to buy comics on a non-returnable basis, which meant that if a comic shop overordered, it was stuck with the inventory.
And Diamond took a pretty big cut, so the retailer and the publisher both only got a fraction of the cover price. I believe we made about a dollar per 22-page comic, which tells you how little people were getting paid to work on them if we only brought in $3,000 at our break even point.
This was very different from how things were traditionally done since the publishing industry has long made most of its product returnable, putting the risk on the publisher, especially with newsstand products like comics.
In this case, Diamond put the risk on the retailer, which meant two things.
The first was lower orders on first printings of individual comic book issues. By the time I was in comics, most of the biggest books being published by Marvel and DC were only selling about 5,000 copies apiece. Only #1s or really highly touted issues sold better than that.
Second, it meant comic book store owners had to be excited about your book to order ANY copies at all because they didn’t want to be stuck with them.
So, guess who had to spend time convincing them that the books my employers were putting out were worth their time and trouble?
Fortunately, we did have a marketable product because we could get those fans I was talking to online to go into their comic book stores and pre-order our books.
This has long been a part of how comic book stores operate – regulars go in and create pull-order lists and ask the retailers to order those books for them and hold them. Retailers will usually order what their customers actually want, and so that turned out to be a reliable way to sell comic books through that sales channel. We just needed to convince a few thousand people to do that.
Diamond would also collect orders for backstock and reprints, which meant if we overprinted our books and then held some back for the next wave of orders, we could give them to Diamond and they could fulfill them as they came in, and then we could order a 2nd or 3rd printing for additional orders.
One other way comic book companies make money is with variant covers. These can be very profitable for collectors since they don’t cost much more to print but may encourage them to buy multiple copies to get each cover. For our books, we often had two covers – a painted one and an illustrated one in the style of the comic.
This helped us multiply our sales.
Even so, the real money in comics has long been in bookstore sales through collections known as graphic novels. We’d run a mini-series of 5 or 6 books, sell them all individually as “floppy” comic books and then repackage them into a single volume with a paperback cover suitable for stores like Barnes & Noble.
The advantage of graphic novels is that they have a much longer shelf life. Our individual comics would be old news after 2-3 months, but some of those graphic novels we produced 20 years ago are still available today.
So, we had a hook with licensing novels people wanted to see turned into comics. We had a built-in target audience. We had a sales channel through Diamond and comic book stores. We had a strategy for making money beyond our costs. We had some original IPs we launched in between the licensed books to try to build our own devoted audience.
And we had two books that hit it really big – The Hedge Knight and Anita Blake were both huge sellers with multiple print runs.
So, why don’t you hear about Dabel Brothers comics today? Or the other publisher I worked for?
Well, the other publisher swung hard but couldn’t make any money in comics and wound up folding pretty quickly.
But the Dabel Brothers entered into a publishing partnership deal with Marvel.
And that was ultimately led to me quitting, because I learned one of the toughest lessons there is to learn in publishing:
Big fish eat little fish. And oh, did we get swallowed.
See, Marvel saw us building this new market for taking existing novels and they wanted to replicate our success. But beyond working with big names like Stephen King, they didn’t have the sensibility we had for the market. We really surprised them with The Hedge Knight and Anita Blake, and they decided the best way to compete with us was to follow the old “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” rule.
If they partnered with us and it worked out – win-win!
But if they realized we didn’t know what we were doing and they could learn how to take the business from us – they’d still win!
Sadly, the latter was what happened. As a family-run business, Dabel Brothers Productions was extremely dysfunctional and we kept having internal strife because of factions that would form within the company.
Marvel quickly realized that we were not professionals and that if they went and started courting our authors to transfer some of those licensing agreements, they could bypass working with us and publish the books on their own.
It ultimately didn’t work out, because Marvel didn’t understand the book business and the authors didn’t like working with Marvel.
They had a certain “we’re the best” attitude that the Dabel Brothers didn’t have, and when Dabel Brothers eventually got out of the Marvel deal and went over to Del Rey Publishing, an honest-to-goodness New York publishing imprint that wanted to get into comics, some of the authors stuck with them.
Marvel moved on to bigger and better things with its movies, of course, and then Disney bought them.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t handle all the dysfunction anymore. And then a guy wormed his way into the company, started calling himself the CEO, and said he was firing me.
It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and I’d been fired and rehired by several self-appointed CEOs at that point. This time, though, I reached out to the Dabel family and told them I wasn’t coming back.
Now, a funny thing about this story. As I mentioned, I was doing all the jobs people didn’t want to do, particularly marketing & PR. Over my several years working for these guys, I actually did get good at those things, and by the time I quit, I was in business school, learning all the fundamentals.
When I left, they didn’t have anybody who knew how to do the essential job of marketing. And they folded not long after. Some of the licenses and intellectual property got acquired by other companies. The rest is really just a memory to those of us who were there at the time.
All of this taught me a few valuable lessons.
#1, if a job sounds really cool and interesting and a lot of people dream of doing it, it’s probably a lousy job that pays horribly.
#2, never work for a company where there’s no structure. If someone can easily try to become your boss because they decide one day that they’re your boss, get out. Chaos is coming.
#3, effective marketing and PR are necessary if you want to be successful. You cannot succeed if you decide you’re too good for marketing, and you cannot be good at marketing if you don’t understand your customers.
#4, if I ever get back into product marketing, I won’t ever deal with a monopolistic sales channel again.
Because Diamond, that distributor I mentioned? A lot of people feel that even as comics were enjoying mainstream pop culture success thanks to superhero movies, Diamond was slowly choking the comic book industry to death.
And #5, working in industries like comics and video games are great when you’re in your 20s and you can afford to dream big. But get a mortgage, and kids, and car loans and all the other trappings of modern life, and you may find you’re better off getting that less exciting office job that affords you the income to indulge in those dreams as hobbies.
Which is what I did. And I’ve never looked back!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been the Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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