The sale really has been a huge success (to the point where we completely ran out of shipping boxes late last week, and had to scramble to find more locally while waiting for our usual supplier to get them to us), so we extended it two more weeks to maximize the response. We’re getting a lot of people finishing off their runs of our mags (Kirby Collector and Alter Ego, especially, I guess since there’s so many issues). If your hints of it being a “fire sale” helped bring some of them there, to quote Jack Kirby, “I thank you for that.” :-)

But there’s other reasons for a sale; one is it’s the holiday season, and we think our stuff makes a great gift idea. Plus, we greatly appreciate all the readers who’ve supported us this year, and want to help them out a little during what are economically tough times for a lot of people. Also, we’re trying to draw new people to our site, to discover things they didn’t know we had.

But perhaps most importantly, Pam and I are taking our daughters to Disneyworld over New Year’s, and we need the dough for souvenirs. So order early and often, everybody! :-)

As to whether the good response to the sale demonstrates that their regular prices are too high to maximize profit, the answer is no. In fact, if they couldn’t substantially increase the quantity demanded by cutting the price in half, that would be a pretty good indication that they’re charging too little to maximize profits. Ideally a firm would charge each individual customer exactly what that customer would be willing to pay; since they usually can’t do that for a whole host of reasons, they maximize profits by price discrimination where they can. In this case they charge enthusiastic customers who definitely want the books one price, and wish-washy customers who are willing to wait ’til the end of the year and only maybe get the book if it’s cheap a much lower price. In their best-case scenario they would have sold every last book that they ever could have at full price, and only the remaining books that had been printed and would otherwise be a loss at the lower price. In practice they’ll probably cannibalize some sales from the would-have-paid-full-price group (those who waited to see if there was going to be a sale, and those who would have picked it up during or after the sale period but jumped on it during the sale), but with any luck there won’t be very many of those.