1. Ah, must be Tuesday on the Internet.

2. Wow, there’s nobody in this argument I can agree with.

3. I wonder if ComicsPro will ever write a position paper I support?

[...] Direct Market, part III: Here’s Brian Hibbs, Lisa Lopacinski, Heidi MacDonald, Simon Jones, Johanna Draper Carlson, Alan David Doane and Richard [...]

I wasn’t actually arguing with the point you were making, merely offering another way of defining who actually gets the largest slice of the pie.

I’ve long since moved past arguing on the basis of fairness, compassion, or charity at all in comics. Ironically, it’s retailers who convinced me that idealism doesn’t matter in the face of actual market conditions and the all important dollar, however I wish it were not the case.

Why? I mean, you can always choose some measure or tell some story about why the amount you’re getting is fair, or should be even higher, but honestly, why is it manifestly more fair that e.g. retailers can make a living at it while many on the art and writing side have to have day jobs to support themselves? If margins ought to matter, should retailers be willing to take a smaller discount from publishers who offer a better page rate or a higher ratio of staff to freelancers?

The point isn’t that retailers have it easy, since as Larry points out everybody works for their small margins, but that talk about “fairness” in business transactions mostly comes down to being able to spin a good yarn to justify your self-interest. I’m much more likely to believe that fairness is a motive when you’re offering *better* terms to your trading partners than they would have agreed to. Otherwise, the acid test is just this: would you rather have the deal on the terms offered, or not? Is there a deal that both parties would prefer to the current one?

But I don’t mean to be pedantic; just pointing out that retailers aren’t getting a disproportionate amount of the cover price. If you only mean they’re getting the largest slice, that’s cool.

EVERYONE works hard for their small margin, in comics.

The plural of anecdote isn’t data. Some retailers claim that publishers are leaving money on the table by selling at conventions in advance of availability to the shops. (This is separate from the claim that the publishers are making money that rightfully belongs to the retailers.) It’s hard to assess counterfactuals, but since the practice has gone on for years and retailers have been complaining for years, this amounts to claiming that publishers are just too dumb to recognize their own interests even when it’s pointed out to them. You’d think that they would notice the better total sales on titles that they never did this with, but maybe each individual publisher is working from too small a sample, or doesn’t keep careful enough track of their sales, or retailers respond by cutting all orders from the publisher and not just ones that they’re afraid will be on sale early at cons so the publisher can’t tell the difference between the general sales trend and the activity on that particular title. It’s a hard sell, though, to persuade your supplier that you know his business enough better than him that he should take your word that he’ll make out better by giving you more favorable terms.

On the other hand, you’ve got the publishers saying that these sales are important part of marketing and generating buzz. And again, while there’s a plausible story to explain why it would be good for everybody, without data publishers are just asserting they know the business better than retailers. Obviously another tough sell there.

I think if publishers and retailers wanted to get past the clash of dueling assumptions, they’d have to carefully track and share data about sales on titles where they did or didn’t offer them early at cons, and perhaps even experiment with offering at some cons and not others to see how regional sales went (though I can imagine that would be difficult if there aren’t near-simultaneous cons in different regions prior to when the book hits the direct market).

As to fairness, like Johanna, I tend to see that as something of a red-herring. Last I checked retailers get the lion’s share of the cover price of the books they sell. Is that fair? Who knows? It is, however, what the publisher has to agree to in order to get the books in the shops.