A Suggestion to Improve Comic Pre-Orders

Diamond Previews logos

There are many many comics being offered every month through comic shops. The ordering catalog I’m looking at right now has over 640 pages, for goodness’ sake!

That means that there are many many titles, the trend of which currently seems to be to pick a single word when naming them. As someone who tries to keep up with the comic market, these generic titles don’t stick in my head. There are just too many.

And when you’re on issue 3 or issue 7 or somewhere in the middle of your story, it’s true that it’s very hard to create solicitation text that means anything, particularly for those who aren’t keeping track of your title. I don’t blame those who give up and just put in a line of some kind of plot, even if I don’t know who any of the characters named are. (This catalog’s most minimal: text that just says, “Power up.”)

However, why not use that space to remind me of your book’s premise? Some of the manga publishers have switched to doing this, with a paragraph of description for the overall series and then a line or two with key events from the particular volume on order. At least that would remind me of something about the comic.

Maybe other customers aren’t paying attention, ordering out of habit or based only on creators or some other factor, so the text actually doesn’t matter, but it struck me that this might be of some small assistance to part of the audience.



One comment

  • Eric Donnelly

    A lot of those pages in Previews are redundant and also there’s a good amount of toys, games and other shit. After a few months you learn to look past that and get to the meat of what you’re looking for.
    If you just keep an excel of what you’re currently pulling and just look for new stuff or if your stuff misses a solicit it is easy to manage.

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