Some days I hate technology.

I spent a solid week on this month's column, with tight arguments weaving in a coherent narrative. It was a thing of beauty.

So then I go to send it off to Comics Retailer, and what do I find? It's gone. Into the electronic ether. Like it never existed. It's not on my hard drive, it's not on any disk in my possession. It's just gone.

Sigh.

So with my back against the deadline wall, I get to start from scratch. I hope it doesn't lose too much in the rush.

How many titles can the market maintain? How many publishers? How many universes?

I'm rapidly coming to the opinion that our customers have too many choices. Obviously we're in the middle of product glut, but the people most affected are us, the retailers.

In Marvel's October 1993 Sales to Astonish catalog, it is claimed that Direct Market retailers have a 90-92% sell-through. I find this a little hard to believe, unless it includes sales on the discount racks.

I look at my sales patterns, and the only thing I can safely predict is that I can't predict anything. Books sell without rhyme or reason, with no kind of pattern I can discern. As an example, I sell somewhere between 1 and 4 copies of Silver Sable each month. As far as I can tell, there is no difference in content or packaging as to whether I sell one or four copies. It's not the creative team. It's not guest stars. It's not crossovers or specific chapters in an arc or even the color of the cover. It appears to be complete and absolute whim.

Silver Sable may seem like an extreme example, but the truth is, on one scale or another, almost every comic we carry has a similar situation. X-Men, for example, currently sells somewhere between 60 and 85 copies (It used to sell well in the 200 range!). If I order 85, and only sell 60, that's only a 71% sell through! Now, X-Men has back-issue potential, so it's not all that bad, but the sad truth is that the vast majority of titles on the racks have a one-week shelf-life. If it doesn't sell in the first week, it ain't never gonna sell!

The solution to fluctuating sales is to be conservative, of course. But the problem with conservatism is that it doesn't leave much room for increasing sales over time. My observation is that as more and more and more and more product comes out, sales growth only comes from one of two places 1) Quality of the material, and 2) Perceived "heat" as an investment item. #2 is always short-term, unless #1 also exists. But #1, in and of itself, is no longer enough, in the face of ordering conservatism.

I remember, not so long ago, when it was possible to overbuy by a copy or two on most every book. Back in the days where 50 titles was considered a huge week (nowadays, that's tiny). When you're selling 30 or 40 copies, dependably, an extra few copies still kept you comfortably within an 85% or better sell-through. Sure, every once in awhile you'd choke, but that was the exception. Conversely, these days, as once dependable titles steadily lose ground (Captain America used to sell a steady 25 copies: now it's whittled down to a measly 5...), you simply can't afford to stock any extras. Where do the next generation of a title's readers come from, then? If for the last six months I've sold a steady 4 copies of Darkhold, without exception, you can bet the house that unless something truly and awe-inspiring amazing happens, I'm only going to order 4 copies. Yet another Ghost Rider crossover doesn't count as exciting (quite the opposite – it's far more likely today, right now, to drop those sales from 4 to 3). But if I'm only ordering 4 copies, then it's nearly impossible that the number will ever increase. Should I order 5 copies then? Of course not – if I still only sell 4 (that's what the cycle sheets say we will) then 20% (!) of my orders go unsold. And if they don't sell in the first week, it'll never sell.

It takes at least six months to accurately determine the real sales of a title (sometimes as much as a year!). That can be a lot of books to eat, if you guess high. And it can be a lot of potential sales (long-term) lost if you guess low. Both of these are untenable positions for all strata of the industry – creator, reader, retailer, publisher, we all lose when we play conservative. But to do otherwise is the road to financial ruin. So what's the solution?

The only thing I can see is twin programs of focused overshipping and limited returnability.

Focused overshipping is the province of a publisher. They need to assess when retailer advance orders don't show as much confidence in the material as the publisher has. For example, Malibu purportedly spent a million dollars to promote the Ultraverse line. While I understand that orders on the first issues were healthy, advances on the second issues dropped as much as 50%. Given that almost all stores reported selling out of the first issues, and that, even after spending a significant amount of money, you've still got a limited window of opportunity, before the consumer forgets the advertising message, I think that some form of overshipping would have been appropriate. These extra books would be shipped fully returnable, on the assumption that very few would be returned in the end.

Limited returnability is a little trickier. What I would suggest is a option between a fixed percentage and a number of copies. For example, 20% or 3 copies, whichever is higher. In other words, if you order less than 15 copies of a title, you could return up to 3 copies, while at over 15, you could return 20%, rounded up. If I ordered 20 copies of Namor, I could return up to 4 copies.

The real trick is to discourage retailer "padding" – that is, if I'm selling a steady 4 copies of Darkhold, I shouldn't then jump my order up to 7, simply because I can. I should raise it to 5, though, to attempt and find a new consumer, and another long-term sale for the title. I think the best way to discourage "padding" would be to make the returns credit not take effect until 6 weeks after the on-sale date. To the best of my knowledge, no store has better than 30 day terms, that two week after-the-fact window would make it unlikely that all but the best-capitalized stores could afford to "float" large over-buying. And the well-capitalized stores are that way because they're too smart to play that kind of game.

While it makes the publisher's position a little riskier, in the long-run it will prove better for them – they'll get information that much more closely approximates real-world sell-through. Here's an example: Last year, the DC Annuals crossover sold ever-so slightly better than the "parent" book each annual was from. The advance orders for this year's crossover seem to support that this was the same for many of you (either that, or we have short memories). This year, however, my experience is that almost all of the annuals did significantly worse than the "parent". (though my orders were slightly higher – that's a lot of books to eat) My understanding is that DC is currently planning next year's "big event" – with the "instant" sell-through feedback of limited returns, maybe they'll re-think the viability.

I know that retailers would think this a good idea, and I suspect that most publishers would ultimately support the principle (there are ways to move returned books, especially to expand the audience ultimately – "3-paks" in airports and the like would be but one), but the hard ones to convince are the distributors. They're happy with the status quo, and have no reason to change it. If you thin this is a worthy idea, I implore you to write your distributor, as well as many publishers as you can, asking for limited returns to become a reality. This is the type of thing that must begin as a grass-roots effort for it to have any effect. As always, it's up to you.