Reviewing Previews
March, 1994

...and THIS is what actually ran as Tilting #23.

Previews (the distributor catalog) still sucks, by the way!

This one is going to be much shorter than usual. I'm writing this post-Christmas, and we managed to turn what was going to be our worst December into our best by clearing our dead back stock at up to 90% off. The way I see it, it's far better to make a couple of cents on a book (or even take a small loss), than to have the money tied up in unsalable merchandise, and to have to store and pay tax on that sludge.

I've been utterly swamped, and having to rewrite my column didn't help much – the first draft was about Continuity, but, of course, that actually ended up in the letter's column, rather than in this space. I don't care much, but it means double work for me the one month I had half the time. But at least the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund will get a double payment this month, right?

I'd like to open this month's bitch-fest with some comments about distributor catalogs. I don't know about you, but I'm getting damn tired of how many pages in each month's catalog that don't contain a solicitation. Card inserts, "exclusive" comics, price guide features, etc. These things all have some value in the consumer edition of the catalog, but in the retailer's version they do nothing except make my job that much more difficult and time-consuming.

I'll let you in on a little trick, if you'd like. You would? Oh good. The first thing I do each month when I receive the catalog is I start tearing out pages. Off comes the cover, and the first 2 dozens pages of "editorial" material; out go the inserts, and the comics, and the price guides; the back cover also goes bye-bye, along with the seemingly endless pages of Marvel hype that are repeated within the body of the solicitations (and their own solicitation magazine), right at the back; finally, I remove any page that has an ad on both sides of the page, and the sections of the catalog for which I have no use (like the sports card solicitations). This reduces the bulk of the catalog by at least half (this month I was left with 176 pages from 350+), and makes it far easier to look up individual title descriptions, and to fill in the order form.

What I'd like to see is two distinctly different versions of the catalog produced: the consumer version, with all the inserts and editorial features intact; and a retailer version with nothing except solicitations. If a retailer wants all the supplementary material, they can purchase the consumer version, and if not, then they're not subjected to it.

This goes just as strongly for advertisements: I simply don't need to see the vast bulk of them. I'm not a fool. One issue of, say, Brigade, is virtually indistinguishable from another. When I place my order for that issue of Brigade the full-color ad doesn't sway me one tiny inch on what to order: I go purely by my cycle sheets and the caption in the solicitation. When you're an established company offering a regular book, a distributor-catalog ad is a waste of your time and resources, just as it's a waste of mine. Now I well understand that they're there primarily for the benefit for the consumer, but they get in the damn way when I'm racing to fill out my order form. When I get to that 16 page full-color Image section, I yank it right out, without even looking. There's nothing there that's going to help me order the book correctly, that isn't just as well told in an inch of text.

Of course, if you're truly new, or you've got a retailer-based promotion that you want to explain graphically, or you're doing something important to the status quo of your title advertising may be important, but, otherwise we know our jobs, and, in my oh so humble opinion, you're wasting your money by simply telling us the same thing month after month. That's what the solicitation information is for.

We've gotten "used to" flashy catalogs, but all the flash does is distract our attention from what really matters: the solicitations.

It already takes far to long to do an order form as it is: even a paltry 15 seconds each on the 2000+ items available to us each month means we're spending over 8 hours on one full pass through! We need that information undiluted by hype and ads. Just the facts, ma'am, to get the closest to the number we're actually going to sell. And the closer we get to that, the better this whole industry will be.

That's it for this month - I'll be back in 30 with a full-sized column. Take it slow.