Even with less than stellar weather, March has been awesome. With 11 days to go, I am $1000 away form beating February's sales totals. And the way things have been going lately, I should accomplish that Friday. There is a big Wednesday of books coming, too.
Captain America 25 -
Well, everyone else has said their peace on it, so I will add my voice to the choir. I was warned that the book would be HUGE. I normally sell 8-10 copies. I ordered 50. I only sold 20 on Wednesday, including subscribers. The fact that there were 2 covers made this really only 10. Nothing big. I knew it was all over the news, but I didn't see any new faces. Until Thursday morning. I heard about the ridiculous prices going online. So I ordered another 30, just in case. Then the new people came out of the woodwork. Lots of phone calls. A lady came in for one and bought all 7 I had on the counter display. I did not care because I still had a big batch on the shelf and if she wanted to hand me $30, fine by me. I doubt she made it back on eBay unless she got it up right away. Then I was out and started taking names. We found out later in the day that Marvel had over-printed and we could get them the next Wednesday, but only if we had reordered by noon. The tricky part is that the books were listed as out of stock, meaning "You will never, ever, see these. Or in a worst caser scenario, in 6 months when Diamond does a physical inventory and finds a box, even if you no longer need them." So, a lot of stores probably did not even attempt to do a backorder.
All but 5 of my copies were accounted for through reservations. It is not fun turning people away. We should have 2nd prints next week.
My opinion on the whole thing. The only mistake I saw was the delay getting the 2nd wave of books out and not letting us know they were out there. We were told we could get more, but only if we had placed an order 4 hours before. Marvel could not have expected the media coverage it got, but remember that we were given no, zero, nada info about the issue when ordering. No cover picture or language ("Classified"). Yes there was rampant internet speculation. But there was on Civil War 7 too, and I still have a bunch. Spider-Man going to the black costume was going to be huge too. I have a ton of those as well.
Side note on Marvel: When the Spider-Man books failed to produce (no real payoff to promised story-line, "This will change Spider-Man forever, but nothing really happened) , I slashed all of my Marvel orders and now am getting bitten by Marvel's publishing decision. I sold out of Moon Knight and Punisher War Journal Wednesday this week (both had Captain America appearances). I went ot reorder around 4pm and found out that the were both out of stock. Wow! Talk about having no faith in your product. I need more now. Well, maybe they will do a second print that I will have in a month. This really kills sales.
I have just finished remodelling the store and will take pictured once everything is organized. I took down my "High Priced" "Wow, Look at That One" wall, magazine rack and an 8 ft table of 12 boxes of back issues to make way for 12' of more New Comics shelving. I was having to overlap my new issues. I had originally left room for 300 individual titles and now I have room for about 450. We'll see how fast that fills up.
Because I lost so much room for back issues, I built (along with my father-in-law) a shelf system that holds all 36 back issue boxes that I had out on the 3 8' tables. I have a bunch of boxes of books to add to those 36 and we are building another unit that will hold another 30. I will still have 1 8' and 1 4' for my sale stuff ($1 and 25 cent books).
I have also not yet made it to eBay. That should boost sales as well, once I get myself organized enough.
That's it for today. Tomorrow is New Comics day and it should be good. Getting more statues, too.
Yeah!
2 years ago
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