Friday, April 15, 2005
On the shelving of CMX and Marvel Age books
I found this thread interesting, in that it sounds like a lot of bookstores are shelving CMX and Marvel Age books together by publisher instead of spread throughout the manga section.
Alex Scott proposes:
Alex Scott proposes:
I think that's probably accurate. I haven't had a chance to actually visit the bookstores for a while now (no $$$), but I'm curious to see if it is happening around here. To Marvel and DC: you may want to just let the individual books speak for themselves. As another poster mentions, this just makes it easy to avoid the books if they don't already have a good impression (like how many fans feal about CMX right now).
I've noticed the same problem with the recent line of Marvel Age books they've put out: they'll all be piled together instead of spread out through the manga section, as I'm sure Marvel intended. The books all have identical cover designs, like the CMX books, and have "MARVEL" in big bold letters on the spine.
I suspect their problem is that they both depend on publisher loyalty in the Direct Market. You have Marvel Zombies, and you have people utterly devoted to DC Comics, and that's the way it's been for at least the past 30 years. They might be assuming that the manga audience will approach them the same way, when I just don't see that kind of loyalty toward particular publishers in the manga market (loyalty AGAINST publishers, on the other hand...).
