This is my obligatory marketing-focused analysis of Minx’s demise.
12 Comments | Posted: September 25th, 2008 | Filed under: Thinking about Comics Marketing | Tags: minxHere’s five reasons Minx died fairly young.
5.
DC didn’t include a free 16-pack of Crayola pencils with each book.
4.
No Geoff Johns? No teenage mutilation? No deal!
3.
Needed more yaoi.
2.
No crossovers. A The New York Four Meet Kimmie 666 would have forced fans of one to buy both titles.
1.
I honestly think it was marketing. I saw no posters or copies of the Minx books outside of the direct market – something I was looking for at local and chain bookstores following the announcement that Cecil Castellucci was involved and googling her name because it sounded sort of familiar. The initial New York Times Article mentioned that there was a “significant” marketing budget in place with Alloy Marketing + Media handing the campaign, but I never saw where it was being spent. That could just be because I’m outside of the target audience, but the fact that the people at Porter Square Books, which has a respectable young adult and kidlit section hadn’t heard of the books – especially The Plain Janes was part of the first wave was hitting says something to me.
But, as Spurgeon says in his post-game analysis, every market failure can be blamed on marketing. One of the big factors cited in his piece was shelving: when I saw the titles in the wild, they were lumped in with the manga and Marvel collections, not the YA section. This would be a key factor in your success, especially when the people who wrote and sold many copies of Flirting in Cars and The Queen Of Cool are your authors. I’d certainly place “Putting Things Where They Should Sell” under the “marketing” umbrella, even if Shannon Smith seems to separate shelving and marketing in her comments.1 The last two times I saw Minx operating in any sort of marketing complex is working within the imprint’s already-existing niche: a table at MoCCA 2008 gave away galley copies of this year’s titles and the group sponsored the most recent Friends of Lulu awards. These are not events where young adult women unaware of the brand are likely to gather in significant numbers.
I’m not going to act like there’s not other factors, though. A majority of the books were fairly indistinguishable from the others at a glance. It’s telling that I never remember the title of one of the books I enjoyed reading and those that I do remember generally fall into the “interesting failure” area or were out and out disappointments. I know that I wasn’t the only person who was puzzled at the ending of The Plain Janes, which seemed to just halt suddenly instead of providing a proper finale, a problem that would have been alleviated with a simple number on the spine or some other notation that it was the first in a series. The one title I was really gung-ho about, The New York Four, was unlike any other Minx book, feeling more like a thematic cousin to creators Brian Wood and Ryan Kelly’s Local than the quirky elevator pitches that marked most of the other books.
No matter what the factors were in the imprint’s failure, Minx was a victim of numbers more than anything else. While Oni Press and the like can get by selling mid-market black and white graphic novels and getting the occasional Hollywood option to shore up finances, expectations for any DC imprint are likely to be much, much higher.
1I should note that In Spurgeon’s piece, Shannon Smith states that the venture seemed very well-marketed towards Borders compared to other DC and Marvel efforts, but it was dwarfed by the dog and pony show the manga publishers put on each month.
Are you sure it didn’t fail because I was feeling cranky at the time and blogged about my crankiness?
Re: well-marketed towards Borders
I did often see copies of Minx titles in the graphic novel section. As I wasn’t researching their placement in the stores, I can’t say whether they were ever in the YA reader sections. Borders did have an “independent reader” section in the main part of the store that seemed to be aimed at some segment of the youth market. Seemed to either skew younger than YA or cover a larger group, but they did have graphic novels in that area (dunno if Minx was included).
The graphic novel section isn’t where I’d shelve works by known YA writers, even if they were comics. Almost every B+N and Borders I’ve been to has the same weird selection of DC/Marvel/Dark Horse/Fantagraphics titles piled on top of each other with no organization.
My guess — and this is me guessing, based on nothing but idle speculation — is that the decision was made from On High. Because I swear I can remember reading (before the line even debuted) that DC knew Minx would be a slow burn…which of course it would be. Don’t get me wrong: Poor shelving practices and a name that made it sound like an imprint devoted to gothic lolitas or something almost certainly caused the books to underperform, even by the standards of whatever modest expectations DC had. But they had to go into it knowing that they were going after a market they hadn’t pursued since…uh…the early ’70s, at the latest, and that it would be an uphill battle. My guess is that some WB exec was looking at a spreadsheet somewhere and said, “Minx? Thafuckizzat?”
Number three is probably truer than you think.
“The graphic novel section isn’t where I’d shelve works by known YA writers, even if they were comics.”
So, just because they’ve written material in other genres, we should lump all their works into that category? If it’s a comic or graphic novel, why treat it otherwise, it defeats the purpose of the entire organizational system.
Though, if market demand for the books in question were high enough to warrant it, I’d say an additional endcap display within the YA section wouldn’t be unwarranted.
1. Mediums, not genres.
2. The current “organizational system” at most chain bookstores throws Spider-Man in with Peanuts reprints in with Dungeons and Dragons books in with Persepolis. That seems more absurd to me.
1. Thanks for the clarification.
2. I couldn’t agree more that their organization in the graphic novels section is usually awful. Perhaps instead of moving the books to another section based on author, an overhaul of the GN organization is needed.
I didn’t see or hear much about the line either beyond its launching and THE PLAIN JANES. They really failed to establish a “brand”, IMO.
“every market failure can be blamed on marketing”
Sometimes stuff isn’t valuable though, so , people won’t buy worthless things wil. . . . .
*Thinks about 70% of things people buy*
oh.
As someone who worked for Borders at the time that the Minx line launched (although I was laid off with 300 others in June), and as a big fan of comics, here’s my take –
Borders, while giving a lot of lip service to “graphic novels” hasn’t really had a clue what to do with them since the loss of Kurt Hassler some time ago. Essentially, all that’s been done is to pack the shelves with everything and see what sells. Mostly it’s manga.
The Minx line would have been an ideal opportunity to cross promote within the YA section as well as graphic novels and the manga section and Borders did absolutely NOTHING. I’m not sure if that was due to lack of marketing support at the publisher level or if Borders has been so wrapped up in their own fail that they have ceased to care. It may have been a combination of both.
I own all of the Minx books and find the quality of writing and art to be extremely high. While they certainly aren’t all a home run, none of them are miserable failures (I even have a soft spot for Water Baby as the talented Ross Campbell does one of my favorite books – Wet Moon).
The Minx comics were pretty well represented in the UK (anecdotally, at least). There are a lot of dog-eared copies of the Plain Janes and Clubbing, for example, in even local branch libraries. Also, you can buy them in WH Smith, which is like a really portly newsagent’s.