Tuesday, May 15, 2007

So the cards are on the table...

First of all, congratulations to Sean for being the new Editor in Chief. Since we last spoke, I got the suspicion that this might be a temporary position, since Tom likes to shake things up. Probably somewhere next week, you will probably get demoted, so be prepared. I think it's part of our job to let you keep the crown, so we should all work together.

Secondly, Patrick got the job. Welcome aboard. Hope you survive the experience, to borrow an expression.

So......

" Your goal over the course of the next two weeks is to increase your sales, put out crowd-pleasing, well-produced comic books, meet your financial obligations to the company and get the books out on time."

I guess this has been obvious from the getgo. But how to approach this?

First of all, we have to divide the books. So far, we have six titles, with two possible ways to cut the pizza. As you all can see, we have three pairs of related books. Uncanny X-Men and (longtime member) Wolverine, two Spider-Man books and Fantastic Four and (ex-member) She-Hulk. I think the most logical approach (and I don't want to do your job for you, Sean, I'm only trying to suggest things) would be to give the X-books to one editor, the Spider-books to another one and the two remaining books to the remaining editor who'd get to decide if She-Hulk should have any ties to the FF. It would make sense to use the synergy of editing several connected books. Everyone of us could choose to create their own little two-book-crossover. Or not.

The second approach is to look at the sales.

UNCANNY X-MEN - Sales 100,000
WOLVERINE - Sales 100,000
AMAZING SPIDER-MAN - Sales 80,000
SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN - Sales 55,000
FANTASTIC FOUR - Sales 55,000
SHE-HULK - Sales 30,000

By combining the two Spider-books, we land at 135k issues. One of the X-books and She-Hulk gets a combined print run of 130k. The problem here is that FF and the other X-book would start at an unfair 155k. I wouldn't have a problem with the 130 or the 155 group, but I think it should be noted that there is no way to let everyone start at the same numbers.
Sure, we could split the Spider-Man books (there's still Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man outside of our jurisdiction), but that would only lead to headaches. This game is complicated enough as it is, we don't have to create additional problems.

If nobody else complains, I'd love to edit the Fantastic Four book, along with either She-Hulk, Uncanny X-Men or Wolverine.

I wonder what the release date for our first issues is. Is it still in time for the June release date for Rise of the Silver Surfer? It's definitely too late to ride on the coattails of Spider-Man 3, and the other books won't have their (in case of the X-men next) movies out in 2007.

2 comments:

Philip Schaeffer said...

I don't want to Sean's job for him either, and I have no problem if he splits the books neither by sales NOR characters, but I would like to say that I wouldn't find it in anyway unfair to have our sales uneven.

Since it's not a competition between us, there's no reason for anyone to feel bad about starting off with fewer sales.

Besides, if you think about the numbers we've got, in order to reach our goals there are different strategies:

UNCANNY X-MEN - Sales 100,000
WOLVERINE - Sales 100,000

The goal with these books is to not let the sales go down. It would be great to raise their sales by a few grand, but it's unlikely we can raise them by any significant percentage.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN - Sales 80,000

This book has the potential to increase its sales by 25%. That should be the bench mark here.

SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN - Sales 55,000
FANTASTIC FOUR - Sales 55,000
SHE-HULK - Sales 30,000

These titles could also maybe increase by 25%, with the possible exception of Fantastic Four, which could grow by closer to 40% (if we assume that Simulated FF2 is indeed hitting the screens and it's not too late to capitalize on it). It's unrealistic to think that they'd increase to much larger numbers... UNLESS WE DO CRAZY STUNTS AND HUGE CROSSOVER$$$$$$$$!

In this issue, She-Hulk jumps rope naked again! Yaaaaaay!

Michael Heide said...

*drools*