airawyn:

I don't really know much about comics marketing and sales, but I think DC fell down on marketing with the Stephanie Brown Batgirl. The first trade paperback was out of print for months – I tried to buy it as part of a wedding gift* for a friend back in October of last year and it was sold out both on Amazon and at my LCS. It wasn't rereleased until, I believe, the end of May this year. And I think the lack of a trade paperback is a serious hindrance. I was ready to buy it and give it to a friend who I think would have loved it and possibly started buying it monthly, and it simply wasn't available for a very long time. It's still not available digitally (although Red Robin is). I also remember reading an article praising the Batgirl trade early this year in a major, not-comics-centered publication (sorry for the vagueness, can't remember the details) and thinking it was great publicity and going to check Amazon to see if it was available and it wasn't. Marketing's useless if the product isn't available. I guess that DC focuses on the new issues, but a lot of people don't want to jump in without reading the back stuff.

Bryan Q. Miller's Batgirl was a fantastic book that was easy for new readers to jump into. It's also a great book for female readers. Not just because it has a non-cheesecake female lead, but because I think that Stephanie persevering despite past mistakes and despite everyone around her saying "No, you're not good enough, quit now" really resonates with a lot of women.

So you can say it didn't succeed because it didn't have an audience, but I don't see much evidence that DC tried to find one. I don't think that's due to deliberate sexism or some kind of conspiracy. I think it's more apathy and unintentional sexism added to the problems that the whole industry is dealing with. I think DC's new "day and date" digital plan is a huge step forward, but I wish Stephanie's book and Oracle's identity didn't have to be sacrificed for it to happen.

*We're quite geeky. They had dice at the plate of every guest for the wedding reception. Also, I ended up getting her Secret Six and Batwoman, so I suppose DC didn't lose too terribly on the deal. I really think she would have connected with Stephanie, though.

Ah!  Okay, about the tpbs. That is absolutely dead on, and to be honest, none of us really know what the formula is for tpb printings. It is absolutely confusing. We see books that no one really seemed to be drawn to get full-on hardcover takes, while books in higher demand wait forever for tpbs.  I've had it happen with both Birds of Prey AND Secret Six. My books tend to continue selling for a long long time, so keeping them in print has paid off well. But we still get gaps where one book in a series will not get reprinted when the tpb sells out—if you look for the out of print Secret Six tpbs, they are astronomically priced on Ebay and at stores. It's very confusing. And it's a separate department, the selection process is not really transparent.

The most famous example of this that I recall was Gotham Central, a book where if you missed an issue, you could really miss out on the entire plot. It was written by two superstar creators, it got amazing reviews, and it took like nine months or something after the stories were finished for TPBS to come out. I don't have an answer for that at all.

I can't say with any certain that tpb sales raise monthly sales of lower tier books, I think that's a hard case to make. I would strongly suspect there's no direct correlation. HOWEVER, tpb sales are figured into a book's profitability. Jonah Hex is a classic example, the book doesn't sell well in floppies in the direct market, but tpbs and the foreign market make that up. Wonder Woman KILLS in tpbs, often.

Going by the rest of your points, again, the sales numbers I showed were not from DC, they're from comics stores, and we see again and again that quality is not a guaranteed indicator of sales. The simple truth is, there's almost always a smaller market for the critically acclaimed stuff. Take the top 100 list of comics sales in any given month. The top ten stuff will almost always be crossovers and icons uniformly. And the books that are critical darlings sell a quarter of that.  Power Girl, Hawkeye and Mockingbird, Secret Six, Jonah Hex, Batgirl, on and on.  Believe me, it's as frustrating for us as it is for the readers of those books.

And it's not me saying the book didn't succeed because it didn't find an audience. It DID find an audience, it's just that it didn't get a big ENOUGH audience, same as Secret Six and lots of other books that people cared about a lot. And publishers have to look at trends, too, and if a book is losing audience every single issue…eventually someone is going to have to make the tough decision.  I don't want to defend it, because it sucks. 

In the actual publishing end of the business, there is no more concrete evidence of trying to make a book a success than which creative team is assigned. DC wanted the book to sell, to pop, and they gave the art to Dustin Nugyen. I can't explain enough what kind of message that is in our field. When you take a hot artist, who could work on any book he chose,  and you put him on a lower-selling book, you are trying to move the dial. You're trying to make something happen. It costs more and has a better chance of making a difference than house ads or POP displays and the like. It is the most sincere effort that can be made, really, to try to get a book to succeed. Believe me, there are few writers at DC who wouldn't kill to have Dustin draw their book, the guy is a genius and has his own fanbase. So that right there is a real-world indicator that someone in editorial was really trying.

Dustin could be drawing some huge project, and they had him on Batgirl, that is a VERY clear message that they believed the book had quality and wanted it to work.

As for marketing, that's a tougher question. I'm not a marketing person. I know the marketing people but I don't know how they divide the assets they have. But I'll say again, it's almost impossible to move a book up the charts in any lasting way with marketing alone. I can't even think of that many examples in the last decade. Eventually it's going to come down to demand, as passed on to the retailers. I hate all this talk of numbers, it's not what I got into comics for.

As I said before, changes were going to be made to Batgirl regardless of the relaunch. Oracle's identity, yeah, that's a loss, for sure.

And I can't disagree about unintentional sexism. I think it exists. However, Batgirl was edited by a female editor with pretty strong positions on women in comics. The bat-offices editorially are, I think, more females than males right now, three of my four bat-editors are female. They don't make ALL the decisions but the running of the books and the selection of the creative teams all goes through them. And truthfully, lots of books selling in Batgirl numbers were cancelled earlier, and WEREN'T given a star artist like Dustin to try to build the book back up.

It's always tempting to blame someone's intent, but the intent was to put out a great book and hope it succeeded. Bryan made a gem of a book. But the selling of a comic these days is a tripod; publisher, readers, and retailers, and the demand has to be there from all three to wok.

I hate to autopsy a great book like this, it's actually physically painful. But I always figure if someone asks a sincere question, it's worth an honest answer. Most of the stuff I said just now could be said about ANY recently canceled book at DC or Marvel that had a small but dedicated following, including Secret Six. It stings when a good book doesn't thrive.

I know it's not fun to hear right now, but that is the main reason I'm hoping the relaunch works, because for years, and this I DO blame on publishers, we have created this situation where readers are told that some books 'matter,' meaning they impact an icon or the universe.  New Avengers 'matters,' say, or Green Lantern Corps. So readers, not necessarily hardcore readers, feel they HAVE to get those books. And that has made it nearly impossible to make a successful launch of a non-icon book at both companies for about two decades now.  Which is why you can't look at Batgirl as a singular failure, but more as a victim of a mentality that makes success EXTREMELY difficult for b- and c- list characters.

And godDAMN that sounds like an amazing wedding.