The comics controversy.

So there's been a lot of talk in the comic industry about the dangers of the future. 

It doesn't surprise me.

In 2017, our comic sales had declined two years in a row, after a decade long steady increase. What I noticed was the market seemed focused on speculation: variant covers, #1s, special editions. But Pegasus Books had decided after the crash in 1995 against encouraging any kind of speculation. We catered to readers. My saying was, "Readers stay, speculators eventually leave."

But that's where the market was going for the foreseeable future, and it put us in a bit of bind. Either we had to pivot to understanding the collectable market, are our sales would continue to decline.

It wasn't an impossible ask. I'd probably spent half my first 30 years on the job dealing with speculators. It's a very time-consuming, somewhat risky market to engage, but I really had no choice. It could be done, though it was always a gamble.

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent."  John Maynard Keynes. 

In other words, no one is bigger than the market, and no matter how right you think you are about a certain stock or trend, the market doesn't care ... (Charles Schwab.)

So I conferred with Sabrina. If we were going to go after the speculators , she would be the point person. She really didn't want to do it. I'd just spent 15 years telling her how dangerous and harmful the speculators could be.

"If we don't do this, we'll have to build the other parts of the store," I said. "Are you OK with that?"

She said she was, so we pivoted even more toward books (a process we'd started years ago, but now we were getting serious about it. 

As I've described many times before, when we closed for two months during Covid, we took the opportunity to lay down new flooring and redesigned the layout of the store to focus on books. To my great surprise, this worked even better than I expected. People started tell me that I was a bookstore, and sales confirmed it. We went for 65% comics/graphic novels to 65% books/graphic novels.

Ironically, comic sales also increased, but I think this was a Covid bump. 

Over the last year, we've been slowly "reverting to normal." Our books sales are still very good, only down 2%, which is a real accomplishment because Manga has definitely declined. 

Comics really aren't down for us in the numbers that other comic retailers are talking about, but I think this is because we'd already absorbed the hit. Sometimes you just have to take your lumps.

The secret to survival is to try to pivot with the market. You Zig when the market Zigs, and Zag when the market Zags. If you do the opposite, you'll pay the price. 

Obviously, you don't always get it right. But the more often you get it right, the healthier you are. 

The thing is, it's much less effective if you start to pivot after the market has already moved. You need to start the process before, and that's always a bit of a gamble itself. 

This is our third amazing fabulous year in sales. I'm expecting more "reverting to normal," but that's OK as long as our budget it aligned. We're so far above pre-Covid sales that we could get a lot of it back and still be a very prosperous business. 

Nice to see at the end of a long career hawking comics.