Comics Price Changes - Part One Howdy! As a few of you have already noticed, I have been gradually working my way through a complete reanalysis of our website prices, raising some, while lowering others. This is the first time that I have undertaken this Herculean task in over three years, mostly because the thought of wading through over 10,000 pages of printouts (each with up to individual 55 line items...) is almost too much for me to bear. I do not mind hard work, but this task is so far beyond being just difficult, that it is almost impossible to describe. I have worked my way through about 2,000 pages so far, and it has already taken me over three months... This effort makes me wax nostalgic for the days when we first began selling comics by mail. When I purchased Richard Alf's comics mail order company in 1978, his back issues could be listed on a single sheet of paper, folded twice to create a tidy little brochure. We only printed our first actual 16-page newsprint catalog in 1980. By the time that we finally quit the catalog business in 1997, however, so many additional comics had been printed that our last publication featured 128 pages of ridiculously microscopic typeset. In reality, it was only because of the advent of the Internet that we survived. The fact that we could convert our cumbersome (and expensive) printed catalogs into digital form saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars per year and printing and mailing costs. What we did not realize at the time, however, was that we had opened a Pandora's box of pain. To explain what I mean by that statement, I will start pointing out that the amount of money that it cost us to convert from a paper catalog company, into a website-driven company, was enormous. Not all that many programmers were familiar with HTML coding in the mid-1990's, and there were virtually no off-the-shelf e-commerce programs available. As a result, we had to not only manually adapt our vast internal database to the constraints of a website, but we also had to pay to essentially invent the e-commerce wheel. Including the cost of all 500,000+ cover scans, our website cost upwards of two million dollars to create. Suffice it to say, we could recreate our entire website today for only a very small fraction of that original cost. Sigh... So you know, it is also that astounding reduction in entry costs that has caused us the most problems. As I am sure that you are already aware, Mile High Comics is now but one online comics company, of many. We still have the very best overall comics inventory, and we certainly provide excellent service, but with so many competing sites now in existence, the back issue comics market is now divided into very small slivers. We manage to exist on our remaining share, but it would be a stretch to say that we are really prospering. Simply put, while most of our online competitors have very limited selections, each chips off a bit from the whole market, leaving that many fewer possibilities for us. I call it the "death of a thousand cuts..." We most certainly could have reacted to this new online competition by becoming leaner, and much meaner. If we had ditched our under performing assets, such as small press comics and books, years ago, we would have a much stronger core business today. It has been my belief all along, however, that there is still room on the Internet for one company to provide great selections of not only all mainstream titles, but also more innovative small press publications. In nutshell, that is why those of you who watch such things will see us constantly expanding our title count each week, adding not only all the new comics published each week, but also obscure older issues that I ferret out during my buying trips around the country. Some of these comics have relatively little actual worth in the collector's market, but my personal belief is that all comics publications should be documented, and priced, on our website. Which leads us back to the fact that we now offer more than 500,000 different comics publications listed on our website, all of which I personally have to reprice over this next year. Passion is wonderful, but it does come with a cost... I will close today's newsletter by mentioning that this is just part one of a series on new trends in the comics market. In Friday's newsletter, I will go into detail for you on specific changes in demand that I have seen manifested in the back issue comics market during the past three years. Happy Collecting! Chuck Rozanski, President - Mile High Comics, Inc. March 20, 2013 Advance Previews of next weeks comics from Archie Comics Current Newsletter