First off, Procrastinators of the World, Unite.
Fantastic Comics is open for normal hours 12pm-5pm this Saturday, X-mas eve.
Congratulations to everyone who took advantage of our $1 minimum auction. In some sense anyone who bids is a winner, but in a larger, more real sense, this customer is the winner — just look at this awesome haul!
For those of you who missed out, you are welcome to bid early on Wave 2, which probably won’t be officially announced till next year. Wave 1 winners, you have until 12/31 to pick up your books!
Also, before getting into the essay portion of the newsletter, let’s look at…
Uel’s Ueltide Picks
Ronin
The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror
Enigma
As always, Uel has an uncensored weekly rantings and ravings liveshow on Tuesday at 8PM, archived here.
Yakkity-Yak
Making the auction site itself was a stupid amount of work for what is essentially a form submitter — a prime example of yak shaving.
Any apparently useless activity which, by allowing you to overcome intermediate difficulties, allows you to solve a larger problem.I was doing a bit of yak shaving this morning, and it looks like it might have paid off.
A less useful activity done consciously or subconsciously to procrastinate about a larger but more useful task. quotations ▼I looked at a reference manual for my car just to answer one question, but I spent the whole afternoon with my nose buried in it, just yak shaving, and got no work done on the car itself.
You can see that Yak Shaving can take on both a positive and negative connotation, and often it’s hard to see which aspect of Yak Shaving will emerge as dominant until the end result, which can be years down the line.
But because of the inherent time scale of a Yak Shaving resolution, if you want to make viable earnings in the short term, you’ll want to minimize Yak Shaving as much as possible. In the context of a comic book store, or for most of you, an occasional comic book seller, this means using the most popular platforms out there, even if they charge a fee, instead of any kind of DIY approach.
Yak shaving an online store
I spoke with our Basement Buddy who has a popular Depop store (currently featuring a sale and lineup of sweet Spider-Man back issues) about setting up an independent main site just in case the platform turns sour. Even with a real existential risk in play, it’s out of the question from a time factor alone. Making your own store, especially from scratch, is a yak most people simply do not have time to shave.
The problem is, in the long term, these platforms tend to not be very reliable, or will often be ill-suited to some of your more niche needs. If your livelihood, or even hobby depends on Twitter, Ebay, Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc… all it takes is an algorithmic tweak, or more recently, a capricious billionaire buying it on a whim, to mess with your day.
If you’ve listened to any podcast, you’ll know that SquareSpace and Shopify is the goto for anyone looking to hang their own shingle on the web, but even these are platforms. We had to dump Shopify for our online store for the fact that they charge a monthly fee — fairly modest if you’re doing brisk business selling $100 collectibles, but fairly steep for the occasional $5 book. Moving to Square for our Half-Price Comics site had its own issues, since as a platform it really expects us to be selling entrees and appetizers rather than books.
Right now, even this newsletter operates on a kind of venture capital funded largesse of people trying to make potential future monies in a highly nebulous and possibly fictitious way. That’s right — we’re talking about Substack.
Yak shaving email
Before Substack, we were paying a monthly fee to an email newsletter service for the privilege of mostly ignoring our vast email list except to let people know about Free Comic Book Day. The simplest Yak Shave we could have done is set up a program to email people with our own servers.
But something even as straightforward as an open, federated protocol like e-mail isn’t so. This is year many dedicated Yak Shavers gave up sending their own emails.
For businesses, we really do need a new kind of email system, or be at the mercy of professionals.
Yak shaving distribution and publishing
For brick and mortar stores, you can argue that online stuff are not truly essentials (although sentiment is such that pure physical retail comics are increasingly less viable as a sole income-generating activity), but when it comes to the big publishers and distributors, these guys are a mandatory aspect of the business.
Of course complaining about them has been a long tradition, but it’s the kind of complaining you do about forces more powerful than you and out of your control. Interestingly, as distribution is looking brighter than ever due to the pandemic-induced schism that broke the monopoly of the distributor-who-will-not-be-named, the increasing consolidation on the publishing side of things is making a lot of people unhappy with the product being churned out.
As all the marquee comic characters seem to be destined to be under the umbrella of the mouse-who-will-not-be-named, it really seems like a prudent yak-shaving measure would be to cultivate an audience outside of such a monopoly.
Oddly, though, in moving to our smaller, more indie location, we’ve seen the store draw more of an audience for capes and tights rather than brooding auto-biographies. There’s no question that there’s a rich environment of local creators to feature, but for us, does shaving the yak mean the invention and promotion of farm-to-table superhero comics?
Stay tuned…