Mary Hoffman is the best-selling author of picture book Amazing Grace, which is currently celebrating its 25th Anniversary, as well as its six picture-book and chapter-book sequels and other acclaimed picture books such as The Colour of Home, An Angel … Continue reading ...
By: Heidi MacDonald,
on 11/4/2010
[In recent weeks there's been much discussion of comics pricing, and both Marvel and DC have made changes to their pricing levels in order to face the realities of the current economic climate. While DC has announced an across the board roll-back of prices from $3.99 to $2.99, Marvel's policy announcements have been somewhat less clear. At the ICV2 conference last month marquee-President Sales & Circulation David Gabriel announced a rollback on selected titles, but no details. In addition at a retailer meeting, Marvel announced that they would be putting out fewer titles. An interview earlier this week with VP-executive editor Tom Brevoort made it clear that the rollback was limited but left details to Gabriel.
In order to clear up what Marvel's policies are in regards to pricing, Gabriel and Chief Operating Officer Jim "Ski" Sokolowski sat down for an interview, discussing some of the business realities of publishing, the growth of digital and how to reach new readers as older ones cycle out.]
THE BEAT: Just to give this some background, at the ICv2 digital conference and Diamond retailer breakfast you made some statements about pricing changes at Marvel and there has been controversy about just what that announcement entailed. So can you explain the details of the price rollback?
DAVID GABRIEL: The pricing structure is that for limited series in the Marvel Universe that we roll out, we will price as many of those as we can for $2.99 for a 32 page book.
THE BEAT: What would be the factors that would affect whether they can be priced at the lower price?
GABRIEL: If someone has 30 pages they want to put into those stories or [special issues], especially a one-shot, those will be at $3.99 as they have been. If there is back up material, the book will be at the higher price. If a series is already is in the works, again, we never made any announcement that we were lowering prices on series that were out already. If the first issue has been solicited at $3.99, the second issue will be at $3.99. There’s not a strict policy thing that we’re lowering everything to $2.99 but there will be pricing structures that will help everyone stay profitable.
THE BEAT: So with a marquee title like a Spider-man or Avengers, it would be at the higher price point so everyone can make as much money as possible, if the sales warrant it.
GABRIEL: Yes, and where we did listen to retailers and the industry months back, most people will agree that that is an okay pricing strategy. I’ve never heard anybody argue about that. Where I have heard them argue is that if we have too many titles coming out at that price, some of the bottom titles that aren’t marquee titles are going to get dropped. Some of the other titles that we want people to sample, that aren’t necessarily the marquee titles, are still going to get stomped on a bit. The titles that people aren’t testing or trying them out. They are the first ones people won’t pick up, if they are a non-marquee title, at $3.99 and we definitely recognize that we need to fix something on those books. Bringing back $2.99 for limited series, that’s where we started that program.
This is for limited series in the Marvel Universe. We’ve got limited series that are third party licensed books, they will stay at $3.99 and the Ultimate line is still our marquee line—it’s staying where it is. There may be a few limited series that will still ge
By: Lou Simeone,
on 6/18/2010
Contributed by David Landis
My name is David Landis, president and manager of Landis Productions in Richmond, Virginia. I started Landis Productions 15 years ago to provide expert creative solutions to clients in a graphic design "studio" format for local, national and international clients. I do a little bit of everything ranging from magazine layout, corporate branding and packaging solutions to web page, multimedia and product design.
By: Steve Novak,
on 6/14/2010
Here's a quick little video I put together of a sixth grader reviewing "Forts: Fathers and Sons."
He was more than a little nervous about the whole thing - which is obvious.
A big thanks to david for even agreeing to do it!
Steve
By: Rebecca,
on 10/6/2009
Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and
author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at General Stanley McChrystal. See his previous OUPblogs here.
Sarah Palin is not the only person going rogue these days. In a speech to the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London last Thursday, General Stanley McChrystal advocated for an increase in American troop levels in Afghanistan by 40,000, while rumors that the General would resign his command if his request was not honored remain unquashed. A week before, McChrystal appeared on CBS’s “60 minutes” to spread the word that help is needed in Afghanistan. And before that, he, or one of the supporters of his proposal, leaked a confidential report of his petition to the president to Bob Woodward of The Washington Post, which published a redacted version of it. These are the political maneuverings of a General who understands that wars abroad must also be waged at home.
But, the General fails to understand that the political war at home is not his to fight, and his actions in recent weeks have been out of line. No new command has been issued yet about Afghanistan, but General McChrystal has taken it upon himself to let the British and American public know how he would prefer to be commanded. As it is a slippery and imperceptible slope from preemptive defiance to actual insubordination, as President Harry Truman quickly came to realize about General Douglas MacArthur, President Obama needs to assert and restore the chain of command swiftly and categorically.
As Commander of Special Operations in Afghanistan and Iraq from 2003 to 2008, McCrystal was given free reign to bypass the chain of command. This leeway allowed McCrystal’s team to capture, most illustriously, Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war. But it may have gotten into his head that the discretion Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney granted to him has carried over to his command in Afghanistan. No doubt, McCrystal has been emboldened by supporters of a troop increase in Afghanistan, who have recently chastized President Obama for not having had more meetings with McChrystal. Others, like Senator John Kyl (R-AZ) have on CNN accused the “people in the White House … (as) armchair generals.”
Those who assault the principle of civilian control of the military typically and disingenuously do so obliquely under the cover of generals and the flag, for they dare not confront the fact that the constitution unapologetically anoints an armchair general to lead the military. It is worth noting, further, that in the same sentence in which the President is designated “Commander-in-Chief,” the Constitution states, “he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments.” The President may require the opinion of any cabinet secretary should he so choose to do so, but he isn’t even constitutionally obligated to seek the opinion of the Secretary of Defense, to whom General McChrystal’s superior, General David Petraeus, reports via the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General McChrystal has spoken out of turn even though his chain of command goes up quite a few more rings before it culminates in the person seated on an armchair in the Oval Office, and yet I doubt he would take kindly to a one-star general speechifying against his proposal for troop increases in Afghanistan.
Dwight Eisenhower, when he occupied the armchair in the Oval Office, wisely warned of the “Military Industrial Complex” because he understood that it was as much an organized interest as was the Liberal Welfare State, Wall Street, or what would become the Healthcare Industrial Complex. No “commander on the ground” will come to the President of the United States and not ask for more manpower and resources, and Eisenhower understood that the job of the armchair general was to keep that in mind.
Let us not rally around military generals and fail to rally around the Constitution. Inspiring as the Star Spangled Banner may appear flying over Fort McHenry, we will do better to stand firm on the principles etched on an older piece of parchment. As Truman wrote in his statement firing General Douglas MacArthur,
“Full and vigorous debate on matters of national policy is a vital element in the constitutional system of our free democracy. It is fundamental, however, that military commanders must be governed by the policies and directives issued to them in the manner provided by our laws and Constitution.”
By: Rebecca,
on 2/25/2009
David G. Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at
Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. In his new book In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, he uses Thomas Jefferson’s views on natural history, law and governance in the New World to illuminate cyberspace’s technological, legal, and social complexities. In the post below he looks at the implications of a court case in Italy. Read his previous post here.
In a kind of reprise of the well-known Yahoo! case (involving a French lawsuit against Yahoo! for displaying Nazi memorabilia on its auction website in violation of French law) from a several years ago, four Google executives are facing criminal charges in an Italian court arising out of a third-party posting of a video at a Google site:
The Italian case relates to a three-minute movie uploaded to Google Video’s Italian site in 2006. In the video, four teenagers from the Northern city of Turin are seen teasing a boy with Down syndrome. After Google received two complaints about the content, the company says it removed the clip within 24 hours. But Italian officials, who didn’t return calls for this article, argue the video should never have been allowed to be uploaded in the first place.
Google concedes the content caused offense. In a statement the company says: “As we have repeatedly made clear, our hearts go out to the victim and his family. We are pleased that as a result of our cooperation the bullies in the video have been identified and punished.”
There’s a great deal one can say about this — indeed, one might even say you could write a whole book about it! At one level, it illustrates an interesting and important difference in substantive law: US law, through sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act (oddly enough), provides intermediaries (like Google here) a very broad immunity from liability for third-party-provided content, while Italian law (I take it, not knowing much about Italian law) does not. It’s an important difference, because it reflects (presumably) a real difference of opinion, and of values, and of policy.
The hard question is: how can we realize the benefits of a truly global communications medium like the Net — the first truly global medium we’ve ever come up with, and whose promise is unimaginably immense — while different sovereigns impose their different visions of the good onto network traffic? We do not have a good answer for that, at the moment. The conventional wisdom here leads to results that are absurd. To summarize: Italy can legitimately assert jurisdiction over Google if Google’s conduct is having “significant effects” within Italy, and Google has tangible assets (machines, offices, typewriters, servers) that are located in Italy (or executives who might set foot someday on Italian soil). Viewed from Google’s perspective, and the question “With what law does Google have an obligation to comply?”, the conventional wisdom says that Google has the obligation to comply with the law of all sovereigns within whose territory it has tangible assets, or where its executives might travel. I call this “Jurisdictional Whack-a-Mole.”
“If you (or your assets) pop up in Singapore, . . . Wham!! Singaporean law can be – can legitimately be – applied to you. Your daughter’s junior high school newsletter, once posted on the Web, is subject to Malaysian, and Mexican, and Latvian law, simultaneously, because it may be having “significant effects” in one (or all) of those countries, and . . . the school’s obligation to comply with those laws is defined by the likelihood that it has assets in any one of them, or that any of its officers might travel to any of them.
That’s a strange kind of law – law that only gets revealed to the interacting parties ex post, and which can therefore no longer guide the behavior of those subject to it in any meaningful way.
This is a really hard problem, and it is one that we need to solve. If I had a simple solution that I could summarize in a brief blog posting, I would do so — and I would not have felt the need to write a whole book about it. I’m hoping the book’s website becomes a focus for some discussion about all this, because I’m pretty certain that we could use more discussion about it.
By: Megan,
on 2/17/2009
David Bach is the best-selling author of the eight books in the Finish Rich series as
well as Fight for Your Money and The Automatic Millionaire. In his latest book, The Finish Rich Dictionary, Bach defines 1001 essential financial terms and provides 10 essays packed with financial advice ranging from skipping your morning latte to avoiding common money mistakes. Below, we’ve excerpted Bach’s steps for creating a financial plan that will really work.
By: Ashley,
on 11/5/2008
By Ashley Bray, Intern Extraordinaire
Few people can get excited over thesauruses like writers can, and as a writer and student 
myself, I eagerly sat down to take a look at the new Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. I was immediately drawn to the Word Notes, which are comments from contributing authors about word entries. I love these notes because they bring you inside the heads of authors to show you just what they are thinking about certain words— a privilege a budding writer almost never gets! I looked up a bunch of notes by David Foster Wallace in light of his recent death, and I wanted to share my favorites.
One of the more interesting notes I came across was for pulchritude, which is a synonym for beauty. Wallace points out that this word is anything but beautiful:
“A paradoxical noun because it means beauty but is itself one of the ugliest words in the language. Same goes for the adjectival form pulchritudinous. They’re part of a tiny elite cadre of words that possess the very opposite of the qualities they denote. Diminutive, big, foreign, fancy (adjective), colloquialism, and monosyllabic are some others; there are at least a dozen more. Inviting your school-age kids to list as many paradoxical words as they can is a neat way to deepen their relationship to English and help them see that words are both symbols for things and very real things themselves.”
Well, Wallace is right about the ugliness of pulchritude. Words like putrid and sepulcher come to mind before beauty ever does. Wallace also points out a very interesting activity that I think appeals to word-lovers just as much as “school-age kids.” I decided to take his suggestion in a different direction and started to make a list of words that do correlate with their meaning. Here’s what I came up with:
What words can you think of that are either paradoxical or parallel to their meanings?
Wallace also wrote an awesome entry for hairy. Here’s another word game for you— how many different ways can you think of to say the word hairy?
You’d be surprised at the answer. Wallace writes about 22 different ways (and two additional classifications) to say the word hairy. I won’t list them all here, but I’ll give you a taste of some of the most “hair-raising” (excuse the pun):
Come on fellow writers, any takers?
By: Cassie,
on 10/31/2008
A. David Moody is Professor Emeritus of the University of York and the author of Ezra Pound, Poet: Volume 1: The Young Genius 1885-1920. In the following piece, Moody looks at the Pound’s opinions on democracy and the economy, showing us that Pound’s opinions in the 1930s line up fairly well with the pundits of today. This piece is also timely since October 30th is Pound’s birthday and he died on November 1, 1972.
I am finding it hard to pin down a feeling I have these days as I read the pundits on the current financial crisis and hear echoes all the time of what Ezra Pound was writing in the 1930s. But Pound was called a crank for his beliefs.
“The provision of finance is a utility, just like the distribution of water and energy. Yet this public good is in the hands of private sector managers who have done a disastrous job.”
(Guardian (London), editorial comment, 9 Oct. ‘08)
“The City has become a ghetto where greed (never mentioned) is all but an absolute good.”
(Andrew Phillips (Lord Phillips of Sudberry), City solicitor, Guardian 16 Oct. ‘08)
“Financiers have organized themselves so that actual or potential losses are picked up by somebody else—if not their clients then the state – while profits are kept to themselves.”
(Will Hutton, Observer (London), 27 Jan. ‘08)
“There is a chance to make finance once again the servant of the public, as it should be.”
(Larry Elliot, Economics Editor, Guardian (London), 15 Oct. ‘08)
“The Bank of England can directly create sterling assets (that is, print money) if it needs to”—i.e. it does not have to “borrow” from the banks it has just had to bail out.
(Gavyn Davies, partner in Goldman Sachs, Guardian (London), 9 Oct. ‘08)
“[The government] pays interest to private organizations for the use of its own credit . . . So that actually the government is getting itself into debt to the banks for the privilege of helping them to regain their stranglehold on the economic life of the country.”
(Senator Bronson Cutting, New York Times, 20 May 1934 – from a speech Pound commended.)
Pound might have written all of those things, if in his own terms. (”Leveraging” was not a current term in the 1930s, so he used plain terms: banks were lending money they did not have, to their own profit and the public’s loss.) As early as 1919 he was trying to understand how it was that, in a democracy, power to secure to the people “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” was not with the people, but with those few who owned and controlled the people’s credit and who were capable of exercising it against the common interest. And he was already arguing that it is the function and responsibility of the state, that is, of the government appointed by the people, to create and to regulate the nation’s credit, and to prevent it being usurped by private interests.
Pound’s prophetic critique of anti-democratic capitalism became a major theme after the 1929 Crash and the Great Depression of the 1930s—and it led to his being falsely accused of being himself anti-democratic. But in this time of financial crisis, and with it being near to the anniversaries of his birth and death (born 30 October 1885; died 1 November 1972), it is fitting to celebrate the now undeniable fact that, while he did go wrong in some ways, Pound was fundamentally right about the damage done to the whole society by unrestrained greed in the financial system, and about it being the responsibility of governments to issue and to control credit. It would be a good moment to read and to take the point of his cantos 31-51, particularly those about the American bank wars of 1829-35 and 1863.
employing means at the bank’s disposal
in deranging the country’s credits, obtaining by panic
control over public mind” said Van Buren
(Ezra Pound, Canto 37)
Further quotations:
“Banking should be treated as a utility.”
(Martin Wolf, Financial Times)
“The reckless greed of the few harms the future of the many.”
(Will Hutton, Observer (London), 27 Jan. ‘08)
“The sin of usury, diluted in the 1500s, should be brought back—usury, reaping that which one did not sow.”
(Ann Pettifor, political economist, Guardian (London), 11 Oct. ‘08)
“It is not money that is the root of the evil. The root is greed.”
(Ezra Pound, Gold and Work, 1944)
“Hopefully our democracies are strong enough to overcome the power of money and special interests.”
(Joseph Stiglitz, formerly Chief Economist of the World Bank, Guardian (London), 16 Oct. ‘08)
“The state can lend money.”
(Ezra Pound, Canto 78)
“It is an infamy that the STATE in, and by reason of, the very act of creating material wealth should run into debt to individuals.”
(Ezra Pound, New English Weekly, 5 July 1934)
By: Jessamyn West,
on 2/25/2008
The Reimer Digital Library, an online archive to publicly accessible US Army publications has been password protected since February 6th as a security measure. In response to a Federation of American Scientists FOIA request and a pointed coverage by the Washington Post
, the Army wil be restoring access to the library “within two weeks“
By: Rebecca,
on 7/26/2007
On July 26, 1908 Attorney General Charles Bonaparte hired the first 34 FBI employees, 99 years later the Bureau employs over 30,000 people. To be honest, most of what I know about the FBI I learned from movies, so I went to Oxford Reference Online and found the entry excerpted below from A Dictionary of Contemporary World History. Love them, or hate them, the FBI’s goal is to protect the citizens of the United States and OUP wishes them a very happy birthday!
Surely he means “marquee” and not “marquis,” right? The lack of sales strength in those non-marquee titles is pretty worrying because most of my favorite Marvel titles either hover toward the bottom of the sales chart or have already been cancelled, stuff like Nova, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Incredible Hercules. I’m just glad Cap and X-Factor are still selling well!
Interesting interview, and it’ll definitely be interesting to see how the pricing shakes out. I will say I was indeed one of those individuals who like Incredible Hulk, but not enough to keep paying $3.99 for it. Having been out of it for months now, I’ve kind of permanently lost interest in getting back into it.
“We had to look at the books that are doing the best and those aren’t necessarily the books that are reviewed the best”
I don’t understand what this means. Does this mean that Marvel is more interested in selling any old book, as long as it sells lots, than in putting out quality?
Hats off to these guys for the most effort ever in a backpeddle.
Marvel, the $3.99 price became “sort of a barrier” to me staying with CAPTAIN AMERICA, THOR, the AVENGERS titles, and possibly INVINCIBLE IRON MAN and FANTASTIC FOUR in the near future. Any chance you could drop those prices as well?
“Yes, and where we did listen to retailers and the industry months back, most people will agree that that is an okay pricing strategy. I’ve never heard anybody argue about that.”
Really? No retailers or industry people argued that $3.99 would be a bad strategy? NO ONE??
Wow. That’s some blinders right there.
I’m just glad that I’m a DC fan.
It does seem unusual for a publisher to price issues of series at $3.99 because “that’s what readers will pay,” based on inelastic demand. That’s more of a monopolist mentality than it is pricing material to the market norm, as with books and magazines. There’s also, still, the question of value for money. A comic that can be read in ten minutes or less, whether it’s priced at $2.99 or $3.99, is still a worse deal in some ways than other forms of entertainment, such as videos and video games. The high price of comics is a barrier in itself to attracting new readers.
SRS
Marvel definitely seems to have selective hearing. I love that bit about retailers begging Marvel to reduce the price on HULK, but only HULK.
Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest
“I’m just glad Cap and X-Factor are still selling well!”
At this point X-Factor is the only regular series at Marvel I’m still reading in monthly format. I get nervous that the price will go up and make me reconsider.
And what about collection prices? Recent FANTASTIC FOUR and IRON MAN hardcovers have had just four issues worth of content for $19.99 (not including tax, more than 40% more expensive than just picking up the single issues). Worse, the recent INCREDIBLE HULK: World War Hulks hardcover was $19.99 for just three issues of new content! In the past, picking up a hardcover or trade would be cheaper than the individual issues…
There is NO VALUE in picking up these collections, which are priced seemingly without consideration of quality or quantity. At least with the FF collections, Hickman puts in the extra effort to design something worth owning – the rest are dumped onto the stands, the already-paid-for content slapped into cookie-cutter packaging.
And then there is the maddening inconsistency of deluxe collection pricing… The first Brubaker CAP Omnibus is 25+ issues for #75, a reasonable value. The Brubaker/Fraction/Aja IRON FIST Omnibus is just 14 issues for $75. The recent JMS THOR Omnibus is $65 for about 20 issues. The Fraction/Lorocca Iron Man deluxe hardcover is less than $40 for 19 issues (a great value for a superb story)!
And none of this scratches the surface on Marvel’s incomprehensible strategy for what they choose to keep in print and available to the direct market.
This is all nuts! Folks need to look away from the cover price on their floppies for a second and look at the price tag on their trades and start demanding some more consistency, logic, and VALUE in THAT department. While there may not always be individual issues of comics, the trade is more likely to endure and cause hair-pulling over pricing in the future.
Jeffrey O. Gustafson
I *can’t believe* anybody is saying “Keep the Nomad series in the back of Captain America to keep that at $3.99″.
Show me those retailers so I can avoid their stores!
I actually don’t mind paying the extra buck for Nomad…
“I *can’t believe* anybody is saying “Keep the Nomad series in the back of Captain America to keep that at $3.99″.
Show me those retailers so I can avoid their stores!”
What, you don’t like paying an extra dollar for a back-up NO ONE demanded?!? LOL
It seems the approaches by DC and Marvel are like this,
DC: Lower cost of titles line wide and expect more sales by fans snatching up the cheaper books.
Marvel: Cut the number of titles – that will save money on production costs – and hope the fans will transfer their money into the Marvel books not being cut.
“I don’t understand what this means. Does this mean that Marvel is more interested in selling any old book, as long as it sells lots, than in putting out quality?”
Of course. They are a business with shareholders to answer to, not a non-profit organization. Why would this shock anyone? Regardless of anyone’s subjective view of a particular book’s “quality”, an Avengers title that sells 90,000 monthly will stay around, while an Atlas book that sells 20,000 will not.