The Indirect Market starts in full this Wednesday, and I'm celebrating real Thanksgiving by sharing some things to expect in the coming weeks and months to come.

  • Regular Series: Absolute Favourite | Many different folks in my life have teased me for my use of the term absolute favourite with I use to describe everything and anything that I hold close to my heart. These features will be about the books that I love, and why I think you all might enjoy them.
  • Regular Series: You Read These With Your Eyes | Covering releases both new and old, this series will talk about how to connect great books to yourself, and to others.
  • Regular Series: Let Me Sell Your Books | Using the week's new releases to talk about how books interact with the world. These articles will not be reviews of the books themselves, but rather how they interact with the industry as a whole.
  • Regular Series: Go FOC Yourself | Shining a light on books that are hitting the final order cut-off cycle, wherein publishers set their final numbers for single issue releases. These will generally not feature reviews of the books, but focus on project awareness. This series will potentially happen on a weekly basis and includ a listing of every book hitting final orders, if there is a desire for such a resource.
  • Regular Series: Previously | Exploring the extensive volume of comic industry reference material that I have gathered over the years. With Previously, we'll be visiting times past to learn lessons both good and bad - or reflect on how some things never seem to change. A good chunk of these will come from digging through old Comic Retailer magazines, reference books, online publications, and other ephemera.
  • Regular Series: The Basics | Topics and ideas that both lay out the basic building blocks of the comic industry, and confront certain norms that need to be challenged. A trilogy of articles within this series will be The Case for Subscribers, The Case for Firing Customers, and Nothing Personal: Losing a Customer, digging through the many different ways shops might deal with customers in both positive and negative ways.
  • Articles at The Beat | The Indirect Market has also returned to the digital pages of The Beat on a monthly basis. Topics will often be discussed in part over here in pieces before hand, with fully formed articles popping up over there as they are ready. This month's edition featured an extensive dive into Marvel's launch of their Midnight line.
  • Back Up: Meanwhile | Various bits and bobs that come up, but don't necessarily warrent full articles or responses. These will be collected in reoccuring posts or pop up at the end of longer articles, depending on the schedule.
  • Long-Form: Money Isn't Real (Working Title) | A long simmering article about how perception is often more important than reality when it comes to selling stories - drawing focus from the past two years of DC Comics, the wrestling world, and... Brazil.
  • Long-Form: The Curiosity Gap | How to engage someone with a pitch, or a post.
  • Long-Form: (Unnamed) | Taking a look at how one early 1900s poet formed his own "shared universe", playing with fiction and reality.

The goal is to post roughly 1-3 times a week, depending on timing, topics, and free time, but as always, we'll see how things go.

Pop back here on Wednesday for a look at a strange bit of business that will happen at the end of this year.

-B.