ChrisW -- I'll buy your book at half-price, if it's not gross. Publishers are supposed to give refunds now?

By the way, neither Pat nor PAD has really responded to the rather striking news that JIMMY CORRIGAN skyrocketed in Amazon's sales listings in the last 36 hours AND one retailer offered anecdotal evidence of several sales SPECIFICALLY linked to the TIMES article.

A graphic novel surges into Amazon's Top 200 best-selling books nationwide the day after it's reviewed in the TIMES. People walk into comics shops almost literally waving the TIMES article looking for that same graphic novel. Could there be...a causal...link? Brows furrow. Heads are scratched.

Naah!

It's not gross, it's only been read once, flipped through a few other times.
Kim asked what I wanted him to say, and "I'll send over the hookers with some beer and pizza" didn't pop into my mind.
(Tom's comment pointed something out to me: For those who couldn't imagine the comics industry being any worse off, what if everybody who said "I think this was a crappy comic, I want my money back" got their money back?)

Peter,

Because in the face of mounting evidence and argumentation to the contrary of his opinion, Pat proves indefatigable. There's something honorable about that (maybe not from a logician's perspective, but I wouldn't mind having him on my side if in a war).

monkeyed around with this long enough and decided I got sidetracked hence:


[This message has been edited by Charles Reece (edited 04-05-2001).]

ditto

[This message has been edited by Charles Reece (edited 04-05-2001).]

And one that reached that 1% goal could last weeks on that top 10 chart, Pat. Get around 3 million Americans to pay about $5 each for the movie, and you've got $15 million... which would be nicely profitable level for many films, albeit not the big budget releases.
Crows the same idiot who was trying to depict multiplatinum CDs as a flop. Aren't you even embarassed a bit by your ignorance? And let's notice that goalposts have changed; we had been talking about 1% of the general populace, suddenly we shrink down to one million. The fact is, you can get into the top 10 cable programs for the week with little more than 2% of households watching. (Here's a quick grab of one example week-- http://tvschedules.about.com/tvradio/tvschedules/library/blcable.htm .) One million can be a very good rating. In other words, you show no sign of knowing what you're talking about.

No, you idiot, a healthy fish in quite a nice size body of water that happens to hold a lot of fish. You may not realize this, but books are a big business. 50,000 copies of a $20 book add up , just as thousands of titles add up.
And your expertise in this matter comes from where, exactly? Publishers invest money all the time in projects that they expect to sell under 50,000. To assume that all investors are going to walk away from something with relatively low up-front costs lined up to do $27.5 million in business is nuts.

ChrisW, it may interest you to know that those of us who liked Jimmy Corrigan don't need to scam hookers, beer and pizza off of Kim. Loving women, wine and tasty food come to us.

Hokay, let’s try it again.



Here, Tom suggests you “firmly believe” that new ACME readers will be culled from the comics reader population only. I found this comparable to:



I will grant the possibility that you were merely speaking in a counterfactual manner of which philosophers are so fond. That is, without possessing a belief yourself, you were proffering the possibility that readers may be pulled from the comics reading population only, while perfectly realizing (yet not putting it in your post) that it’s just as likely that they won’t. Of course, if you actually thought one scenario was more likely than the other, you’d be in possession of a belief (like Tom was ascribing to you). If, in fact, you were and are in possession of a belief, perhaps it’s not firm, and you’re fairly agnostic about it. In such an occurrence, the reader has cause to wonder why you’d feel the need to post the equivalent of “I’m just not sure, but I believe you might be wrong” to another poster. I guess you could’ve been playing devil’s advocate. Let’s see what the next fact that I offered says:



I found this to be a pretty good summation of:



It seems as if you’re not just agnostic on the 2 scenarios I mentioned above. In fact (assuming you’re not playing devil’s advocate), you’re “very skeptical” of the scenario where a new ACME reader is drawn from the non-comics reading population. That suggests, by implication, that (1) you’re in possession of the belief that the new ACME reader will be coming from the comics reading population, and (2) you’re fairly certain about it (“firm in your belief”, perchance?).

Nevertheless, it would appear that the tenor of your posts isn’t as clear as you assume.

And, while we’re at it:

Gary responded to one of your posts where you suggested the possibility of it being unlikely that new ACME readers would come from a non-comics reading population with the statement: “Contra Peter David, a review or profile in the NY Times will help sales. Period. End of discussion.” Now, regardless of the firmness of your belief, he was denying your scenario by implying its impossibility. He made no claims about your internal belief state.


[This message has been edited by Charles Reece (edited 04-05-2001).]

David wrote:

"I consistently said that readers "may not" (use interchangeably with "might not") be as quick to buy a positively
reviewed graphic novel, regardless of how glowing, simply because it's a comic book. Implicit in that is that they
MAY be inclined. That's the purpose of qualifiers. I don't know for sure; I think it unlikely, that's all. But you and Tom
removed the qualifying, maybe/maybe not tone and said that I was making a flat-out assertion: That a Times reader
WILL NOT read a graphic novel, no matter how positive the review. Groth went so far as to say that I claimed a
NYT review would not sell additional copies. I never said that. You guys said it for me and then made comments
about that."


PAD is backpedalling. He did not "consistently" say that readers "‘may not’…be as quick to buy a positively reviewed graphic novel, regardless of how glowing, simply because it’s a comic book." His argument was considerably stronger than that. Nor did I "say" that PAD "claimed a NYT review would not sell additional copies." What PAD said in his first post was this:

"The difference between, say, a novel getting written up in the NYT and Chris Ware's work is that people may read
a novel review and, if the material interests them, buy the book. But if they read a review of a comic book, their
reaction may well be, "Oh, but *I don't read comics.*" And they will not buy it for that reason and that reason alone.
It doesn't matter whether the material is adult or not. They wouldn't want to read it because the format itself is
associated with juveniles and idiots, and they wouldn't want to be thought of as either one."

Note that there is no qualifer prefacing the verb "will not" as in "And they will not buy it for that reason and that reason alone," which is as declarative a sentence as one might ever hope to see. Nor is there a qualifer prefacing "wouldn’t" –used twice!-- as in "They wouldn’t want to read it because the format itself is asociated with juveniles and idiots, and they wouldn’t want to be thought of as either one," which is also as emphatic as you can get.

In the event, I think my clarification was perfectly justified:

"Contra Peter David, a review or profile in the NY Times will help sales. Period. End of discussion."

Anyone who doesn’recognize as a first principle that an article on the front page of the Times Arts section will sell books should be considered too stupid or ignorant to post here on the subject. (Thanks, Rory, for providing empirical evidence that a NY Times piece will sell gra[phic novels – as far away as San Francisco!)

By the way, it appears as though Pat hasn’t read the Times piece at all: it is not a book review, it’s a profile of the artist with comments about the work littered throughout.

This, a snippy altercation on a public messboard, would be the perfect time for Groth and David to shake hands and make up. I'd like that, anyway. Um, just a suggestion. 'Scuse me while I hide.