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How To Be An Unofficial Free Comic Book Day Retailer

STK666593To qualify as a Free Comic Book Day Participating store, you must operate a storefront business and order a 25 each minimum of the Gold books. Alone that will cost a retailer a minimum of $81.75 plus shipping, for three hundred comics. That's the bare minimum, most retailers will order thousands, tens of thousands of comics and spend the equivalent.

In return, you will be listed on freecomicbookday.com, get promotion for your store's activities, and get a posters, window and shelf signs.

But what if you want to be more selecting of the comics you give away to your community? What if, as some believe, that Savage Dragon is a bustest flush or 30 cents is still too much to pay for a Doctor Who comic to give away?

Tim Finn of Hub Comics in Somerville, MA, told us,

If it's like previous years, the minimum is to get your store listed as a participating store on the DCD/FCBD website. Stores can order fewer than the minimum, they just don't get listed. That's what I did with my store last year, and for the Halloween ComicFest as well. After the initial order but before the final deadline my sales rep asked if we wanted to up our numbers so that we'd get listed, and I said no, since many of the books weren't what we wanted to carry in any amount. He said a few other accounts were doing the same thing.

So the bigger piece of news here might be how many stores are participating in FCBD without being listed as participating. I don't think people found us on FCBDs past via the FCBD website, but rather, it's a sunny summer day and people are walking by the store on their way elsewhere, which is why this isn't a bother.

Free Comic Book Day makes note of the many millions of dollars in free publicity that they generate every year, and it's true, they do. But you don't actually have to be an official partner to benefit from that. You can order whatever you want and give whatever you want away without penalty. And there are also publishers rejected by Free Comic Book Day (more this year than ever) pursuing other means of distributing free comic books to comic stores – probably for less than FCBD will charge.

It's possible that this year, more and more will join them… and make their own signs.


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Rich JohnstonAbout Rich Johnston

Founder of Bleeding Cool. The longest-serving digital news reporter in the world, since 1992. Author of The Flying Friar, Holed Up, The Avengefuls, Doctor Who: Room With A Deja Vu, The Many Murders Of Miss Cranbourne, Chase Variant. Lives in South-West London, works from Blacks on Dean Street, shops at Piranha Comics. Father of two. Political cartoonist.
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