What is it?
Direct Market Series Codes are how comic shops subscribe their customers to an ongoing title. This is the easiest way for a comic store to streamline their sales. Without subscriptions, Saga's collection sales, for example, would not have gained the heights they did.
For 20-ish years, Diamond Comics was the creator and keeper of all direct market series codes. This was great, because believe it or not, they were pretty dang good at it. By the time they stopped being a reliable source for series codes, a series code was a 6-digit number. With the dissolution of Diamond, the industry has needed to shift away from their centralized method of assigning series codes.
So where does it come from?
For a publisher or distributor managing DM Series Codes, the first step is to find out if Diamond had already assigned a series code. If they have, please use that to ensure backward compatibility with POS systems and software vendors.
If there is no Diamond series code available, periodical issues get a different type of series code than books (TPBs, HCs, etc).
Until our industry has a trusted central source for DM Series Codes, and in order to keep a unique series code that can be tied to the title, these are our recommendations.
Comics: Our recommendation is to use the first 12 digits of the cover A barcode. Because periodical comics use a UPC +5 format, the first 12 digits will almost always stay the same across the title's life.
Books: Use the ISBN of Volume 01. Books do not have the advantage of an ISBN that refers to the series like comics do, but if we use the ISBN of Volume 1 for the series code, at least we can tie the series code back to a root source that makes human sense.
When assigning DM Series Codes, keep these things in mind:
A Direct Market Series Code:
- Refers to a continuing series of comic books, collected editions, graphic novels or Manga.
- Never contains more than a single issue with the same interior content (each Hellboy miniseries gets a new series code).
- Is never a series of one-shots (lookin' at you, Marvel).
- ALMOST NEVER includes multiple formats (but Fables had a legitimate reason to include comics and graphic novels).
What else do we need?
A series code is just one of four fields that help facilitate subscriptions in the Direct Market. Ideally, you would also be supplying an IssueSequenceNumber, an IssueNumber, and a Printing field.
IssueSequenceNumber defines variant covers, and can be found on page 4 of the Comet Standard manual:
IssueNumber is just a numerical indication of what issue this is. Sometimes a customer will want to subscribe to a span of issues (like only issues 186-192 because their favorite creator is on the book). This issue number facilitates that option. You should include an issue number even if you're representing a one-shot. One-shots should have issue number 1.
The printing field just indicates if this is a reprint or first printing. First print gets the number 1, second print gets the number 2, etc.
I hope this helps! It's kind of a big dump, but having this data distributed at a top level REALLY REALLY helps retailers subscribe customers easily, which is like putting oil on the slip and slide that brings you money from the Direct Market.
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