A Market Worth Fighting For

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Wizard found its audience with a multipronged approach, targeting fans, the industry, and collectors, and less than a year after it debuted, Shamus says, he knew it was a viable business. The rash of comic-based big-budget films pouring out of Hollywood the past few years, such as the Spider-Man, Batman, and X-Men franchises, have helped drive interest and readership. Today the magazine enjoys circulation of 185,000, a figure Shamus considers "fantastic" for a niche publication.

Early on, Wizard was sold by the nation's 5,000-odd comic specialty retailers, mostly mom-and-pop shops. Shamus watched them closely and developed a knack for spotting trends. For one thing, he noticed that they were diversifying their product lines and starting to sell action figures and toys, fantasy and role-playing games and accessories, and the newly popular Japanese animation products. Much of the gaming expansion was driven by the launch of a best-selling card game called Magic: The Gathering, essentially a faster and easier to play alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, the fantasy game that enjoyed its heyday in the 1970s. Shamus's response to Magic was to launch InQuest Gamer, a magazine covering the character gaming world with reports on strategies, products, and competitions. Like Wizard, it became the leader in its category.

Between 1991 and 1994, Shamus launched five magazines, three of which quickly became profitable. The other two foundered, however, and had to be shut down shortly after their debuts. In a way, the two losers--one a pure trade magazine about the comic book industry, the other a sports-card-collecting publication--were as important to Shamus's ultimate success as the winners. They prompted him to adopt two rules: one, he would not do anything that might jeopardize his cash cow, Wizard; and, two, he would assign performance metrics, time and revenue benchmarks, to all new projects and would reevaluate them if they did not perform as projected.

Along with figuring out when to pull the plug, Shamus also figured out earlier than many entrepreneurs that he needed the help of professionals. From the moment he launched Wizard, he says, he was looking forward to hiring executives and stepping away from day-to-day management. "I was 21 years old," he says, "and I knew I didn't know everything. I wanted to bring in people who were great at what they do, because when you do that, they are the least expensive people that you have no matter how much you are paying them." The most important person he brought in was Fred Pierce, who had been a vice president at Valiant. "When I met Gareb, he literally was not old enough to rent a car," says Pierce, who quickly became a mentor to Shamus. "Whenever I had a problem," says Shamus, "I would call Fred. He was always helping me out. At this point I was starting more magazines, and I needed someone to help me run the business. After Valiant got sold, I brought Fred in to run my operations."

Let's Leverage It

Pierce, who is 16 years older than Shamus, became president of Wizard Entertainment in 1994. Having him at the helm allowed Shamus to pursue other opportunities, and he quickly extended the scope of Wizard beyond publishing. Since launching Wizard magazine, for example, Shamus had been attending the nation's major comic book conventions, including a big one in Chicago that was owned by a comic shop retailer. The show had gotten too big for the shopowner and his staff to handle--but not big or profitable enough to allow him to hire help. He also could not afford to market it properly. When the convention began to struggle, Shamus saw an opportunity.

At the time, it was the second largest convention in the comic book industry, but it was just a comic show. "They had maybe 5,000 or 6,000 people over the weekend," remembers Shamus. "Because we now had a gaming magazine and toy magazine, I thought, Let's invite the gaming and toy industries and leverage it into different markets. Unlike a typical start-up, we already had the relationships with all the companies." He bought the comic show and transformed it into what he calls a "festival," adding gaming tournaments, movie previews, autograph sessions, lectures by stars and directors of comic-based movies, and exhibitions by comic book artists and writers. He also made it family-friendly, charging no admission for kids. The first year he drew 20,000 fans; today, it draws 56,000 and Wizard attracts 125,000 attendees to five highly profitable consumer conventions and one trade show for the toy industry. It also attracts sponsorships from companies eager to reach those 18- to 34-year-olds, including Sony, which wanted to pitch its PlayStation even though Wizard doesn't have a magazine devoted solely to video gaming. Now a major sponsor of Shamus's conventions, Sony pays Wizard to put its logo on all convention materials and ads, and it also buys ads in the various magazines throughout the year.

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