Retailers need solicits for everything, because they need to be provided with sufficient information in order to order their books in the proper amounts. Readers, less so–they need enough information to make decisions about what they want to buy. So AMAZING SPIDER-MAN does need solicits–it (or any other title) is not going to sell at that level without them.

That said, the effect of the average solicitation on the sales of the average issue of an average title is minimal. And I’m not convinced that most of the Previews that we drop do a whole lot of good in that regard, either. It seems like readers are more hungry for their free fix of the Previews than they are to buy the books themselves. That’s a cart-before-the-horse situation, and so it’s one that I’d like to experiment more with.