Caine's Floppy PSA for 2009

Do you suffer from reading comic book floppies?

Are you surrounded by stacks, or piles, or teetering towers of comic books?

Do you spend more time worrying about where you will put and how
you will store the comics you buy, then actually reading and enjoying your comics?

Does your office or other personal space look like this?

Maybe you've got it all figured out, and your space only looks this bad.

Regardless of what kind of hardships or mishaps you may have had with comic book flopies in the past we here at the Paper Comics Deathwatch want to assure you that your worries, storage problems, and fear of safety hazards are over now.

Diamond Raises Minimum From $1500 to $2500? ~Comics Reporter

Dan Vado's Informal Letter On Diamond's Edicts ~Comics Reporter

I saw your recent post about the new/old Diamond policies and I would like to confirm that these new policies are indeed true and confirm that they will have a chilling effect on the business as we know it.

So, to the brass tacks, the thing that slaps us up in the face most is the raising of the Purchase Order benchmark to $2500. What that means is that every book needs to generate $2500 of revenue (that would mean a little over $6000 in sales at retail based on the discount we give to Diamond) in order to be listed with Diamond. That does not mean that Diamond is going to cancel or not carry books which appear in the Previews but do not reach that benchmark, but it does mean that if you have a line of books which consistently do not meet that mark, you will not be getting your books listed in the Previews for long.

About the Benchmark ~Icarus Publishing

Diamond, the undisputed ruler of direct market distribution, asks vendors to meet two sets of sales guidelines. The first is a general sales threshhold applicable to initial orders, somewhere between $3000~4000 retail, that Diamond expects comics to meet to continue to be listed in Previews. New comics are given a few issues to reach that plateau. If the comic doesn’t, or falls below it after a few issues, Diamond will ask the series to be cancelled. While the sales threshhold is applicable to all products, this is most relevant to the concept of comics as periodical magazines; serials which have limited shelf lives.

There is a lot more discussion of this subject happening on the internet here , here , and here as well.

I think this quote from The Beat summed it up best:

The last time Diamond raised its benchmark, to $1500, it was pointed out that under this policy books from Bone to Cerebus wouldn't get into the catalog under this policy. The new benchmark would leave out the first issues of things like 30 Day of Night, so we're not talking obscure indie material but mainstream genre fiction. - more at The Beat

I hope you all have a nice weekend.

-Caine