As far as a listing fee, it is widely believed, though I don't think an absolute rule, that Diamond will list books that purchase advertising; I think the minimum size ad is $350.00 or thereabouts.

At least for relists, I think it would be a good idea for Diamond to offer some kind of affordable listing fee; of course once they start down that road, we'll all have to pay a fee every time, no matter how much our books sell!

I was just admiring Steve Bissette's color sketch on Walt Parrish's 'Cliffs' webpage yesterday. Anyone who wants to criticize him, please let us know if you're capable of producing anything even one tenth as beautiful as that simple little sketch!

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Joe Zabel
joezabel@hotmail.com
Vist the Amazing Montage webpage: http://members.tripod.com/~amazingmontage

Savage uttered: "Actually, Kim. I think they SHOULD be forced to take any "amature doofus'" book until they offer a reasonable option for people to solicit. Or until the exclusive deals die and another distributor comes along."

That's totally unrealistic. I'm an amateur doofus and I wouldn't want Diamond to carry my comic just because I say so. They should carry it only if they think they can sell it. Otherwise, they (and I) would wind up losing money and for what? Because a doofus like me wants my comic to be listed in their catalog because I said so? Last year Diamond refused to carry my comic book. Why? Because they thought they could not sell it (and so did the retailers who were on the board looking at my submission). I accepted that. If they can't make a profit off of my comic, then I can't. Know what I did? I went back to the drawing board. I'm still there.


Savage again: "Come on, you've seen that catalog. They don't pick the books that go in there on quality. They probably just flip a coin or throw all the letters up in the air and see which ones land face up."

Diamond does not carry product based on quality. They do so based on whether they can sell it or not. Diamond is a business. Money talks. If they can make money off of you, they will carry your work (yes, I know that there are some exceptions to the rule).

Joe weighs in: "I was just admiring Steve Bissette's color sketch on Walt Parrish's 'Cliffs' webpage yesterday. Anyone who wants to criticize him, please let us know if you're capable of producing anything even one tenth as beautiful as that simple little sketch!"

Then by your logic no one can criticize a movie unless they can make a better one. And no one can criticize the President unless they have what it takes to make it to the Oval Office themselves.

Andrew,

You are missing my point. It isn't a matter of realism or whether it will make Diamond a nice happy profitable corporation. Frankly, I couldn't give a damn if Diamond died a slow horrible death. The point is that until they give people an option they should be forced to do something unpleasant.

Love,

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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
Sabre's Edge
www.sabresedge.com

Kim, thanks for clearing up what really happened with TCJ #212. I was delighted to find that it was you guys who screwed up, not Diamond. :-)

JM

People DO have an option, Justin. They can sell through Last Gasp. They can sell through FM. They can compile a list of good, alternative-friendly stores and do direct mailings to them -- either by themselves, or with a group of their like-minded friends.

Diamond has no moral or legal obligation to carry anything they don't think they can make money on. If they fail to carry something that's really great we can all try to shame them into carrying it (as we did years ago with YUMMY FUR and OMAHA and DRAWN AND QUARTERLY), but a general-principle "they should carry everything" stance is ludicrous on the face of it.

Your claims about how cheap it is for Diamond to list a comic in their catalog and distribute it are naive. The annual Fantagraphics catalog, for instance, costs us over $60,000 to produce, print, and mail. When you add in overhead, labor, etc., I calculate (and use as a rule of thumb) that any item we put in the catalog has to sell $150 to just BREAK EVEN for us -- i.e., selling 50 copies of a $3 comic (a "profit" of $75 over what we paid for the comic). Since Diamond's cut is much smaller (15% to 20% instead of 50%), their overhead is much larger, and there is more complex labor involved in distributing a comic to retailers, I would say that if Diamond charged $100 to list the proverbial doofus's comic and then sold 250 copies of it -- another big $100 or so "profit" -- they would indeed be losing their shirts on the whole exchange.

Joe: I assume your comment on Bissette means that you think your work is better than that of anyone whose work you've ever criticized? (Didn't you cream SIGNAL TO NOISE, now that I think of it? Does that mean you think you're a better writer than Neil Gaiman and a better artist than Dave McKean?)

All joshing aside, the idea that Steve, or Dave Sim, or anyone should somehow be exempt from any sort of criticism as to his work, his views, his policies because he can draw purty pictures is silly. I hope you sobered up after writing and posting this.

And Don, we didn't go into distribution because the logistics seemed difficult to impossible and we've already got our plate more than full with publishing. Also, we looked at the track record of previous "alternative-friendly" distributors (bankruptcy) and thought the odds were not good. And finally, we didn't want to have to spend 20 hours a week arguing with doofuses whose illegible and unsalable comics we'd turned down for distribution, not to mention slogging through the hundreds of illegible and unsalable comics we'd be deluged with -- and, ultimately, arguing endlessly on message boards about how alternative-unfriendly and hypocritical we were for turning down those doofuses' comics. Basically, we didn't need the grief.

Another point to consider is that many, many retailers regularly call for Diamond to filter out -more- small press publishers. Previews is already a thick and unwieldy mess, cluttered with dozens and dozens of utterly unsellable shoddy comics.

As soon as a retailer ventures past the safe world of the exclusive publishers and the few independent pubs he might support, he has no idea what he's ordering. The book might never come out, and if it does ship it might be an unreadable piece of garbage. There's no way for him to know. And there are hundreds of these black boxes for him to ponder every single month.Diamond isn't denying these retailers the opportunity to purchase your book, they're sparing retailers the effort of reading yet another solicitation, and trying to keep them from being stuck with (what their experience tells them is) a book no one will buy. (I wish they'd do the same with shitty mainstream books, too, but that's another matter.)

I'm certainly not an enemy of art comics or the small press. The overwhelming majority of the comics I buy are from FBI, D&Q, Top Shelf and other independent publishers But I'm regularly appalled at how low Diamond's sets the bar. I attend a lot of conventions so I have a good idea what's out there, and I have no doubt that for every True Swamp they might step on, they're freeing retailers from hundreds of amateurish z-grade space operas and tragic superhero attempts. Everyone reading this knows exactly the books I'm talking about- the comics that make you scratch your head and wonder, "can't he see how much this *sucks*?" How would the industry or the medium be served by Diamond listing these books? Diamond filters them out, for their own benefit and that of the retailers. It's inevitable that a couple of good books will get filtered out too, but as Kim mentioned, there are ways to deal with that.

At a time when books featuring well-regarded alternative creators might sell 600 copies through the direct market, how much good is Diamond Distribution going to do you? Your chances of ever breaking even on printing costs is painfully, painfully slim. You'd be a lot better off doing mini-comics or web publishing and building a network that way. Come back to Diamond after a year or two of that with more polished work and a nice stack of fan mail and the situation might change.

Finally, consider this: North American comics is already the most transparent publishing market in the world, and getting a self-published book distributed by Diamond is insanely easy compared to getting traditional bookstore distribution for a vanity press title. By all means, keep fighting, but also be aware of how lucky we are to have a market that's as open to the little guy as this one is.

I am wondering about a chnage in the format of the Previews catalogue that might make it easier to find comix of interest for any particular person: listing by genre. This is what book publishers do, since they stock many types of books and realize that buyers interested in automotive manuals probably don't feel like wading through the poetry section to find books relative to their store's clientele. Could Diamond do something similar, perhaps "creating" say a dozen genre categories and asking each publisher to flag a title's genre specification. Seems like a step in the right direction...

Keith

Kim,

How much do you charge for ad space in your catalog?

How much do you charge for people to recieve your catalog?



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Justin Savage
President/Editor/Web-bozo
Sabre's Edge
www.sabresedge.com

That would be zero and zero. We don't charge publishers to list their books --we just list the ones we like or think we can sell-- and we don't charge mail-order customers for the catalog. It's free for the asking.

I'm not entirely sure if the "genre" suggestion boils down to organizing the comics by genre -- autobiography, humor, horror, movies & tv, science-fiction, super-hero, whatever -- but I can't imagine anyone, publisher, retailer, or even reader would want to see each company's output broken into disparate shards of information and strewn all across the catalog.

Steve Lieber has it exactly right on all fronts.

Actually, as far as genres go:

Diamond just started listing comics by some genres on the Retailer-only section of their website. Pretty interesting choices. Here's the email I got 26 June 1999.

*****In response to retailer requests, the Retailer Services Area of Diamond Online now provides a complete reference key to the GENRE CODES and BRAND CODES that accompany product item lines on PREVIEWS ON DISK.

*****The codes are designed to let retailers sort their orders so as to effectively track ordering and sales patterns for specific genres. The Genre Codes include: Action/Adventure (AA); Adult (AD); Anthologies (AN); Anthropomorphics (AP); Crime (CR); Fantasy (FA); Horror (HO); Humor (HU); Music (MU); Reality-Based (RB); Romance (RO); Science Fiction (SF); Super-hero (SH); Seasonal Merchandise (SN); Sports (SP); War (WR); Western (WS); and No Genre/All Genres (XX). Brand Codes narrow this focus by allowing retailers to track sales of products belonging to specific brand families, such as
merchandise related to BATMAN (BM) or STAR WARS (SW).

I'm trying to do genres for all the comics I carry, and that's a lot harder than it sounds. Some comics deserve eighteen different categories (especially the longer running ones - Cerebus is what genre? etc.) while others don't fit into any category I can think of. I've been tempted to just let comics folk name whatever genre they think their book falls into. We'll see.



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Jared Smith
jared@marsimport.com
owner
Mars Import
www.marsimport.com
"Quality Earth comics"