Mr. Nozemack, do you have any information regarding how this affects DBD publishers? Are the Book orders lumped in with the Comics orders to meet the benchmark? Or are DBD publishers given preferential treatment, since they are exclusive accounts for DBD?

Just a big “A-men!” to what Joe Nozemack is saying. I’ve read plenty of responses to this whole topic on various message boards, and there is a definite undertone among a small subset of folks who want to paint Diamond as some evil organization that hates small press comic books. I even read one small publisher who went on a tirade to villify Diamond for actively and purposely trying to kill independent comic books, blah blah blah.

Um, no - this is a *business* decision. It costs quite a bit of money to purchase items from hundreds of different suppliers and distribute them to thousands of customers. Like any major corporation, Diamond has overhead. They have hundreds of employees, multiple buildings and warehouses, trucks and equipment. It costs money to deal with suppliers, costs money to print a catalog, costs money to process orders, costs money to count and sort the product, costs money to handle accounts payable and receivables, costs money to handle damages, returns and other problems. Add it all up, and divide that sum total by the number of products offered, and you arrive at a dollar amount. Diamond did this, and arrived at a number for 2009: $2500-wholesale per product line item. (Of course I’m oversimplifying the whole process here, but you get the idea) And remember that does not mean Diamond gets $2500 per item, their cut of the product is a fraction of that - probably closer to $600 to $900 per item, depending on discount levels and discounts offered by the suppliers.

Diamond is not cutting off profitable items. They set the new benchmark at that level because items below that point are *losing* money, for Diamond. A book that sells below that level costs more in assorted costs to distribute than the revenue it would bring in. Diamond is trying to staunch the financial bleeding.

And as Mr. Nozemack points out, Diamond is only *part* of the larger revenue stream for any small press publisher. For most small press publishers, the majority of their sales are outside of Diamond - bookstores, libraries, online, direct-to-retail, direct-to-retailers, etc. And it has been that way for years. I would go so far as to say that any publisher that cannot survive without Diamond probably should be reconsidering their business plan (or rather, should have done that years ago). This move is not unexpected - the writing has been on the wall for a while now - and any publisher should have been prepared for an eventual Diamond cutoff. Not to be mean (after all, I’m working for one of those publishers in the bullseye) - just cold, hard reality.

If you have not read the entirety of my post, only the portion that was quoted, this is the sentence that followed it:

“Actually, that’s unlikely to happen to Oni. But I wanted to show just how high a bar Diamond is setting. (And I’m not picking on you, Oni Press. I just using this for illustrative purposes. I’m so sorry! m(_ _;)m)”

All I was interested in was showing the available math behind a top 300 trade paperback, nothing more. And I did feel bad about it, since I’ve quite enjoyed the original volume. It’s a fine, fine book.