herouniversecomics

Hehe. That title sounds funny.

Anyway, with Diamond changing its sales thresholds, a couple of other companies have stepped up to try and fill the void, that is. to give lower selling books a chance to get into stores, books that would not make Diamond's standards. One such company is KaBlam, who is in the process of starting up their ComicsMonkey division to offer direct-to-retailer printing and ordering.

As many of you probably know, Diamond has, for many, many years, been the sole distributor for nearly all comic book retail shops. They have a virtual monopoly on the comics distribution business (they really do have a monopoly, but courts have ruled that because their products qualify as books and there are other book distributors out there, it doesn't count). To get listed in Diamond's Previews catalog requires not only that you make certain sales thresholds, but a fairly steep start up cost (not to mention the up-front cost of just printing the books and shipping them to Diamond).

So, why is this news in the "Fan Chatter" section of our forum? Because Ka-Blam is the printer for most of our books, and therefor we'll have an account with ComicsMonkey when it launches. This could potentially give us a little boost in terms of market penetration, and really without any additional costs to us. This also means that if, for example, you have a comic shop near you that decides to give this project a shot, you could actually purchase your HU comics from your local shop (thus saving you the shipping costs charged by IndyPlanet).

So, here's hoping that this little venture does well for them and for us.

That kind of sucks on Diamond's part. Now definitely is and isn't the time to be greedy, and be being so blatantly and boldly greedy, I think that they're going to lose a little bit of their chokehold on distribution. Even just reading the comments on the NewsARama article, there seems to be a lot of buzz about a smaller distro company called Haven.

I think that ComicsMonkey is a great idea, though. They already have a ton of material out there (thanks to Ka-Blam and IndyPlanet), and giving DIY projects distribution options as well as publishing is great for their creators.

indeed, this sounds like a great idea...on paper. So we'll just have to wait and see how it turns out.
But it sounds like it will give your projects a lot more market penetration with their big and strong ... penetration? Brett Favre could do it.

I've been looking into Haven, but they have some of the same problems as Diamond. Granted, they don't have the super-greedy thresholds and huge start-up costs, but there is the same problems of print costs (as in, I'd have to pay up front for the cost of printing my books and having them shipped to Haven's distribution center, then waiting for them to cut me a check for my profits) and discounts (books are usually sold to comic shops for about 60% of the cover price, which means the distributor only pays the publisher about 20-40% of the cover price. Given our current arrangement, where our books cost about 60-80% of the cover price just to print, that wouldn't really be viable. We'd have to go to a non-POD printer, and they have sliding prices depending on quantity ordered, and we wouldn't know our order size until after the book is solicited). So, if KaBlam's new venture does well, we don't have those problems, which, given my current finances, is much more advantageous.

I hate to play the part of the dark gray cloud of doom, but there hasn't been an update about ComicsMonkey since early March. Almost 6 months with no word has left me more than a little skeptical of this bold and brave new world Ka-Blam was supposed to be ushering in.