More money is flowing OUT than is flowing IN… for a small business (even one with one business that has a pseudo-monopoly as Diamond does) that can mean big trouble. And with cash hard to get at the bank (and Steve not wanting to kill his entire retirement fund) things have to change.

Whether increasing the minimum order was a good idea or not… it was one that makes sense: they CANNOT make enough money from selling books that do not make the minimums. Interestingly enough (and this often goes unsaid) – NEITHER CAN THE CREATORS AND PUBLISHERS.

Comic books is often a business of passion… creators and publishers will create and publish in the absence of logic (i.e. when there is really no market for their product)… and will continue to create and publish when the market has gone on to something else but their passion keeps them going.

The inherent problem is that they will often keep producing EVEN WHEN they should logically have stopped (and now THEY are only losing money with each item that gets made.)… Think of an easy parallel… if a house builder continues to build MORE houses than he or she can sell… they lose money no matter how GOOD the houses are… comics are no different…

So now, Diamond (who is losing money) steps in and says to the product creators “enough is enough” and cancels some titles because it doesn’t make sense for the creators or the distributor to keep at it…

Should Steve and the powers at Diamond have been expected to have the foresight to try to find other businesses to expand into so that they can move the people to that business rather than fire them? That is the” ideal world model” but one that I have never seen in real life (except in very socialistic societies where it is really hard to lay someone off – and that is not the USA)… and if the owners of construction companies, mortgage brokerages and the banks don’t have that same foresight, how can Steve and his team of people that sell comics for a living? ? (no offense, Steve)

Thanks for pointing out the link problem on the PREVIEWSworld.com site, we’ll get that updated.

Other than the already-reported Tokyopop cancellations, the biggest “name” cancellations are arguably Slave Labor’s cancellations. A lot of Gargoyle books are gone, but wasn’t there licensing issues there? (I could be totally wrong.) Lenore #14 is also cancelled; that’s a shame. I hope that’s just a temporary condition.

Hermes Press, a nice little company that makes some nice books about comics history, has some cancellations. The biggest of that group was Will Eisner’s PS Magazine. I had emailed the publisher some months ago about this, as my Amazon pre-order had been cancelled. He had told me that the book was still coming out. These solicitation codes are very old (going back to 2007), so it could be that the books will eventually be resolicited.

I’m not so sure that we’ll see the real effects of the Diamond move on the cancellation sheets. It’ll be in the books that never make it to Diamond.

Its hard to argue that when the list of dead product goes from three pages to eight that nothing happened. While the DVD and T-Shirt categories took hits, a load of books and comics are going out the stores as well.

Diversity does not mean a wide variety of Wolverine titles.

Bill
LSP