A Distant Soil: The Gathering Page 18

Thanks for the kind mention of the new blog and site to all the great folks at Broken Frontier!

The site also mentions the doings at Diamond Comics, which have affected retail order minimums on comics and will probably send a lot of small press companies down the tubes. There’s a link to a New York Times article with more about it all. There has been some very interesting analysis at The Comics Reporter, The Beat, and other comics blogs.

This is similar to the situation that felled many in the small press in the mid-1990’s. I mention it on the dvd Scenes From the Small Press (available in the SHOP above.)

The Diamond decision did not influence me to post my book here, because my new blog went up before Diamond made their move, and my books sell above the threshold anyway.

In the early 1990’s (as I recall) the order minimum was $500. Back in the day, it was the thing to constantly relist back issues of comics, and keep them in print as if they were front list books. I made almost all of my self publishing profit this way, relisting as many as three or four issues a month. Diamond pretty much put an end to the practice (for a time), and it helped to drive self publishers like me to Image.

I came up with the idea to package several copies of my books at a time in “starter packs”, with autographed books, and prints inside each package as a way of making my back issues into new product. I was able to sell out more than 1,000 starter packs with the first three issues in one Diamond order this way.

Image has been great, so no worries. But I feel the pain of a lot of small press guys who depend on those piles of backlist comics to keep the bills paid.

Anyway, I made the decision to go online with A Distant Soil more than a year ago, and had come very close to signing an agreement with Wowio. I got cold feet after six months of vacillating on the agreement (especially since – between the time I got the contract and the time I was ready to sign – I was handed a new contract with far less attractive an offer than I’d agreed to in the first place.) Wowio has been having problems of late, so no loss.

Some may recall I even posted A Distant Soil: Seasons of Spring on the old blog, but it did not have this nifty format.

More on all this later. Gotta run.

c