>Diamond fucked up their handling of sales last January >the Diamond monthly report for January 2019 came out the same day May 2019 solicits went online on PREVIEWSworld Now the July 2019 solicits are out BEFORE the March 2019 Diamond sales report. Tec #1000 will be March's best-selling comic but will not outsell Action #1000, and expect that the War of the Realms #1 will likely have a sales estimate of over 200,000, all without major changes in the publisher rankings.
Also remember that a few weeks ago, Marvel overshipped a few of its titles that sell like slightly shit. And Marvel solicited 33 (thirty-three) #1's (not counting the purely reprint books) for this July. Still also, prepare for a load of shit once the July 2019 sales reports from Diamond come out.
Is it that Comic Store owners want the sales report out after solicits so they can gauge how much of a certain title to order?
What is exactly did Diamond do wrong?
Jaxon Barnes
I'm waiting for the day that Disney steps up and starts their own distributor. They have Marvel, they have IDW, I'm sure the little guys will follow if not purely for the excuse to not have to fucking deal with Diamond's bullshit anymore. Fuck, they might even just let Marvel be in charge of the whole thing and handle it themselves. Their POS systems and inventory systems are fucking nightmares to deal with too.
Justin Smith
Fuck diamond, they need to die
I am fully convinced they are the main reason behind the stagnant growth of comics
Bentley Cox
Probably because you don't understand how different markets work, and you need a scapegoat to blame.
Dylan Bennett
Took me a while to get the post but I remembered April 2019 is almost done and we still don't have March 2019's sales report on Comichron, which is pretty unusual. They also took longer than normal to publish the July 2019 solicits this time, which are usually posted around the first week of every month. >Tec #1000 will be March's best-selling comic What is "Tec"?
Asher Allen
>What is "Tec"? Detective Comics #1000, the only comic other than Action Comics to have 1000 issues.
Jaxson Smith
Ah duh, I've never seen it referred to as "Tec" though, it's why I was confused.
Ryder James
Then explain it, smart guy. You won't.
Carter Johnson
When Diamond is basically the only game in town, it's easy to know who to blame.
Hunter Collins
ITS SIMPLE! DIFFERENT MARKETS WANT COMICS DIFFERENTLY! GROWTH IS STAGNANT BECAUSE OF DIGITAL AND DIFFERENT MARKETS WANT COMICS DIFFERENTLY. DIAMOND IS REACTING THE WAY IT SHOULD
Jacob Gutierrez
Diamond doesn't prevent publishers from using additional distributors alongside Diamond. That's how Archie is able to be sold in supermarkets.
If a publisher isn't in another market, it's because that publisher DOESN'T WANT to be in that market. Archie is the only publisher who wants to be in supermarkets, because the publisher has to buy back all unsold copies, and Archie is the only one with enough mass appeal to not lose money in that scenario.
Andrew Wood
Tell me what you think they should do differently.
Levi Young
>GROWTH IS STAGNANT BECAUSE OF DIGITAL More like growth is stagnant because Diamond outright forces digital comic prices to be the same as physical floppies that include shipping, printing and processing. Digital hasn't grown at all in years for this precise reason.
Jack Walker
>Diamond outright forces digital comic prices to be the same as physical floppies that include shipping, printing and processing. Source? Has anybody said that Diamond mandates this?
Angel Wood
90% of my and every retailer's problems honestly come down to basic shit. Organize the website, improve the servers so the PoS stops freezing during busy days, communicate with store owners, restock the fucking Diamond Selects and don't wait 6 months after the movies to make statues that people aren't going to buy now, etc. They're so incompetently run it's starting to feel like it's deliberate.
Jaxon Evans
So they're responsible for a few mild annoyances, and they're not the Ultimate Evil Destroying Comics that everybody likes to pretend they are.
Caleb Nguyen
Here's some detailed explanation on why the prices are the way the are among digital and physical issues: reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/8qitr2/digital_sales/e0jofom/ tl;dr, It is a competitive, unspoken agreement with retailers. It also stems from Cebulski's words during a summit in which he explains that they purposely sell their comics to the retailers at the same price as the digital versions as to avoid undercutting them, and it's why the unilateral Marvel sale (at $0.99) wasn't their doing, but Amazon's: comicsbeat.com/cb-cebulski-we-do-not-set-the-prices-on-the-controversial-99¢-digital-sale/ If digital prices were lower, that market would definitely grow, but retailers would suffer for it, shrinking their market considerably.
Landon Young
Thank you for the sources. I'm glad we can stop blaming Diamond for things they didn't do.
For my next trick, I will go into a Dan Didio thread and say that he gets blamed for a lot of things which he isn't responsible for.
Juan Diaz
Disney will NEVER do that. NEVER EVER do that.
Only in rare exceptions, does Disney run an internal publishing company. It's easier and they can make an extra buck to just outsource publishing, so they don't have to do extra work and to make other people deal with the fanbase of the properties being made.
It's why they killed George Lucas's in-house video game studio and outsource it to another company.
Marvel's one of the few exceptions. Disney only cares about the IPs and movie/cartoon rights they got buying Marvel. Nothing more, nothing less. HOWEVER, they were smart enough to realize the HUGE backlash they would receive, if they just killed Marvel Comics off. So they keep it going and occassionally give them a smack on the head, because they realize that the SJWs at Marvel are dead set on exploiting Disney's good will to run the company into the ground and make it unprofitable with SJW garbage, while abusing Disney's kindness under the logic that Disney will keep Marvel going, even when it's been rendered 100% unprofitable, because of PR and not wanting to admit that they fucked up letting shit get this bad.
Disney would love Marvel to fail, so they can get out of the comic business and just make super-hero cartoons and movies. But by being so utterly hands-off, they now have turned the vast audience for the Marvel IPs against both Marvel AND Disney. And given that they've poisoned the well and made Star Wars unprofitable and a radioactive franchise, they can't do the same with the Marvel property or else heads will roll when Disney's profit margin doesn't reach what the top brass and it's shareholders demand it does.
Nathaniel Wood
>even when it's been rendered 100% unprofitable How to detect someone that doesn't actually know how comics work.
Protip: Comics are profitable.
Mason Hill
Who manga master race here?
John Wood
COMIC GATE COMIC GATE COMIC GATE COMIC GATE
Michael Myers
>all this typical rant against Disney and SJWs and zero actual reasoning behind the company having their own distribution The real reason is because outsourcing the distribution to dedicated companies that already have it figured out is much cheaper than doing it from scratch, specially when having their own distribution entails a series of considerations they can usually palliate by paying someone else to do it. It's the EXACT same reason why Amazon is barely just now working towards their own distribution solutions, and why it's still pretty limited. They prefer to do the packaging and sorting from their own fulfillment centers since that part of the process has always been in their system from the time they used to sell books exclusively (not many remember this, apparently). But the shipping? Nah, no point when USPS, UPS and others offer them better deals.
Ian Morgan
Finally Diamond will die and comics can finally go the way of manga, in which it's being sold in gas stations, supermarkets, and anywhere that will bother. and digital sales will finally matter.
Yikes. That's a terrible idea. Why don't you read the thread?
David Garcia
Stop being autistic
Mason Lee
I did, it's a shitshow of shills and people who don't even care about comics
Jack Jackson
No. Scapegoating is almost always a bad idea. Reality is much more complicated and nuanced than you give it credit for.
Isaiah Brooks
>it's a shitshow of shills and people who don't even care about comics As opposed to you, who propose the expansion of the physical market and increasing the retailing which SOMEHOW will make Digital sales matter again despite their prices hanging in the balance of the survival of said retailing options while having a worldwide reach that should theoretically put it at the forefront of the industry. Yeah, I'm sure you understand the market just fine dude.
Ayden Jackson
If America and Europe stopped making comics, it would just mean less consumer choice and no backup plan if the Japanese one goes under/stops selling to the west
I don't even read any western comics outside of webcomics, but willingly letting one reletivly small and increasingly nationalistic country have a monopoly on an entire medium is fucking stupid
Evan Harris
No, I get that. You're just being autistic about it
Ian Adams
Disney killed Lucasarts because neither side of the equation was competent. Even before the buyout Lucasarts was incredibly dysfunctional, and Disney themselves has a pretty lackluster in-house track record with games.
Gabriel Lopez
Yeah, it has nothing to do with the fact that 90% of comics coming out now are pure shit.
David Wilson
Marvel tried making their own distributor in the 90's and it created massive backlash and is actually the reason that Diamond is the only one left standing today.
They are discouraging growth but they are very, VERY far from the main reason, and the only people who believe this are the people who have no idea what they're talking about and think comics returning to "grocery stores and newsstands" is actually a viable thing that could still work in this century.
