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Don't be sorry for asking, but there aren't too many folks here who have actual insider comic industry knowledge. I would check the regular comic news sites like Newsarama and Comic Book Resources to see if there are any updates.
The downside is many of those, especially CBR now have many, MANY annoying pop-up ads that make the sites really hard to read and navigate.
Well considering that the Canadian printer that handles most of DC's (and many other publishers) printing is closing for 3 weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic and that Diamond has announced it will not be accepting any new books form publishers until further notice, the whole industry is pretty much up in the air right now and anything announced will probably be delayed if not cancelled and re-solicited later, and if that happens, all bets are off as to what changes will happen.
This is going to be a time of massive sweeping changes to the comic industry. Many comic retailers may not survive this and when we get to the other side, the comics landscape, business models and infrastructure may look very different, and I am not sure in all this sea of change, the details of one particular book or another will be making headlines or even be a top consideration for people making or reporting the industry news.
-M
"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato
so you may be waiting some time for those one-shots or anything else 5G related even when Diamond resumes distribution and DC has a printer available to them.
-M
"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato
so you may be waiting some time for those one-shots or anything else 5G related even when Diamond resumes distribution and DC has a printer available to them.
-M
Diamond might not be coming back from this one.
You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren't happy in one place, chances are you won't be happy anyplace. -Ernie Banks
Penguin/Random House made a serious run at buying Diamond before all this went down. Geppi refused. Reportedly, they repeated the offer when Diamond announced it was suspending receiving new books, and Geppi refused.
If true, and Geppi thought this was the end of Diamond, he would have sold in a heartbeat, even if just to get out from the debt that would be incurred if Diamond went out of business. But this tells me that Geppi thinks Diamond is in a position to survive the storm and resume activity on the other side. He's actually a pretty good businessman, and he has been willing to take short term hits to his company in order to enable the industry as a whole to survive in the past (he floated a lot of debt owed him an extended a lot of credit to individual shop owners after the speculator crash in the 90s-hundreds if not thousands of shops went under at that time, something like 40% of all shops, but the number would have been closer to 75% of all shops if it weren't for Geppi's efforts to help them through that crisis by taking losses for Diamond in the short term to allow the industry to survive in the long term). I am not a big fan of Diamond and some of their policies, but Geppi gets painted as the bad guy far too often when the industry has survived this long largely on the shoulders of his efforts.
I think that the industry and the market will look radically different on the other side, but I think Diamond will still be part of the landscape (and Alliance, the major game distributor which is also under the Geppi umbrella and if Diamond goes, so will Alliance, and Haake's, and the several other businesses the hobby industry is built on currently. I am not sure print periodicals well be the primary form of the industry on the other side, but it will not disappear entirely, and neither will Diamond's place in the marketplace.
-M
"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato
wonder if Marvel will learn anything from the beatdown the New Warriors trailer got on Youtube.
All depends what kind of orders it got. Dollars and wallets speak louder than internet posts. If it sold/sells well in its initial solicitations, then all the negative posts in the world aren't going to make a damn bit of difference because the voices that matter, i.e. people spending money, will have spoken louder than any negative reactions online. If publishers listened to negative internet postings to determine publishing plans, nothing would ever get published.
-M
"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato
Penguin/Random House made a serious run at buying Diamond before all this went down. Geppi refused. Reportedly, they repeated the offer when Diamond announced it was suspending receiving new books, and Geppi refused.
If true, and Geppi thought this was the end of Diamond, he would have sold in a heartbeat, even if just to get out from the debt that would be incurred if Diamond went out of business. But this tells me that Geppi thinks Diamond is in a position to survive the storm and resume activity on the other side. He's actually a pretty good businessman, and he has been willing to take short term hits to his company in order to enable the industry as a whole to survive in the past...
-M
He's holding out for an offer from Amazon. Penguin/Random is susceptibility to market volatility that Amazon is not. By integrating with Amazon, he not just makes a boatload, but ends up operating their genre/fan division.
All depends what kind of orders it got. Dollars and wallets speak louder than internet posts. If it sold/sells well in its initial solicitations, then all the negative posts in the world aren't going to make a damn bit of difference because the voices that matter, i.e. people spending money, will have spoken louder than any negative reactions online. If publishers listened to negative internet postings to determine publishing plans, nothing would ever get published.
-M
I don't even think it got that far yet as far as solicits go. Its over 20k down votes, in the Ghostbusters reboot territory. That translated into bomb, so it will be the same with this mess.
You must try to generate happiness within yourself. If you aren't happy in one place, chances are you won't be happy anyplace. -Ernie Banks
I haven't seen the trailer and don't really care about the book itself, as I've never been a fan of the New Warriors in any incarnation, but what I do find is that fandom in general has an over-inflated opinion of the importance of internet postings vs. real-world dollars importance. Of the 20K downvotes, how many were actually potential purchasers? How many were actually in the existing customer base of digital or comic shop buyers, and how many were knee-jerk mob mentality comics-gaters trying to sabotage something because it doesn't cater to their narrow view of what comics should be and who the target audience for comics should be? It takes a lot of asses in seats in movie theatres to make a box office success, it takes the average comic shop ordering 5-10* (possibly less, there are approximately 1500-2000 Diamond accounts in the US direct market so if each orders 5 copies that's 10K orders) copies of a books at launch to make it a success, since the big online retailers like Mike High, DCBS, Midtown and mycomicshop order at least 10K of any Marvel book combined for their online sales just to qualify for all the variants they want to be able to have access to sell to their pre-orders. The threshold of a profitable book launch in the context of what the market was pre-pandemic is fairly low.
*For comparison-the top selling books that sell 100K copies sell an average of 50 copies per shop if there are 2000 Diamond accounts. The big 4 accounts mentioned above usually account for close to 50% of the sales figures though, so the remaining accounts only need to average 25-30 or so copies to achieve the other 50K to make 100K. A solid mid-tier seller averages 30-40K a month, so the remaining shops only need to average 10-15 copies (assuming the low end of 1500 accounts, less if there are still 2k accounts)to achieve 40K in sales. At an average of 5 copies per shop, with 2000 shops, you get 10K, figures in the big 4 just about doubling that and you have 20K in sales, in February 2020, 20K would make it a top 100 seller on the Diamond charts. And the people ordering are retailers, not online posters, and they will order based on what their preorders/pulls and projected day of release sales are for the book and not on what internet posters or youtube viewers who never have or never will set foot in theri shop or order from them online.
So in the reality of the actual marketplace, internet comments and downvotes get entirely too much credence for their impact on actual orders or on the potential success of a book. That said, the marketplace on the other side of this is going to be an entirely different animal, and I think publishers are going to consolidate their lines focusing on proven sellers and perennial sellers until the new normal is established and a better sense of the market becomes available, so experimental projects are likely to get shelved in the short term, but it will not be because of internet postings and downvotes, but because of the shambles the market will be in and the limitations of cash flow retailers will have after being closed for several months (and the overall smaller size of the market post-pandemic because there will be far fewer Diamond accounts on the other side as many shops will not survive the hiatus of the industry. But I am sure internet posters will be quick to claim credit for the projects that don't move forward that they didn't like the cut of their jib.
-M
"Opinion is the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding." -Plato
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