Robot 6
Food or Comics | A roundup of money-related news
Bone #1
• Brian Hibbs, Simon Jones, Kevin Boyd and Dirk Deppey respond to Christopher Butcher’s recent comments about Diamond’s new threshold for publishers.
Hibbs’ remarks are particularly good: “Here’s the real problem: Diamond’s purchasing department. There are some really great guys working there, but they don’t really have a great aesthetic judgment. That’s not a knock, necessarily, but in 20 years of buying from Diamond I don’t believe that they’ve EVER had a year where they had the entirety of, say, the Eisner nominees in stock at or around the time of the nominations. … I don’t believe that Diamond would recognize the ‘next BONE.’ Not from hatred or anything, but because they have policies in place to be ‘fair,’ that for a decade or more essentially treats all projects as interchangeable widgets.”
Deppey, meanwhile, thinks Last Gasp could use the new Diamond policy to its advantage: “Because their market focus plays more to general American alt-culture, they’ve never seemed like direct competition to Diamond; rather, they’ve been the indy-comics scene’s gateway to record stores and radical bookstores, more a source for hipster culture than literary comics. The fact that they just happen to be a fairly comrehensive source for literary comics really hasn’t been a serious topic for discussion. Until now.”
(Boyd link via Deppey)
• Creators Syndicate has launched Rev-Up, a program in which online ad revenue is shared by the company and member newspapers.
• At Major Spoilers, Stephen Schleicher offers marketing tips for small publishers.
- February 5, 2009 @ 08:53 AM by Kevin Melrose