Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne looks at the proposed settlement in the Diamond Comics Distributors consignment dispute, and at where distribution is going.
The announcement of a proposed settlement in the long-running Diamond Comic Distributors bankruptcy case may bring a less than satisfactory ending to that part of the affair (see “Settlement with Some Diamond Consignment Vendors Proposed“). Companies that consigned product with Diamond now get access to their products. Sparkle Pop has to charge reasonable fees to ship out companies consigned products or allow a third-party company to do so. But the consigned products sold by Sparkle Pop are gone, with the nearly $900,000 owed the publishers going to the bankrupt Diamond estate in exchange for dropping its claims to the inventory (to say nothing of the many millions of dollars owed publishers before the company declared Chapter 7 that will never be recovered).
As a result of this, I’ve heard some publishers, as well as retailers, musing on a new distribution model but they do not appear to have any idea as to what sort of model to pursue. For the 30 years that Diamond was around, its monopolistic power had pluses and minuses for the comic industry. The pluses: retailers had only had to worry about ordering from one source; as long as they could generate 400 copy sales, Diamond gave small publishers access to its retail network; ComicSuite, while problematic at times, made it comparatively easy to put in and receive orders.
The minuses: freight charges were extremely high; publishers without access to Diamond’s network found it hard to gain access to comic shops (several small distribution houses focusing on small press comics came and went over Diamond’s three decades), responsiveness to problems varied depending on which customer service reps you were dealing with; problems affecting Diamond affected the entire industry, and there are probably more that I do not remember.
The problem is that the comic industry as well as the game industry needs distributors, especially if you are not a Wizards of the Coast, Image Comics, Marvel Comics or DC Comics (see “Why Choose Distribution“). As example, take Zenoscope Entertainment, which has published since 2005. We have carried Zenoscope’s titles off and on since its inception but customer demand never grew big enough that we could carry more than a copy or two of any of its titles.
But since Zenoscope was one of the lines Diamond carried, we could add on a copy of one of their titles to our monthly order and satisfy the customers wanting a copy. Once Diamond shut down operations, Zenoscope reached out to us and other stores, offering to sell to us direct. Unfortunately, we only had those one or two customers wanting their books. Zenoscope could not profitably ship us books to satisfy those customers without the freight costing more than the books. Using Philbo Distribution, which distributes Zenoscope, required us to buy more copies than we could profitably sell, so we discontinued offering Zenoscope.
Now, Lunar Distribution has announced the company has entered into an agreement to distribute Zenoscope and, since we can now profitably offer the line again to our customers, we will order the books that our customers want.
This is the way game distribution has worked for years. Is it perfect? Nope, but I do not see another means of distribution coming in the foreseeable future.
Comments? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
