Diamond NOT the end for the indy comic publishers

with the news of Diamond raising the amount of money comics need to make to be listed in their catalog, there has been a lot of talk about this being the death of the indy comic.

the reasoning behind the panic is because Diamond is the largest comic book distributor and pretty much every comic shop orders from them (mainly because they have exclusive distribution deals with Marvel and DC)

But even thought Diamond is the biggest game in town, doesn't mean their are other distributors out there with large reaches into the comic book market.

One distributor that has a bigger reach into the comic book market then people realize is Haven Distributors. Their catalog reaches 2300 comic book retailers.

Where as
going by information ICv2, diamond has an active customer base of 4300

Which makes Haven nearly half the size of Diamond in terms of the retailers that order form them. Not bad, giving that with the news of diamond changing their terms, in most likelihood Haven's numbers will grow.


and giving that a lot of comic shops only stick with Marvel and DC, the stores that order with Haven are the types of stores that have a good (or at least decent) amount of Indy comics. So even though you may not get your comic in diamond, by being in Haven you're more likely to be seen by the types of stores that will order your title(s)

Diamond makes policy changes that will have huge effect on smaller comic book publishers

Diamond has just raised it's threshold for minimum orders on the products they carry from $1500 to $2500 in whole sale orders.

This of course will effect many small publishers since they wont be able to meet the sales now need to keep their product in the diamond catalog.

it will also effect publishers who get by selling low volumes of reprinted stuff every month.

Diamond is also getting rid of the print version of their catalog for porn comic (and going to an online version)

not sure how much that's going to effect the industry because I didn't know they had this type of catalog.

it also seems that diamond is cutting the amount of time they give retailers to reorder periodicals (such as comics and magazines) to 60 days.