While we’re sipping soup and all that, Joe Nozemack, publisher at Oni Press, was kind enough to send us some brief thoughts on Diamond’s new ordering policies and we wanted to get them out there as soon as possible. We’ll be back with more linkage and analysis. Now, here’s Joe:
I would hope to think that the $2,500 minimum that Diamond is instituting isn’t an arbitrarily concocted number. I’m sure they looked at the costs of listing a title, giving it space in the catalog, cutting the p.o. and receiving and reshipping the orders. There is a hard cost to doing all of this and I’m sure this went into the calculation of the minimum. Diamond should not be forced to lose money to list and distribute a title if it cannot prove to have a viable sales history after a certain amount of time. I also don’t think anyone is saying that these judgments will be made prior to giving a title a chance.
And in response to Simon Jones use of our title Salt Water Taffy as an example of a book that might be on the chopping block, this is just not the case. While the direct market is an important and key sales outlet for Oni Press, it is not our only sales outlet. When mass market and library sales are included, this title was in no danger of having its purchase order not issued.
But I do believe that if higher limits are to be put on relisting titles in Previews, Diamond might take another look at the 3% reorder fee that it charges for items it distributes for non-Premier publishers. While the fee is understandable on low ticket items, I do think that the fee can have the effect of being a penalty for those publishers besides Marvel, DC, Dark Horse and Image. The fee makes perfect sense for low priced items, say under $5, to cover the costs of picking and packaging them. But for books and graphic novels, I believe the margins and profits are high enough that the fee, passed on to the retailers, makes our product less attractive to the retailers.
Hello Mr. Nozemack,
If you have not read the entirety of my post, only the portion that was quoted, this is the sentence that followed it:
“Actually, that’s unlikely to happen to Oni. But I wanted to show just how high a bar Diamond is setting. (And I’m not picking on you, Oni Press. I just using this for illustrative purposes. I’m so sorry! m(_ _;)m)”
All I was interested in was showing the available math behind a top 300 trade paperback, nothing more. And I did feel bad about it, since I’ve quite enjoyed the original volume. It’s a fine, fine book.
Are the “mass market and library sales” that Mr. Nozemack is talking about done through Diamond?
“I would hope to think that the $2,500 minimum that Diamond is instituting isn’t an arbitrarily concocted number. I’m sure they looked at the costs of listing a title, giving it space in the catalog, cutting the p.o. and receiving and reshipping the orders. There is a hard cost to doing all of this and I’m sure this went into the calculation of the minimum. Diamond should not be forced to lose money to list and distribute a title if it cannot prove to have a viable sales history after a certain amount of time.”
Just a big “A-men!” to what Joe Nozemack is saying. I’ve read plenty of responses to this whole topic on various message boards, and there is a definite undertone among a small subset of folks who want to paint Diamond as some evil organization that hates small press comic books. I even read one small publisher who went on a tirade to villify Diamond for actively and purposely trying to kill independent comic books, blah blah blah.
Um, no – this is a *business* decision. It costs quite a bit of money to purchase items from hundreds of different suppliers and distribute them to thousands of customers. Like any major corporation, Diamond has overhead. They have hundreds of employees, multiple buildings and warehouses, trucks and equipment. It costs money to deal with suppliers, costs money to print a catalog, costs money to process orders, costs money to count and sort the product, costs money to handle accounts payable and receivables, costs money to handle damages, returns and other problems. Add it all up, and divide that sum total by the number of products offered, and you arrive at a dollar amount. Diamond did this, and arrived at a number for 2009: $2500-wholesale per product line item. (Of course I’m oversimplifying the whole process here, but you get the idea) And remember that does not mean Diamond gets $2500 per item, their cut of the product is a fraction of that – probably closer to $600 to $900 per item, depending on discount levels and discounts offered by the suppliers.
Diamond is not cutting off profitable items. They set the new benchmark at that level because items below that point are *losing* money, for Diamond. A book that sells below that level costs more in assorted costs to distribute than the revenue it would bring in. Diamond is trying to staunch the financial bleeding.
And as Mr. Nozemack points out, Diamond is only *part* of the larger revenue stream for any small press publisher. For most small press publishers, the majority of their sales are outside of Diamond – bookstores, libraries, online, direct-to-retail, direct-to-retailers, etc. And it has been that way for years. I would go so far as to say that any publisher that cannot survive without Diamond probably should be reconsidering their business plan (or rather, should have done that years ago). This move is not unexpected – the writing has been on the wall for a while now – and any publisher should have been prepared for an eventual Diamond cutoff. Not to be mean (after all, I’m working for one of those publishers in the bullseye) – just cold, hard reality.
Oni is distributed to bookstores and libraries by Diamond Books Distributors. Their, and other DBD publishers’, titles are also available from general distributors such as Ingram and Baker and Taylor, but it would seem that those distributors order their product from Diamond.
Mr. Nozemack, do you have any information regarding how this affects DBD publishers? Are the Book orders lumped in with the Comics orders to meet the benchmark? Or are DBD publishers given preferential treatment, since they are exclusive accounts for DBD?