I am, however, forced to go the digital route when hardcopy versions do not exist. I'm a fan of well-done adult comics...this series below was made exclusively digital although I wish Fantagraphics would actually publish it. This is one of the few pages that does not include anything explicit...(resized, actual page is 2100x3150)

Amazon as a corporation has some negatives. But I doubt as many as Marvel, DC, Diamond, Disney, Fox, ect, ect, ect...
These companies have done, are doing, and will do things that aren't all that nice. At least on the level of Amazon. And if you think Amazon is playing dirty trying to cut Apple out of the digital media market, what do you think of Marvel and DC trying to push other publishers out of the physical media department? As well as refusing to pay royalties on intellectual properties and works that have made the companies millions upon millions of dollars.

Yeah, are they worse than Disney or Marvel or Diamond?

If a comic publisher doesn't like the way Diamond works, their other option is to go out of business. If a book publisher doesn't like how Amazon works, they still get to sell their books in bookstores.

Funny I see lots of graphic novels in bookstores from publishers like Scholastic, First Second, etc. that really wouldn't miss a beat if Diamond refused to sell them. Most of the top selling comic format books in 2013 sold in bookstores and weren't carried distributed by Diamond. I saw Walking Dead trades in our local supermarket, Meiers, and even Wal-Mart, none of which were distributed by Diamond, and when we were in K-Mart yesterday there were nearly a dozen different Archie Digests for sale right by the registers that weren't distributed by Diamond. Diamond doesn't distribute the comics that sell digitally, and none of the comic publishers I buy books form at cons like Independent Creator's Expo or SPACE (Small Press Alternate Comics EXpo) seem to be out of business because Diamond won't distribute their books...so I gess publishers still get to sell their books elsewhere if they don't like how Diamond works too...

-M

Do you see many floppies being sold outside Diamond? How many publishers could survive on the graphic novel sales alone?

Hey, I agree, screw the Direct Market, but let's not pretend mainstream comics wouldn't take a gigantic dive if that happened. Fantagraphics would be okay, and I'm fine with that. The entire reason Fantagraphics would be okay is Diamond already all but pushed them out of the floppy market though. What's the last Fantagraphics floppy you saw at the LCS?

By the way, you should look up the sales for those Archie digests, and then wonder how the company hasn't folded yet when their top sellers are about a third of Marvel's cancellation numbers.

See, we're not talking about book publishers finding an entirely alternate format to sell their books in. The same exact book for sale at Amazon is for sale everywhere else books are sold. Not so with comics. The comic rack at the book store has maybe fifteen titles. How many comics come out a week? Those would cease to exist overnight.

So basically you're saying that book publisher that's having problems with Amazon should tough it up and sell their books elsewhere.


Agreed.

Here's a little sales perspective for you, some stats I got form Michael Stackpole in his seminar on breaking in the business as a writer at Origins last year...

-98% of all self-published ebooks don't break double digits in sales, which is why book publishers rarely look to carry or pick up stuff that is too small for them, if it doesn't look like it will move a minimum number of units they want no part of it and those writers have to find alternate means to get their books to customer, which is an uphill battle
-90% of all books printed won't reach 10K in sales in their lifetime
-many publishers pay non-established writers on the back end, so those books don't end up costing them as much to produce if they don't sell, and if in the group of that year's offerings, one or two books strike gold and produce an author that will sell in the future, it's worth their investment for the year
-the most consistent selling sector of the bookmarket is serials, and romance serials are tops among them, proven sellers, proven writers, telling proven stories with proven tropes.
-fresh new innovative content doesn't pay the bills, because it rarely sells unless it picks up the right kind of critical buzz that creates a grassroots support movement, so publishers are looking for stuff that fits the mold of proven sellers not original or innovative stuff

in other words, the book market looks a lot like the comic book direct market and Diamond behaves in a manner very similar to book publishers. Neither wants to deal with product that doesn't move a set number of units, both focus on proven sellers and highlight known commodities in their sales slates, etc.

If small book publishers want to get into bookstores, they can, but they have to do a lot of the sales calls, marketing, and delivery of the books themselves. The same is true of small comics publishers. Our shop gets 15-20 e-mails, 4-5 snail mail letters, and maybe 6-8 cold phone calls each month from small publishers looking to place their books in our shop. They're too small for Diamond. Most often our answer is no, because the margins are slimmer for us than something we might get from Diamond and chances it will sell to our customer base is slim to none. Of course we say no to about 90% of the stuff in the Diamond catalog because it won't sell to our customer base too, so how it's distributed doesn't matter to us as much as if our customers will buy it. If we had a snowball's chance in hell of selling the stuff in the shop, we would bring it in, from Diamond or not.

Small publishers don't have an inherent right to be distributed by Diamond. And most of those small book publishers you are talking about, they've gone out of business, or if they were successful, were bought out by one of the big 6 publishers. If comics worked like the book publishing industry, Image would have been bought out by Marvel or DC as soon as it became successful and become an imprint under their umbrella. Dark Horse too. IDW three. etc. etc. etc. Would comics be better off operating that way?

For those who aren't familiar with book publishing-this is the big 6:

Big Six (publishing)
Hachette (publisher)
Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group/Macmillan
Penguin Group
HarperCollins
Random House
Simon & Schuster

almost every label in book publishing is an imprint under one of those 6 umbrellas. They dominate the book market even more than Marvel/DC dominate the comics direct sales market. 

-M