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Another Reason Why Diamond Book Distributors Have A Difficult Week Ahead Of Them

Published Sat, 13 Mar 2010 09:00:53 -0600

Last updated Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:30:39 -0500

Who would be a Diamond Book Distributor representative right now?

Currently, Amazon won't allow customers to directly order product distributed to them by Diamond Book Distributors – which includes Marvel, Dark Horse, Image, IDW, Avatar and many more prominent comic book publishers. While booksellers registered with Amazon Marketplace can sell copies of the disputed comics, Amazon's warehouse supplies are just sitting there, not selling. So Amazon are ordering no more to replace them. Which, for a number of smaller publishers who depend on Amazon as their primary sales base, is a disaster. Equally, Diamond Book Distributors are losing a regular stream of revenue.

We're told this is a temporary issue. That's it's a procedural issue after the weekend's glitch that saw a $14.99 and $8.24 price points applied to many items distributed by DBD to Amazon, even if their retail value was in three figures. That saw a number of items delivered below cost, below even the cost of postage. And that saw Amazon pay out $25 certificates to other who ordered and did not receive product as a result.

There is also the abiding suspicion that this is a political move on Amazon's part, punishing Diamond Book Distributors and part of a negotiation over where the fault lies and who may have to pay for the results of the "glitch".

Naturally, the continuing lack of resolution is causing worry amongst the affected publishers. Coincidentally, this week sees a number of publishers heading to Baltimore to hold meetings with Diamond Bookstore Distributors representatives at Diamond's HQ where they were due to discuss all sorts of things, contracts, distribution issues, product, market tactics, you know the usual.

But if the situation has not been resolved by then, and right now there's no sign it will be, those may be very awkward meetings indeed.

There may well be very little Diamond can say or do. But publishers will be in a very good negotiation position. And it's just possible we may get some answers to how this whole thing happened in the first place.

It's also worth noticing that, despite Barnes & Noble's similar glitch, they continue to sell DBD distributed product. Although a number of customers are now receiving cancellation notices. And no $25 vouchers…

UPDATE: Slowly and surely a handful of DBD titles are returning to normal status at Amazon. Hopefully we'll see a lot more as the day continues.

UPDATEUPDATE: And here they all come rolling back. A lot of the hardcovers Amazon no longer have in stock, but they are accepting preorders on unpublished titles now, and returning Buy Buttons to comics that are in stock.

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