Diamonds

Four years ago I made a good decision. I decided to have our graphic novels distributed by Diamond Book Distributors. This is the other side of Diamond Comic Distributors, the company that supplies every comic shop in North America with their comics, and also puts out the monthly Previews catalog. DBD was the division set up to sell to book stores.

In 2005 Yaoi Press had published several books, and was established enough to work with a major distributor. I thought of Diamond because it was a company I'd known most of my life. I'd ordered from the Previews catalog for years as a comic collector. Graphic novels were just thicker comic books. I decided they should be the one to sell them.

This was an instinctive decision, not based on much research. I'd looked at a few other distributors, but not really in depth.

Diamond Distributors has a love/hate relationship with the industry. I'm aware of it's haters. You'll excuse me if I don't go into why some businesses take issue with them. They're my distributor. I'm not going to spread bad press about them.

However, there was a time when I was strongly pressured to find a new distributor. My friend at Hirameki was very unhappy with them. He told me horror stories about how their account was handled. He warned the same would happen to me. Then a person from Dramaqueen told me how they refused to ever do business with Diamond due to bad experiences of their own. Last was Bebeautiful. They also were not happy with Diamond.

Then I spoke to a friend from DMP. She had also heard what the other companies said about Diamond. We agreed we were both going to stay with them. We hadn't had problems. We didn't know if the grass would be greener elsewhere. We were staying put.

I think a great deal of the success both Yaoi Press and DMP has seen is because of this decision. No distributor is perfect, but there still hasn't been one whose shown they can do better for us.