Happy Yaoi Yum Yum is going to ship a little late. We're four days behind schedule right now, and anticipate this delay continuing until at least May 19th. We're very lucky to have a printer who makes us a priority when they get our files in. There's nothing they can do until those files get sent, however. We're hoping to ship in early June. I wasn't as concerned about this as usual because I thought we'd lost our two most time-sensitive orders. These are comic shops and Borders. Borders isn't ordering much from any publisher these days, but we never even marketed HYYY to them due to the extreme content. It's no surprise that they aren't carrying this one.
Comic shops are a different animal. We had a respectable number of orders, but new higher minimums were imposed by our distributor. A month after the orders were first showing up on our vendor inventory report they disappeared. I assumed this was due to their new policy.
Without comic shops or Borders we've lost most of the 'Where the Hell is my book?' factor that leads to canceled orders. People preorder books at comic shops and to a lesser degree, Borders. With Borders you have many stores prominently displaying a list of what graphic novels are 'coming soon' with the release dates. I've seen this as a whiteboard sign behind the info desk at one Borders. It was a black changeable letter sign on the wall at another location. Customers see that _______ title is arriving on _____ date and show up on that date to pick up a copy. When the book doesn't arrive on time they're annoyed. They blame Borders. They order it on Amazon instead. Borders cancels orders by the hundreds. A few of the more autonomous branches never order from the late publisher again. (A Borders vending at a Florida anime con told me this).
Borders is out of the picture for HYYY. Comic shops suddenly aren't. A few days ago I saw that our comic shop (aka direct market) orders had magically reappeared. ~~; Argh. I mean...hooray.
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