Sunday 3 June 2012

Victoriana will be our last themed anthology for a while...

I announced this on the ''Accent UK Comics'' Facebook Group a few days ago...

'Sadly, I need to announce, I guess due to the current economic climate (which is hitting comic retailers as it is everybody else), we have been experiencing ever decreasing orders for our anthologies.
The idea of the anthologies was always to get the work of contributors as far and wide as possible, but with falling orders from stores this commitment isn't really being honoured, and so we've decided to stop publishing themed anthologies for a while.
Not an easy decision as we really enjoy pulling them together and selling them at Cons but a decision we've had to make.

So, Victoriana which is in the works, will be the last for a while which means that Vikings won't be published I'm afraid. Apologies to those with stories already in production.
This does not effect any of our other books in production, it just means that we'll be focussing more on the one shots and mini-series for a while ... and of course Thaddeus Mist which is looking jaw droppingly good'.


This move is not something that we've wanted to take, but is a reflection on the tough times we are all facing and also the success of events such as DC's 52. You just need to walk into stores around the country to see shelves packed with titles from 52, wander in a week later and you'll see that a lot of them have sold. This leaves shops with little cash to spend on books that will sit on the shelves a little longer. All understandable.
As mentioned in the Facebook posting, we will continue with the many one shots and mini-series in production, as well as the awesome Who On Earth Was Thaddeus Mist ?, with the focus on getting more readership which will then hopefully result in more interest in our other books, including anthologies.
Also, as mentioned in the KAPOW!! posting, these books do sell very well at Cons and we get plenty of customers, who have bought one before, coming up to us to buy more. We just need the retailers to stock them, if they don't then the non-convention-going-population won't see them. Hopefully smaller, cheaper, books will be more attractive and will continue to see healthy numbers through Diamond.
We are getting good interest in digital versions of our books through LUSH Comics, but as with printed copies, the percentage of cover price that actually gets back to us is not that high, and whilst this is a growing outlet for our books, it certainly is nowhere near encouraging us to replace paper with digital comics as a viable step to take.

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