Quote: Warren Ellis (Again)

In this thread over at his Whitechapel forum, he opened my eyes to just how crappy the current distribution system is:

The first odd thing happened after the first issue came out. Now, remember, I’d been doing mostly original material for the previous few years, and doing fine. But I was suddenly flooded with email from kids — teenagers — who had never heard of me before. What was happening, it turned out, was that I was reaching seven or eight hundred stores at maximum, and there was anything up to a couple of thousand stores who just weren’t ordering my stuff. I remember talking this over with people at Marvel and particularly DC, and it turned out that this was in fact the case — that two thirds of comics stores really don’t order much other than superhero comics and a few licensed books. And in those years of doing my own thing, the audience had turned over to the point where there were people who’d never read a thing by me. It hadn’t been all that long ago that I’d been selling 200,000 copies of DV8 and 150,000 copies of WOLVERINE, I thought…

The second really odd thing came in some months later. Sales of TRANSMET TPBs spiked massively. And the only thing that had changed was that I was writing UFF. What had happened was that these new readers had liked UFF, gone looking for other stuff by me, found nothing in their local store, gone to Amazon or bookstores, and picked up TRANSMET books. A few months later, I saw numbers on all my other creator-owned TPBs pick up too.

Emphasis added by me.

This is another reason why I’m all for ebooks.

I don’t want some git in a foul T-shirt restricting my choices based on his limited brain pan.

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