Crisis of Finite Claypools
I'm probably not going to make any friends with the following, but here goes.
Claypool Comics is in potential trouble, as evidenced by this link: MILE HIGH COMICS presents THE BEAT at COMICON.com: Claypool threatened by Diamond policy. Basically, some of their books are not going to make the new thresholds established by Diamond for distribution. These were controversial a few months ago when first announced, but the the argument over them died down pretty quickly. Personally, I don't particularly care for those minimums, but Diamond can establish them with impunity because they're a functional monopoly.
As much as I'm bothered by the potential stifling of another set of editorial voices, I have to wonder how Claypool hasn't found a consistent audience for its books over 12 years of publication. No, I'm not intimiately familiar with their works, just passingly so. I don't know all the details, but I do wonder what their audience looks like and if perhaps they might be better served by dropping floppies altogether and moving to a quarterly/biannually-published thicker magazine. Or is their audience made up of impulse-buyers?
Either way, they've been around for a long time and haven't managed to connect to a larger audience. Diamond's threshold isn't *that* high (for instance Strangeways #1 is over it by a significant margin, though I don't know for sure if that would have happened if it wasn't a Speakeasy book). Maybe looking for a different way to do things is what's called for now (as painful as it might seem at the moment.)
Of course, I'm just an ignorant loudmouth.