Media release — We’ve signed a deal with PDG, a newsstand specialty market distributor, to distribute our titles to specialty stores, comfort stores, independent shops, and also to Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and other smaller bookstore chains.
There are 2 crucial aspects to this deal:
1) issues will be released to newsstand 2 to 3 months after they’re released in comic shops. even then, newsstands will only receive between 2 to 5 copies per issue, so if you want your copy guaranteed, make sure to pre-order at your LCS!
2) a lot of of the newsstands are located 10+ miles from a comic shop. We want to grow an audience not force customers to choose between getting our titles at a bookstore or at their favorite comic shop. If you already get your comics at a comic shop, by all means, please continue to do so!
We strongly feel that comics need to be sold in a lot more places in buy to not only reach a new audience and supply a living for comic creators, but to also inspire a new generation of comic creators that may not have comic shops in their area and may not even be aware that new comic books are still being made and that there are a variety of titles and publishers to choose from.
Most aspiring creators don’t believe that their stories can earn them a living and that they need to instead work on pre-existing characters at a bigger company. This is mainly because creator-owned comics are not being distributed en masse and Alterna is pleased to be the only creator-owned publisher currently on newsstands.
The initial success of our newsstand test market of stores has also shown something interesting — we’ve seen a 20% to 25% increase on issue #2 orders compared to issue #1 orders. This is in stark contrast to the direct comics market, where there is normally a 40% to 60% decline in orders from issue #1 to issue #2. hopefully we’ll continue to see growth in these areas as we step forward.
As always, thank you for reading and for supporting Alterna!
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