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Nat Gertler On CR’s Ten Unanswered Questions
posted December 17, 2008
 

1. I suspect the "alternative audience" was never as separate an audience as some would have you believe, but either folks who wanted something else to buy after they had picked out all their mainstream books, or people who felt they had outgrown the mainstream. The Big Two are doing an ever-better job of providing more material for both these groups.

4. I haven't done a full analysis, but I suspect that sales have gone up at the tail end of the 300 chart in large part because of more color licensed books and other things with strong hooks being put out by publishers outside the big two, creating a lot of books big enough to make some impact.

5. I think most relevant folks get the CBLDF; I think those that don't do so loudly because they feel outshouted by the very presence of the CBLDF and ongoing support for it.

6. I think there's less moral component to concerns over Marvel & DC's dominance of the DM because other publishers now have better access to non-DM markets.

7. The lack of traditional self-publishing success is more a failure of the black-and-white pamphlet market. The traditional self-publisher doesn't go color. Notice the general lack of B&W pamphlets from other publishers? (I will add another name to your current self-pubbing successes, however: Echo, by Terry Moore. But it says something that the three guys with really visible self-publishing efforts -- Smith, Sim, Moore -- are the same names one could've listed a decade back.)