Diamond Comic Distributors has begun surveying its customers on the biggest changes in comics distribution in more than a decade:  making Tuesday New Comics Day and allowing all comic retailers to receive their books the day before New Comics Day to give them more time to process their shipments. 

The topic came up at the Diamond Summit in April (see “Comics on Tuesday?”), and this survey is designed to broaden the discussion to offer all comic retailers the opportunity to provide input.  Diamond has already had “substantive dialogue with publishers” on the topic, and is now taking it to retailers. 

The Tuesday release day would align New Comics Day with the release day for new DVDs, CDs, videogames, and books, allowing retailers serviced by Diamond to be competitive with other channels on DVDs and other products not exclusive to comic stores.  It would also facilitate the move to allow retailers to receive their shipments before on-sale date. 

The move to get retailers their shipments the day before on sale date would be done in conjunction with a secret shopper service, which would both check stores the day before New Comics Day to ensure compliance, and investigate complaints.  Retailers that broke on-sale dates would lose their early shipment privileges, at first temporarily, and permanently with repeat violations.  Retailers participating in the program would fund the secret shopper service with a weekly charge (estimated at $5 or less per store per week).   The proposal for a third party monitoring service (Diamond does not want to be the cop) funded by participating retailers came from well known retailer Paul Stock of Librairie Astro in Montreal. 

Both of these changes have been under discussion for years.  Given that Diamond has now apparently cleared them with publishers and found a solution to a major logistical issue (monitoring compliance), the choice has now been put to retailers, who have the opportunity to express their opinions formally through the survey. 

The survey closes June 11th.  The changes, if they happen, would be made in early January 2011.