On the heels of my musings about 300’s “gateway” potential, and its record-breaking weekend at the box office, ICv2 is reporting that Diamond, the book’s exclusive distributor to both the direct and mainstream markets, was out of stock of the $30 hardcover as of last Thursday, March 8th. In this case, though, the finger of blame doesn’t point at the much-maligned monopoly, but rather at the publisher, Dark Horse, who once again has a hit movie tie-in (Hellboy, Sin City) but is faced with a shortage of books to fully take advantage of it.

Dark Horse VP Business Development Michael Martens…explained the situation. “The information I gave you last Wednesday was several days old,” he said, “and in that time a lot of copies evaporated.” The 14,000 copies that had been available as of Friday, March 2nd had been sold, and Diamond was out of stock as of last Thursday, March 8th.

Martens also clarified the news on the 15,000 copies of the 300 graphic novel that had “just arrived.” Those copies had arrived in the country and were en route to Diamond. When they are available for distribution (presumably this week), they’ll be used to fill the back orders that accumulated last week. Martens promised a favorable allocation of those copies for the direct market vs. the book channel, with some copies left to fill comic store orders that come in this week.

Last, the additional 15,000 copy order “en route” from Asia is around two months away, meaning that the copies currently in stock in retail stores, soon to be at Diamond, and at book wholesalers will be all of the supply available to the market for some time. Martens did say that additional copies had been ordered beyond those 15,000 copies in an attempt to catch up with demand.

Talk about dropping the ball!

Last year, anticipating demand driven by the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta, DC made the TPB returnable for a limited time for direct market retailers, enabling them to stock an ample supply and take advantage of the heightened interest in the book, which ended up being Diamond’s best-selling graphic novel of the year. In an article about their upcoming Minx imprint, Publisher’s Weekly noted that “DC will also be making its Frank Miller graphic novels returnable in a tie-in with the March release of the 300 movie.”

By the time Dark Horse’s additional [non-returnable for the direct market] copies of 300 are finally printed, the demand will have died down significantly and it will be a major missed opportunity and, as The Beat points out, raises some interesting questions about their financial viability.

We know this is a $30 book with high production values, but is Dark Horse’s cash flow really so bad that they couldn’t just front order enough books to meet demand for a movie that the studio has been touting as a “four quadrant hit” for four months or so? It’s not like they would ever get stuck with them–Frank Miller is a best selling author and his books are perennials.

For now, both MidtownComics.com and MileHighComics.com are currently showing 300 in stock, as is Amazon.com, where it is currently ranked as their #6 bestseller in Books and is priced at a hefty 40% discount, significantly cheaper than the aforementioned comics retailers. Also available is the movie tie-in, 300: The Art Of The Film, which Amazon has ranked #95 and priced at a 34% discount.

In an ironic twist on the “gateway” potential of the movie, one book that is probably seeing a related bump in sales, with no concerns about availability, is Steven Pressfield’s amazing historical fiction novel, Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae, which is currently ranked #21 on Amazon. If you enjoyed 300, in either form, and want to read more about what happened in that epic battle — or you thought Miller’s slim story didn’t cover enough, and hunger for fascinating insights into Spartan culture and daily life — that book is an absolute must-read. What it lacks in visual appeal, it more than makes up in engaging storytelling.

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