Green Ronin Crowdfunding Legal Defense Fund In Fight Against Diamond Distrubutors

Green Ronin Publishing has set up a crowdfunding campaign to help cover legal fees fighting to get back their inventory from Diamond Comic Distributors in what it describes as "a dire financial threat to our company, not just today, but well into the future".

Diamond, which filed for Bankruptcy in January, still holds the stock of Green Ronin and over one hundred other companies in its warehouse, and has asked the court for ownership of that inventory so that it can liquidate it and pay its creditors. The distributor, while being mainly comic-book focused, also serves as distributor for some toy and TTRPG companies, including Green Ronin, Paizo, Goodman Games, and Roll For Combat.

The GoFundMe had raised $17K at the time of writing, with over 200 donations.

Paizo Publishing, also affected, has announced that its upcoming releases will not be available at major bookstores or at Amazon because the company has stopped shipping products to Diamond. This includes 12 August releases and 10 September releases, such as Starfinder Player Core, Starfinder GM Core, Pathfinder Battlecry, and more.

The court has scheduled a hearing on July 21 to hear objections from the affected vendors.

My name is Nicole Lindroos, co-owner of Green Ronin Publishing. Diamond Comic Distributors' recent Chapter 11 bankruptcy has impacted over 100 independent publishers, including Green Ronin, putting us in a very precarious position. Diamond is attempting to use a legal technicality to claim ownership of millions of dollars worth of consigned inventory, which amounts to several hundreds of thousands of dollars for Green Ronin Publishing alone. This is stock that we still own and have not been paid for.

This is a dire financial threat to our company, not just today, but well into the future. We must secure legal representation immediately before the deadline to do so passes.

While there is no "good" time for someone to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of your property to sell for the benefit of their biggest creditors, it is especially challenging given that Gen Con is weeks away. Gen Con is not just a convention for us, it's our most important annual event for connecting with TTRPG enthusiasts, our business partners, and our community, and this year is no exception. We're launching new products and have already committed significant funds to cover everything from booth space, travel (flights, rooms), and most critically, the production of new books and merchandise specifically for the show floor.

Diamond’s bankruptcy and this legal action also mean that Green Ronin has lost its book trade distributor. We are looking for a new partner, but that will take some time. Book trade sales of literary licenses, currently The Fifth Season and The Expanse, are a key part of our strategies for those games. This is especially bad timing for The Fifth Season RPG because we recently received final approvals from N.K. Jemisin and the game is ready to go to print.

We simply don't have the cash on hand to do all of this, pay for an attorney, or participate in any collective legal actions with other publishers in our same position.

The banks are stopping at nothing to wring every last dollar out of Diamond - including taking several hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Green Ronin product to sell in order to pay Diamond’s debts - but they can't do that, and we've got a legal agreement that says as much. Now, we just need to secure a law firm to represent us in the courts.

The funds raised through this campaign will be used directly to cover the escalating legal fees associated with fighting Diamond's claim in bankruptcy court. This includes attorney retainers, court filing fees, and the costs of pursuing every possible avenue to recover our inventory and protect Green Ronin's assets.

 

[mamba]

Not that they can ever define deserving or undeserving....

sure they can, they deserve it, everyone else does not

 

[JLowder]

GR is, by this fundraiser, announcing that they do not have the financial resources for even a modest legal defense.

This is a company with an annual revenue in the seven million dollar range.

So, either they are cynically exploiting their fan base, or they are ripe for harvesting.

Lots of speculation there, all, of course, framed to present Green Ronin in the worst possible light.

 

[JLowder]

Couple that with the claim they can't raise $50,000 on a few week's notice, and either they're trying to offset their losses via fake panhandling, or their profit margin isn't all that great.

Comment removed. The mods addressed this.

 

[JLowder]

It's not that the games are not generating money. As in comics, the cover prices charged have not kept up with the cost of goods. More importantly, of that cover price, less of that money is going to publishers (and then to freelancers) because distributors and platforms such as Amazon have increased the cut they take. The same with the major licensors. (The book Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow is well worth a read on this general trend.)

Publishing has always been a narrow-margin business. Even a single percent here or there can make a big difference. Because of the way the current market operates, places like Green Ronin that try to pay their freelancers fairly—as opposed to shifting all those increased distribution and licensing costs on to the creators, as some places do—are quite succeptible to bad actors and unexpected turns, like sudden bills for tens of thousands of dollars for tarrifs or legal fees that never should have been necessary.

 

[chuckdee]

My impression is that many fairly established publishers (Onyx Path for instance) use crowdfunding because it means that you no longer have to go quite so deep into a financial hole during the development/printing of a new product, with any future payoff many months away once it can be sold. It de-risks, somewhat.

That's what I mean by shift left. But it has its own problems. If you aren't careful, it can be like robbing Peter to pay Paul. The aforementioned Onyx Path is a good example of this, though they pulled themselves back from doing that. Communication and updates are much more frequent than in a traditional manufacturing setting. And backers can feel like the company is beholden to them or get the wrong idea about their level of investment.

It's a different way of doing business. And if you do it wrong, you can waste a lot of goodwill (see Palladium for a huge example of this). It requires a different skillset and if you don't have it and don't take the time to learn it or hire someone that knows it, you can really mess your business up.

 

[chuckdee]

Onyx Path also has a record of their products being "mostly done" by the time they start crowdfunding.

Umm... not by a long shot. They have a first draft, but there's a loooong tail on the end. I back a lot of their projects and you should go in knowing you'll have a wait. And they even run crowdfunding campaigns on multiple platforms to get around the long time they take to fulfill.