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.

 

[Jd Smith1]

And you have repeatedly cast this in the worst possible light while brushing off the behavior of Diamond and the estate, and the significant damage it has caused, as "feces happens." That's on you.

Its simple fact that things like this happen every single working day. In 2022, for example, there were 383,810 filings of various types of bankruptcy.

No one goes into business planning to go bankrupt. While Diamond's fall may hurt publishers, Diamond employees are definitely losing their jobs.

 

[Jd Smith1]

And not every company is going to have them always at the ready, especially in low-margin businesses, especially within months of having to shell out money for tariffs levied without sane discussion or processes.

Then those companies are accepting an additional degree of risk, particularly if they engage in consignment markets. That's their choice, not a tragedy. If their crowdfunding works for GR, good for them. If it does not, that's the breaks. This is, ultimately, a business endeavor being undertaken.

I'm not familiar with Diamond's methods except by hearsay, but I do some business through Amazon, and I can assure you that Amazon will be a lot more pragmatic and authoritarian than Diamond, and very willing to boot anyone they find not playing by their rules.

Tariffs are not the topic of the thread, so I'll skip that.

 

[JLowder]

I'm not familiar with Diamond's methods except by hearsay, but I do some business through Amazon, and I can assure you that Amazon will be a lot more pragmatic and authoritarian than Diamond, and very willing to boot anyone they find not playing by their rules.

Tariffs are not the topic of the thread, so I'll skip that.

Tariffs are very much on topic, as they are an expense--running into the tens of thousands--that have hit these companies with little notice in recent months. That impacts their immediate cash flow for emergencies, such as the Diamond inventory grab, and undermines the armchair CEO claims these small companies should have planned better.

Again, your repeated insistence that all this is "just business" is appalling and really sums up everything wrong with the way a lot of these predatory companies and individuals do business. And holding up a truly predatory company like Amazon as if everyone is lucky the others are not that bad is fairly absurd. All businesses are not predatory, and "it could have been worse" is a very shallow hot take. Moreover, Diamond acting as they have in the lead-up to the bankruptcy will not save a single one of their employees, but it very well may take several very good companies with them as they go under.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Again, your repeated insistence that all this is "just business" is appalling and really sums up everything wrong with the way a lot of these predatory companies and individuals do business. And holding up a truly predatory company like Amazon as if everyone is lucky the others are not that bad is fairly absurd. All businesses are not predatory, and "it could have been worse" is a very shallow hot take. Moreover, Diamond acting as they have in the lead-up to the bankruptcy will not save a single one of their employees, but it very well may take several very good companies with them as they go under.

Appalling to you, sure.

Amazon rocks, really. They've made me a fair amount of money over the years, and they will always have a special place in my heart.

 

[JLowder]

Appalling to you, sure.

Amazon rocks, really. They've made me a fair amount of money over the years, and they will always have a special place in my heart.

The world is bigger than you, though, so that hot take--I did okay, even if they screwed over lots of other people--is never going to be the flex you seem to think.

 

[Jd Smith1]

The world is bigger than you, though, so that hot take--I did okay, even if they screwed over lots of other people--is never going to be the flex you seem to think.

Again, I'm not clear on your usage of 'flex' in this context. Or 'hot take'.

The world is also larger than you, and what appalls you. Diamond folding is not a good thing, but it is, in the final sorting, just business. No one has or will perish.

 

[JLowder]

Again, I'm not clear on your usage of 'flex' in this context. Or 'hot take'.

The world is also larger than you, and what appalls you. Diamond folding is not a good thing, but it is, in the final sorting, just business. No one has or will perish.

Yes, the world is bigger than me. It includes people who think all businesses are predatory. It includes people who run publishers and distributors who get in trouble and pass, through malice or incompetence, as much of that damage on to business partners as possible, typically shrugging all the damage off as "just business." (That's the surest sign malice was involved.) There are people who look at those types of predators harming creative companies that have done good work and struggled to treat creators and business partners well for decades and shrug it off because "no one will perish."

If someone is aware of others and is capable of even the smallest amount of empathy, those callous hot takes ("a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction"--Merriam-Webster), especially when offered in public or semi-public forums frequented by the people directly harmed by the events under discussion, are always going be trash. Doubly so when they try to blame the victims. These types of comments are never the flex ("an act of bragging or showing off"--again M-W, free online) the people posting them seem to think.

I hope that clears that up for you.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Yes, the world is bigger than me. It includes people who think all businesses are predatory. It includes people who run publishers and distributors who get in trouble and pass, through malice or incompetence, as much of that damage on to business partners as possible, typically shrugging all the damage off as "just business." (That's the surest sign malice was involved.) There are people who look at those types of predators harming creative companies that have done good work and struggled to treat creators and business partners well for decades and shrug it off because "no one will perish."

If someone is aware of others and is capable of even the smallest amount of empathy, those callous hot takes ("a quickly produced, strongly worded, and often deliberately provocative or sensational opinion or reaction"--Merriam-Webster), especially when offered in public or semi-public forums frequented by the people directly harmed by the events under discussion, are always going be trash. Doubly so when they try to blame the victims. These types of comments are never the flex ("an act of bragging or showing off"--again M-W, free online) the people posting them seem to think.

I hope that clears that up for you.

Not really, but its not important.

Sure, there are people who believe a lot of things. This is not new.

But regardless of what people think, or believe, a bankruptcy proceeding follows a well-defined route to an inevitable, passionless, and unsurprising conclusion.

The question that interests me, is: who will absorb Diamond's market share?

 

[JLowder]

But regardless of what people think, or believe, a bankruptcy proceeding follows a well-defined route to an inevitable, passionless, and unsurprising conclusion.

That's only true if someone lacks even the smallest shred of empathy for other human beings. It's not even true in legal circles, as bankruptcies can be quite chaotic, as with Lehman Brothers and on and on.

 

[Jd Smith1]

That's only true if someone lacks even the smallest shred of empathy for other human beings. It's not even true in legal circles, as bankruptcies can be quite chaotic.

They can on occasion. More often, not. This one, with a consignment inventory with loosely-worded contracts, isn't likely to hold many shockers. But time will tell.