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<blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 3869688" data-attributes="member: 2174">It is possible to rush a product to market in four months, but that's the absolute minimum due to the solicitation deadlines from the major hobby distributors. If you &quot;short solicit&quot; a product inside that time window, it does not appear in the printed catalogs that are sent to stores. Basically, if people ask for it the distributor can send it to them, but we're talking sales in the hundreds of units here. In order to solicit products to the book channel, the timelines are significantly more advanced. The deadlines to Diamond Books, the distributor used by Paizo and Green Ronin, for example, require full solicitation material (title, ISBN, synopsis, and ideally a cover image) WAY out in advance. To get into the tri-annual Diamond catalog you've got to have solicitations ready sometimes up to 10 months in advance. The deadline for product from April through August passed about two and a half weeks ago, so at this point all Gen Con products that are going to take full advantage of book store distribution have missed the boat.There are opportunities to get solicitations into monthly &quot;sales kits&quot; sent to book stores and chains, but a huge percentage of orders (and especially reorders) come from those tri-annual catalogs.It's not a matter of not being able to have product ready at Gen Con (yet). It's a matter of how well those products will be distributed.--Erik</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Erik Mona, post: 3869688, member: 2174"] It is possible to rush a product to market in four months, but that's the absolute minimum due to the solicitation deadlines from the major hobby distributors. If you "short solicit" a product inside that time window, it does not appear in the printed catalogs that are sent to stores. Basically, if people ask for it the distributor can send it to them, but we're talking sales in the hundreds of units here. In order to solicit products to the book channel, the timelines are significantly more advanced. The deadlines to Diamond Books, the distributor used by Paizo and Green Ronin, for example, require full solicitation material (title, ISBN, synopsis, and ideally a cover image) WAY out in advance. To get into the tri-annual Diamond catalog you've got to have solicitations ready sometimes up to 10 months in advance. The deadline for product from April through August passed about two and a half weeks ago, so at this point all Gen Con products that are going to take full advantage of book store distribution have missed the boat. There are opportunities to get solicitations into monthly "sales kits" sent to book stores and chains, but a huge percentage of orders (and especially reorders) come from those tri-annual catalogs. It's not a matter of not being able to have product ready at Gen Con (yet). It's a matter of how well those products will be distributed. --Erik [/QUOTE]

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