Seven Seas announced via their @gomanga account on twitter that they have made scheduling changes following the Coronavirus pandemic.
From the announcement:
Our Ghost Ship paperbacks are distributed by Diamond Book Distributors, and as you likely heard, they’ve stopped shipping new titles until further notice. Ghost Ship paperbacks on sale April 1 or later will likely reach stores late, unless they shipped before the shut-down. But…
...Seven Seas paperbacks are distributed by Macmillan, and as of now, basically all those April paperbacks have shipped to stores, online and offline. Those April paperbacks should be coming out on time--or only slightly late, since chains could be slowed.
We know many in-person bookstores are closed, but lots of online retailers are still shipping paperbacks to customers--such as @rightstufanime and http://barnesandnoble.com and many others. Call your local book & comic stores, too, as many are offering shipping or curbside pick-up!
Here’s the rough news: almost all our May paperbacks--Seven Seas AND Ghost Ship--need to be delayed, with new dates coming next week. Those are the books that have been getting hit the last few weeks with shut-downs and scale-downs. But there’s a bright side to May:
One thing we can control on our end, and is safe in the pandemic, is ebooks. So we’ll be releasing basically all our May books on time on DIGITAL platforms. In other words, our May books are being changed to Digital Early, to come out in May even if paperbacks are delayed.
Paperback delays in June, July, etc. are a question mark. We plan to keep our ebook program running on time to keep most of our new releases on schedule, even if their paperback editions are delayed. (How long they’ll be delayed depends on stuff that's still developing.)
There is light at the end of the tunnel however:
Also, we’re doing a big license event later this month (April), to announce some of our Fall 2020 books and beyond. We hope that will include good news for a lot of you! As ever, we’ll do the event on social media, so you can tune in, in real time, from the safety of your home.
I'm happy to see a very clear message from Seven Seas, and look forward to supporting them through the coming months, especially since Diamond Distribution are in financial crisis, having laid off staff delayed payments to vendors until they can retrieve money from struggling comic shops. It seems Seven Seas have their ship in good order and will weather the storm far better than Marvel of DC.
