Since my last update, the tariff situation has stabilized enough that we’ve decided where to print the Fifth Season material (South America) and everything is ready to go. We want to get the print job going in September, but the Diamond bankruptcy continues to cause us grief. We had hoped this was all going to get sorted out last week because the judge was supposed to issue a ruling. Instead, he told Diamond it had to get serious about resolving the situation and pushed the ruling back to October 3.

Getting our books is one problem but also at issue is our contract with Diamond Book Distributor. It gave them the exclusive right to distribute our products into the book trade, which is distinct from the hobby trade that serves game stores. Diamond Book Distributors has functionally ceased to exist, so obviously none of our stuff is getting into the book trade at the moment. At the same time, the contract is still in force and there would be a risk if we violated it. One of the things our lawyer is trying to do is get Diamond to reject the old contract (since they can’t possibly assume it), which would free us to get new representation. As you can imagine, we do not want to wait until October 3 for this to happen. Hopefully, our lawyer can get our contract rejected before then.

The Fifth Season is, of course, a literary property, so our expectation all along was that it would have strong book trade sales. Ideally, we would have pre-order numbers before setting the print run, but obviously that is impossible for the book trade right now. We will probably have to take an educated guess on the print run, which has its own dangers. Over printing and under printing both create problems.

That is where things sit at the moment. One way or another, something needs to happen in September to push the project forward. Stay tuned.

Chris Pramas