About that DARK SHADOWS comicstrip collection: Part 2

UPDATE:  I just received word from Hermes Press that DARK SHADOWS THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES  is "on hold" because of low advance orders. The book has not been cancelled, though, and could be re-solicited in 2015.

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If you pre-ordered DARK SHADOWS THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES on Amazon, you received an e-mail last week notifying you the order had been cancelled "due to a lack of availability." The book had originally been scheduled for release in early September, but the date came and went without orders being fulfilled. I contacted the publisher, Hermes Press, about the situation, and their spokesperson told me that advance orders for the book had been too low to meet that particular deadline. The company still planned to proceed with the book, but it would take a little time to get those advance sales numbers up.

Ordinarily, I wouldn't run an update like this without input from the publisher. I've been getting e-mails from people curious about the book's status, and I simply don't know what's going on. I've sent two messages to Hermes Press since Oct. 27 and have yet to get a response. There could be a number of perfectly valid explanations for this silence, but I've got a lot of dead links on this site leading to the Amazon sales page for DARK SHADOWS THE COMPLETE NEWSPAPER DAILIES that need to be addressed.

At the moment, I'm not exactly brimming with confidence that this book will ever see the light of day. The advance orders were extraordinarily low for a book with the broad fanbase of DARK SHADOWS. Maybe there's just no demand for the product ... but it disturbs me that businesses have a habit of folding after trying to sell DARK SHADOWS products to apathetic fans. Spectre Toys produced exactly three Mego-inspired dolls based on characters from the original series before going out of business. Majestic Studios, which produced three museum-quality DARK SHADOWS dolls, also seems to have disappeared. Dynamite pulled the plug on their various DARK SHADOWS comics, while they've been able to keep bottom-shelf characters like The Green Hornet, Red Sonja and The Six Million Dollar Man in print.

The day I have to run an announcement that Big Finish has ceased production on their line of DARK SHADOWS audiodramas it probably the day I stop updating this website. If fans want to keep DARK SHADOWS alive and relevant, they need to begin mobilizing to support these products.