Update on Sanctum's Black Bat Reprints

A week ago, Sanctum Books' Anthony Tollin commented on a discussion about tardiness with the publisher's Spider reprints. He included The Black Bat in his response. I've copied most of it below, adding only paragraph breaks and removing a portion about recent health issues.

BLACK BAT #10 is completed and WILL soon be resolicited. Sales and income are down, and THE SPIDER and THE BLACK BAT simply were not selling well enough to justify their continuation (at least not with the added cost of the bonus Sanctum Books extras). It costs a lot of $$$ to include all the extra features and articles that are part of the Sanctum Book format, but those extras don't appear to pump up sales at all, at least not on SPIDER and BLACK BAT.  

Altus, like most other pulp reprint companies, relies on print-on-demand printing, while Sanctum has always gone exclusively with actual print runs and real warehoused first printing inventories. Hopefully, Altus will be able to make a go of THE SPIDER and BLACK BAT with the lessor print-on-demand advance overhead.  

Also, THE SPIDER and THE BLACK BAT took much more time editorially and production-wise to produce than THE SHADOW and DOC SAVAGE, and I recently had to concede that I was sabotaging/delaying several important upcoming book projects (including THE SHADOW newspaper strip collection and the revised, expanded color edition of THE SHADOW SCRAPBOOK) by devoting so much time to two time-consuming ongoing series that were not producing an actual profit. Things would have been different if THE SPIDER and BLACK BAT could have sold just a couple hundred more copies per issue, but they simply didn't.

Probably nothing that shocks anyone but it's still good to hear it from the dachshund's mouth, if I may alter the expression to refer to another interest Mr. Tollin and I share.

Last we'd heard, the books were going to come out annually. Now we're not sure if there will be an 11th issue. Too bad, but business is business.