DIAMOND RAISES THRESHOLDS FOR PUBLISHERS

On Newsarama's website today it was announced that Diamond Comic Distributors would be raising their threshold for Publishers once again. I definitely reccommend reading Newsarama's article at this link: http://www.newsarama.com/comics/010919-Diamond-Thresholds.html . This is sad news for every Independent publisher out there. Diamond had recently raised their threshold in September 2005 to $1500 and back then it was tight for Indies to meet that goal, but now they are raising it to $2500. There's pretty much no way that anyone will be able to meet that amount unless they are one of the big companies. By big, I mean Marvel , DC, Image, Dark Horse, IDW, SLG and a few others. So, what does it mean for us little guys? I'm not sure yet. As it is, we are all always struggling to get our books out there. But with no other way to distribute to almost every comic book store in the U.S., it basically means we're on our own. I'm trying to figure out how exactly I will deal with distributing NEVERMINDS and the other projects that I have started, but I don't see being able to do it through Diamond. It's sad that the comic industry is shrinking to almost non-existence and this seems like the nail in the coffin. Thoughts?