The summer of 2019 was supposed to be one of quiet work. My husband and I had books to make. But then a toilet clogged which led to a plumbing discovery. Ten days later I had a backhoe digging up my street, three rooms with flood cuts and no flooring, a hole jackhammered in the concrete subfloor of my office, and three creative professional workspaces relocated to incredibly inconvenient locations in our house. All because the sewer line between our house and the street needed to be replaced.
Instead of focused work we had six months of massive disruption to our work schedules, living spaces, and lives. (Replacing the sewer line took two weeks, repairing the damage to the house took much longer.) Through all of it I learned a lot about managing to do creative work through disruption. I would get a second and very differently shaped lesson on weathering disruption only a few months later when the shutdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Through both major disruptions I learned that you can find ways to continue to nurture your creative growth no matter what disruptions come your way.
Disruptions that ambush you
Both my plumbing-disrupted summer and the pandemic were disruptions that sprang on me unaware. Many disruptions do. So if you find yourself suddenly ambushed by a disruption take a moment to assess the following.
Look clearly at what you can’t change
With the pandemic there were so many things outside my control. Services I relied on were shut down or limited. Grocery store shelves were empty of my habitual purchases. The sweep of disease was far beyond my control. It was important for me to recognize that and let go of trying to control everything. Spending hours predicting the future wasted energy.
I sincerely hope that at the moment you are reading this you are not living through a pandemic, but even in more standard life circumstances there are lots of aspects of your creative life and career that are forever outside your control. Big corporations will make changes that affect how your book sells. Governments may apply taxes or barriers that you did not anticipate. People you expected to help you instead ghost you.
None of this is in your control.
If you can’t control it, you have to adapt for it. That adaptation is easier when you recognize that you’re coping with things that you can’t control.
Look clearly at what you can change
My plumbing disaster had a lot more pieces that I could control. I could choose how to proceed with repairs. I could spend my time on doing the repairs or I could spend money having someone else do them. I could choose flooring. I could choose whether it was more disruptive to displace the kitchen table and turn that into a workspace or if it was better to retain family gathering space and work in a closet. I frequently did not like the choices that were available to me, and sometimes having to choose felt like an extra burden, but being able to choose did give me some power over the flow of my life.
So when you’re faced with disruption, identify the choices you have and use them wisely. Small choices have a cumulative effect especially if the disruption happens over an extended period of time.
Disruptions you can prepare for
Some of the disruptions in our lives we can plan for in advance. Folded into that crazy summer of disaster clean up, my daughter got engaged and we planned her wedding. It was a wonderful event, but it definitely added to the sense of disruption in our lives. Our house got more crowded as her new husband more-or-less moved in, then shifted again when they both moved out. The reality of those changes naturally turned out a bit differently than we pictured, but we were able to consciously decide the shape of many things as we prepared for her to move.
When you see a disruption coming, take some time to evaluate the impact of the coming disruption on your creative goals. How will you get creative work done while planning a wedding or a move or whatever else may come your way. You can choose whether to carve out a daily space for your creative work or whether to let your creative work rest while you cope with the disruption.
Preserve your creative space
The most valuable thing about your creative work or project is you. If you break by pushing too hard or caring too much, or mis-match your expectations to reality, then you’ve broken all of your future projects until you find time to heal. This is important to remember when facing disruption. It may not be a period of significant creative production. The early pandemic certainly wasn’t for me and many creative people I know. Sometimes the most important creative work you can do is to self-protect in the middle of disruption. Grant yourself a quiet retreat into some measure of comfort so that when the disruption calms, you have energy for what comes next.
Disruptions you choose
Sometimes we choose disruption. We make choices that are going to disrupt our lives, our creative processes and the lives of others. Make sure the disruptions you choose support your priorities and goals. Going back to school to get a masters degree is a huge disruption, but it is worth it if it fulfills a dream or opens a life path that you want.
Be aware of what your chosen disruption may break for other people. We are all entwined in relationships and communities and disruption often creates strain. I certainly wish that when big bookselling corporations make changes they would consider the impact on the small author. (They don’t, sadly). When people want to disrupt the way things are in the world, they often speak of breaking the old system and replacing it. Yet the disruptions with the most power to change the world are not based in destruction, but in growth. If you want to change the world, nurture growth in yourself, in your creative work, in your small business, in your friends.
Disruption is often not the creative person’s friend, but it does not have to prevent you from writing the things you want to write.
What disruptions have you faced / are you facing in your life right now? What are you doing to protect your creativity?
About Sandra
Sandra Tayler is a writer, editor, and publisher with credits in over thirty different titles. She is a consistently successful crowdfunder, and has spent the last thirty years managing a household alongside several small businesses. Her book, STRUCTURING LIFE TO SUPPORT CREATIVITY, is a non-fiction book meant to help creative people make more space in the life they have for the creative work they want to do. Sandra lives in Orem with her husband, three cats, a minion, a cryptid, and a family of very demanding scrub jays who insist that Sandra's only real job is to put peanuts on the deck rail. You can find Sandra online at sandratayler.com
Let’s talk about quantum mechanics, shall we? What, you say you’d rather have a root canal? Ok, how about the wave-particle duality?
Stick around. It’s worth the trip.
Light is a wave, a part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Light is a particle, a little bullet of energy.
This is one of the major insights of the last century — the realization that light is both.
Writing fiction is every bit as hard to break into as it always has been.
Writing fiction is a new game with no rules and the concept of breaking in is gone.
They are both true. This is one of the major changes brought about by the information revolution of the last century.
The State of Fiction
Fiction publishing is both as restricted and hard to break into as it always has been, and it is wide open, a playing field with room for everyone and the only limits those the writers impose on themselves.
This shift from pure print to electronic has been the subject of millions of words as readers and writers everywhere struggled to figure out what it all meant. Bookstores will die! Publishers will go bankrupt! “Print is dead!” (Egon In Ghostbusters, in1984.)
Barnes & Noble is still there. The Big Five publishers are still alive and well. The Hacette Book Group, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster are happily grinding out new titles every year. Print isn’t dead — it’s everywhere in 600 million blogs read daily, and some of those blogs contain serialized novels, and wouldn’t Dickens have loved that, racing in a Hanson cab through London, scribbling the next installment of David Copperfield? He would have understood.
For you the writer, that is good news and bad news. In the good old days publishers and to a lesser extent libraries were gatekeepers. They evaluated stories and passed judgement. The publisher had to think “Will this sell enough copies to justify the cost of production?” The librarian had to decide whether to use part of a limited budget to buy copies of the book.
A story, like a wave, goes out and either reaches readers or it doesn’t. A story, like a particle, goes on forever, always seeking new audiences.
Restrictions off
Now the gatekeepers are no longer all-powerful. They still control big-time publishing, but that “big-time” is no longer the only outlet, there are literally countless electronic ways, blogs like this one, that allow writers to find a voice. Simon & Schuster et al. are only there if you and they come to agreement.
Responsibility On
Now you have to figure out what you want to say. Unless you hire one, you no longer have an editor to say “I don’t understand the character’s motivation in Chapter Three.”
You have a story to tell. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t. Friends and neighbors, that is the first, and most important step. You have the responsibility— now what?
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
One. What do you want to say?
Is it a serious exploration of 21st-century angst? Is it entertainment? (It can be both but that’s a tough assignment.)
Two. Package.
Do you want to self-publish, find an independent publisher, or look for traditional publishing?
In reverse order — traditional publishing.
You are on the right track reading this blog. You will find literally all the information you need. Write the book, find an agent, let the agent find a publisher. The steps are not a mystery. There are publishers out there. One advantage of traditional is that it will be easier to get your title into bookstores. Your publisher will design the book, create a cover, establish a marketing budget, and send the title out, one wave among thousands rolling up the beach.
Independent publishing.
Do your homework! Look online, find small presses that publish books like you write, buy a couple of them and assess the quality. Take your book to one that looks good. There is a wide range of services provided by indie publishers, so it’s difficult to generalize. It’s not an easy decision so I’ll share that I based mine solely on enthusiasm. My publisher loves the books. Once I realized that, I quit thinking about how much promotion they’d be able to do, or what kind of cover artists they had available because I knew we could create the best book possible, and that purely subjective judgement proved one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.
Self-publish.
Again, do your homework. There are countless ways to do it. Plan on a lot of additional non-writing tasks as you edit, design, and promote your book.
I have read that the publisher loved Stephen King’s magnificent novel The Stand, but said the cost of publishing a book of that length was prohibitive, and did he want to make the cuts or did he want them to do it?
It’s as if when the unknown storyteller who created Beowulf sat down around the campfire and his friends said, “Talk fast. We only have an hour.”
Has it gotten harder?
Well, in many ways yes, because as the creator you make all these decisions yourself. The package has changed; the center, the story is the same. “With great power comes great responsibility.” Spider-Man’s uncle told him that and it’s true of novels in this era. If your book goes out with typos (and I speak from experience) it is painful to be told about them — and guess what? It’s your fault!
So the story waves run up the beach to vanish into the sand, while the bullets keep going as your words become part of the incomprehensibly huge universe of words.
Writing is important and you should think of it that way. It has consequences, often beyond those you plan.
I’ll close with two examples of the effect stories can have, and why they are worth every bit of the effort to create.
After I self-published my first novel I got a letter from a reader. In my novel my hero’s wife is killed and the story is, in part, how he deals with it. The reader wrote to me to say that his wife had just passed away, and that my book had helped him.
Six novels later I met a reader at a convention where I was appearing and he told me how he’d been given a set of Surf City Mysteries while he was flat on his back hospitalized after spinal surgery and that they kept him going.
So whatever path you choose, it’s worth it. You never know who you will touch.
Now it’s your turn. Tell us about where you are on the journey and what your next steps will be, or share an anecdote about how your work reached someone in an unexpected way. Thanks for being part of the discussion.
About James
James R. Preston is the author of the multiple-award-winning Surf City Mysteries. He is currently at work on the sixth, called Remains To Be Seen. His most recent works are Crashpad and Buzzkill, two historical novellas set in the 1960’s at Cal State Long Beach. Kirkus Reviews called Buzzkill “A historical thriller enriched by characters who sparkle and refuse to be forgotten.” His books are collected as part of the California Detective Fiction collection at the University of California Berkeley.
In 2018, Microcosm fired our final distributor in favor of self-distributing. A relatively obvious advantage to us is that we would no longer need to kowtow to Amazon’s demands and market dominance. This was a business decision even more than it was a moral one. They took larger discounts with every contract renewal and so we decided to ignore them, as any adult ignores their ex who insists on continuing to behave badly in public.
Our sales more than doubled over the next year. For reasons that I cannot entirely grasp, the headline was never “Microcosm’s sales double by self-distributing,” it was always “Microcosm doesn’t sell to Amazon.” Indeed, six years later, I am still asked about this in every interview, rather than the fact that our sales have now more than octupled in the past decade through this decision. I digress.
What is “distribution?”
A staffed warehouse.
This can be your bedroom or basement; you just need a way to store inventory, find it when you need it, and ship the orders. For years, my “warehouse” was a closet shelf I kept together with liquid nails and a computer in the hallway. Within ten years, we upgraded to a grade level basement garage. We could roll pallets in the front door and then access cartons by going up and down stairs.
Within another ten years, we were desperate for a loading dock because receiving ten pallets of books is much faster this way. But start where you are and build up as you find the limitations. Don’t start big. Learn as you grow. You’ll have fewer risks and more fun.
Fulfillment/warehouse integration software.
A way to manage inventory and turn orders into shipments and then itemized invoices. We built this as WorkingLit.com and offer it for free to publishers with fewer than ten titles. In the industry, this is called an “Enterprise Resource Planning” system (ERP) and a good one costs over $1M. You can also use spreadsheets and a clipboard until you outgrow them or start with our free software.
Send an ONIX feed.
The industry needs data about your new titles and when something changes about any title in your back catalog. ONIX is theoretically publicly owned and open source. In reality, it’s almost impossible to get information about sample feeds and best practices. Worse, everyone wants a slightly different ONIX feed. The publishing industry claims to want the newest version but only accepts ONIX 2.1, which has been outdated since 2009. We built these features into WorkingLit.com, also free to publishers with under ten titles. It took many stressful months of adapting this in a way that vendors would accept. So please enjoy the fruits of our labor.
Marketing Presence at Trade Shows.
In order to market your books, you’ll need to meet with librarians and buyers, which can happen at these events. There are national and regional shows of all stripes for both bookstores and gift stores. The shows include everything from gift shows to regional book shows to national shows to library shows. Each one costs about $200-2,000 plus shipping, hotel, and travel. If that’s not punishing enough, publishers are expected to give better deals at these shows.
The immediate results are difficult to gauge as most orders are written separately to your sales reps. In the past few years, shows have provided less of a tangible impact so this is no longer essential. The pandemic was transformative for new buyers discovering books on new platforms. However, you will find key buyers at these shows. The difference is that you may pay $1,000 in customer acquisition costs at these shows and find that it takes three years to earn that out in sales.
Edelweiss Catalogs and Listings.
Edelweiss is a private, for-profit company that owns the digital cataloging for the entire publishing industry. All serious publishers are expected to have their titles listed on Edelweiss. They can accept an ONIX feed and your sales force will utilize these listings as well as printed catalogs when meeting with buyers.
Again, it’s not essential but it’s where buyers expect to find books from professional publishers so the cost is part smoke and mirrors—demonstrating your credibility vs actual value of discoverability.
Telesales and Field Sales Force.
A strong sales force is the major difference between a successful publisher and the competition. These are “boots on the ground” that physically walk into bookstores, show your titles to buyers, and are knowledgeable about all of your lines. They know how to repeat the marketing handles, talking points, and anecdotal stories about your books and authors in ways that make them seem like natural conversation. A good salesperson is like a neutral third-party intermediary; relaying information from the field back to the publisher’s office and vice versa.
Consolidation of the industry has also hit field sales forces. There are major swaths of the country that don’t have adequate coverage and others where there are inadequate numbers of reps per square mile. As such, you’ll want to have some amount of telesales people telling stores about new books and collecting reorders. This could be you, your extrovert friend, or a commissioned sales force.
Commissioned reps need to believe in your publishing program (or be forced to sell it by their employer). They charge 15% of invoice rather than hourly pay. Find rep groups by picking up catalogs at trade shows or PDFs online from larger publishers who publish books similar to your own. In the back the catalogs have a page that lists their rep groups by territory. However, there are places where reps don’t wander, sometimes because of geographic isolation, sometimes because it’s outside of their contracted territory, and sometimes just out of habit.
I cannot tell you how many times there have been two stores across the street from each other and our reps only meet with one of them. For this reason, we employ our most experienced staff to send out samples and make telesales. They also handle specialty accounts like Fuego and Urban Outfitters as well as things like record stores, hardware stores, grocery stores, and mercantile. While this is expensive, the monthly sales of each person rival that of an entire rep group.
Accounts with wholesalers.
You’ll want to be available through all appropriate wholesalers that service your type of publishing. Usually a bookstore will make their first order direct with the publisher. But once a store is in the habit of stocking your book, they make weekly restocks with wholesalers like Ingram and Bookazine because it’s easier, faster, and more efficient. If you publish children’s books, Follett will likely be a major customer for you. Similarly, libraries order through Follet/Baker & Taylor or other library “jobbers.” New Leaf is a mind/body/spirit specialty store wholesaler. Military Families Books services just who the name implies! If you publish Mormon books, you’ll want to connect with Deseret Books.
Ingram and Baker + Taylor are major accounts for most trade publishers, representing about a third to half of their total trade sales. There is a list of wholesalers in the back of this book. These companies are important to make it easy for stores and libraries to order your books. They demonstrate that you are a “real publisher.” If you want to supply Barnes & Noble or Amazon, you’ll need to create an account with them as well.
Meaningful Ways to Market Your Books to Readers.
The biggest mistake that most publishers make is that they get fantastic distribution in place, build fantastic relationships with retailers, and...fail to let the public know about their books. Think about the influencers in your space and how you learn about new books that you purchase. Historically, publishers created sales through reviews and publicity, but during the pandemic this value chain fell apart.
Rachel Noorda and Kathi Inman Berens studied what causes readers to buy and found that they don’t even trust bookstore employees, magazines, or online reviews, leaning more towards more intimate relationships with influencers, family, friends, and piracy. Microcosm has always overcome this hurdle by focusing on what we call “consumer events,” where our fans go to learn about and purchase new books—everything from RollerCon to Peerpocalypse to Portland Indie Book and Art Fair. Events like this don’t just sell books that day—they spread buzz to local retailers for years to come.
Whether or not you have a distributor, do not skip this step. This is the difference between the industry average returns rate of 20% and Microcosm’s returns of 1.4%.
Methods to Get Paid for Invoices.
Stores want to buy your books on credit and pay after 30-90 days. You’ll need to generate invoices and remind them when they are overdue. When the checks arrive, you’ll need a workflow to deposit them into your bank account. When you ship an order you need a way to turn that into a check in a month or two. We built this system into WorkingLit, where all of this is automated for publishers, from billing to reminders to collections.
The British book trade also created a company called Batch, which automates payments for self-distributed publishers to get paid by bookstores in weekly deposits. This simplifies the largest hurdle for bookstores adding a new account because it incorporates it into an existing workflow. So we built Batch into WorkingLit as well!
Bonus: Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) compatibility.
Once a publisher does a certain amount of business, companies like Barnes & Noble, Baker & Taylor, and Ingram will no longer be willing to manually enter invoices and return credits. EDI offers a way to automate purchase orders into invoices and then shipments and returns into credits between systems. This sounded excessive to me until I came to understand that these companies will routinely order twelve copies of a title to one warehouse, return two from another, and then reorder more copies of the same book to a third warehouse the next day.
The result is that it’s very difficult to remain organized using manual systems. These companies will often charge a fee if you are doing several hundreds of thousands of dollars in business annually and not able to accept EDI feeds. EDI should also be incorporated into WorkingLit by the time this book is published!
Trade distributors
As soon as they can attract one, most publishers fulfill these functions through a trade distributor. Because of their size and scope, trade distributors often have better leveraging power to sell books, get good placement for the books they represent, and, last but not least, get paid for books that have been sold. A trade distributor typically takes about 35% of each invoice as their compensation. In this way, they are rarely losing money on a sale—though you may be. Compare some numbers of what you are currently paying for these services versus what outsourcing them will cost.
A trade distributor takes a much bigger cut than retailers or wholesalers. You normally only get paid an average of about 37% of your book’s cover price on the books that do sell through. The many little costs and fees can add up quickly. Certainly, part of the costs of having a distributor are the fees.
It's an incredible bummer to spend several hundred thousand dollars per year negotiating their systems and way of doing things, but again, that is a six of one, half dozen of another conundrum, compared to running your own warehouse and fulfillment. It's a question of fixed versus variable cost accounting. With a distributor, you only pay fees when you have sales or returns.
Running your own distribution, you have staffing and operational costs regardless of sales. So while a distributor is about twice as expensive, it’s also a safer way to learn and get your feet under you. For many publishers, it’s comfortable for the long haul to stick with a distributor that they know. However, when we were soliciting sales rep groups, Fujii founder Don Sturtz told me “I suggest to publishers that they sign a contract with a distributor, learn as much as they can from that experience, and then venture out on their own at the first possible opportunity.”
It was edifying if self-interested feedback to my ears. And it made a ton of sense to me. Working with distributors teaches publishers what their blind spots are. This helps them see their publishing program more seriously as a series of costs and consequences.
The two greatest functions of an outside trade distributor are helping you with title development—they are experts in making it easy to understand what a book offers—and getting you into all of the stores that would love to have your books but just “can’t” purchase directly from you. A good distributor allows a bedroom publisher to operate competitively with major houses.
Distributors create demand for books by contacting account buyers. Wholesalers fulfill that demand and keep stores stocked quickly after the initial push has caught on. However, due to capacity issues, they likely cannot maintain orders and interest like a publisher can manipulate all of the levers to keep that sales activity moving. We often found that, with a distributor, sales would dry up after a year. However, when we began self-distributing in 2019 and built in reorders incentives and sales follow ups, we could maintain the sales of each title in relative perpetuity.
It wasn’t our new books that were selling better—it was books from previous seasons!
What a trade distributor wants
Once you have a book that has sold at least 5,000 copies and at least three titles that are selling consistently month over month, it’s a good time to begin shopping for a trade distributor. These stats show that you have an audience who will buy your work and is hungry for more. However, a distributor is more interested in the future of your publishing program than your bestsellers. They want to understand that you have a frame, a vision, an ethos, and five to ten new books coming down the pipe each year.
How can you show:
your list’s unifying vision—in regards to quality, category, theme, and formats?
your long-term publishing plan, years from now—how you plan to acquire more high-quality content?
that you have a complete understanding of the current book market, either from experience or extensive research?
your shelf-busting capabilities within a particular category or categories?
A distributor is looking for active bestsellers and key “signature” titles from your press. They need to be able to see a path to grow your existing sales, not just maintain them. Your books need to be competitive on the shelf, in terms of price and format. Distributors need to understand your comprehensive marketing plan and/or strong sales proposition and platform, as well as that of your authors.
A distributor is looking for both a high editorial standard and professional covers that have the look and feel to convey your value proposition. Since a distributor’s likelihood of success is built upon your education, they consider how experienced your press’ leadership is within the book industry, so it helps to demonstrate that you have collaborators that you employ to this effect.
Your distributor needs to see you having the bandwidth to navigate both their onboarding systems and their seasonal schedules.
What a distributor can and can not do:
Again, distribution is not the holy grail. While a distributor does extend its credibility to you, they cannot place your books nationally, infinitely into major accounts, or in stores of your choosing, because those retailers retain their own agency. A distributor cannot create your market, your brand, your message, or an audience.
However, once you have outgrown your own reach and resources, a distributor can free up your time to promote and create new content. A distributor means that you get paid without the same amount of collection risk. A mistake I made as a young publisher was insisting that a distributor could repair all of my failed titles. They cannot because the product market fit remains the problem, not industry access.
Not all books are created equal.
It’s always much easier to sell what is already selling than to sell what you’ve struggled to sell. The distributor’s value is in their feedback about what they are seeing and how you can improve things moving forward. Don’t argue with them; write down what they say. Demonstrate your spirit of partnership.
When to approach a distributor
According to Mark Suchomel, Senior Vice President of Baker & Taylor Publisher Services, a publisher should approach a distributor “when they have plans for a good, ongoing publishing program. I’ve taken on publishers who have just a few titles where I saw that they could take that into a program and make it work.
“The distributor has to invest a bit of time and resources in order to make a publisher successful. Most distributors should have some room to make those investments. I’ve watched publishers go from a few books in a few years to a few million dollars in annual sales.”
Mark Suchomel, a veteran in book distribution, has long helped to build small presses into formidable category powerhouses. “The reward I get is seeing good books get into the hands of readers. That and the growth of my clients’ businesses is a lovely way to measure success. I am in a position where I am constantly learning. My career has exposed me to an astounding range of subjects and topics. I am hopelessly curious and through my work am constantly finding out about things of which I was never before aware.
“At the same time, I have the pleasure of working with people from all kinds of backgrounds who find publishing to be a good fit for them for all kinds of reasons. To be able to help my clients, who oftentimes become my friends as well, is incredibly rewarding. Building a business and keeping that business growing and healthy is tough to do. If I can play a part in something like that which helps people accomplish something they have dreamed about and at the same time educates and entertains others, I’m having a good time.”
Shopping for a distributor is like seeking any other kind of relationship, business or personal. Shop around and go with the one that seems to understand and appreciate you and your books the most. Negotiate your terms, and continue to work on improving the relationship so that you can both succeed. It is vital to stress that it works best when it’s symbiotic and you are working together.
Even working with a distributor, you’ll still be able to sell your books directly to readers and to some sorts of stores (depending on what is in your contract), but your distributor will take over sales to bookstores and large accounts. Keep in mind that any terms you are offered will seem harsh at first, especially if you are used to doing all your sales directly and even more so if you are no longer able to sell to many of the stores you have built relationships with and are now paid less for the same books. But this is part of the math of this relationship.
Remember that the staff at your distributor is doing work that you either can’t or don’t want to do yourself. The work is often not nearly as glamorous as the artistic side and involves a lot of paperwork and rejection. Appreciate trade distributors for what they do. Don’t approach them until you are ready and can’t move forward on your own.
Important things to remember
The Myth of Organic Discovery
Again, distribution is not a substitute for building an audience. It’s tempting to assume that once your books are widely available via trade distribution, readers will organically discover them. We remember emotional childhood moments when we discovered favorite books while browsing our favorite subject or section at a bookstore. For many, this is the dream that trade distribution (or its cousins at Amazon and Ingram Spark) represents: that the existence and intrinsic value of your work will attract readers.
Working with a trade distributor is a risk.
There are many other publishers competing for the same shelf space; meanwhile that space is shrinking. Of the millions of books published last year, Barnes & Noble stocked only 15,000 of them—and returned many copies of each of those. In 2019, James Daunt began managing Barnes & Noble like the British chain Waterstones, now owned by the same parent company. Daunt is much more savvy in the ways of book retail than the previous rounds of management and realizes that the strength of the store is in not making each location a carbon copy of the next one or as he puts it, a “not very good bookseller.”
The Shift in Bookstore Strategy
Bookstores do not operate on a McDonald’s sales model, but on one of local taste and regional difference.
Daunt has allowed buyers to bring in the right inventory for their store, which is a vast improvement. Barnes also bought Denver’s indie goliath chain, Tattered Cover, in 2024. The company has focused heavily on increasing inventory turn and reducing returns—often at great public controversy. In 2022, when authors learned that Barnes had slashed the number of young adult and middle grade hard covers on their shelves in 2019, authors took to X to argue that this harmed midlist, marginalized authors disproportionately.
However, to a question at the 2023 U.S. Daunt, speaking at the Book Show keynote, highlighted that they returned a significant 80% of their books due to lack of sales. He argued that this practice wasn't beneficial for anyone, especially authors, and announced a new approach: ensuring the correct books, in the appropriate quantity, are available in the right stores.
Reducing the amount of shelved titles frees up that inventory and actually benefits both authors and publishers. Yes, some amount of those books may have been discovered at some stores, but most of them would be shipped back to the publisher and harmed sales elsewhere and revenues on the whole.
The best way to make this relationship successful for you is to already have a growing audience that is eager to get its hands on your books from all kinds of outlets.
Financial Implications of Returns
What happened previously with Barnes was that your distributor would often sell 800 copies of your new book in advance—which is a great number—only to see 775 of them returned eleven months later. The publisher would have to reprint in the meantime and then be stuck with too much inventory.
It works like this: each store orders five copies of a new book, puts them on display, but only sells one and returns the other four copies after a year. Your distributor will charge you a 10% processing fee for reshelving the returns. The fees might add up to more than what you get paid for the 25 books that sold through. It’s easy to get in over your head and end up owing money to your distributor.
Comments from James Daunt at the 2023 U.S. Book Show pointed out that book sales remain “incredibly vibrant and resilient.” The strength as a bookseller is in locally sourced curation, so you don't “end up with boring bookstores.” Five years ago, B&N put whatever by the door that publishers would pay advertising for “very predictably arranged” in an “essentially identical” regardless of community, with a planogram detailing how to display books and a co-op fee attached to the prominence of that positioning.
They were taking money for placement rather than creating placement based on what they knew would sell. Since 2019, B&N has begun removing non-book titles that had taken over 40% of stores. They are investing in people and education and praising workers for being unhappy for being paid “basically minimum wage.” Daunt likes key performance indicators that are "qualitative rather than quantitative," explaining it's "not what you sell but how you sell," which remains good advice for any publisher.
Examples of Distributor Relationships
Ripple Grove Press
A distributor will usually manage the B&N relationship better than a publisher, but not always. Rob Broder, President of Ripple Grove Press, who focuses on timeless children’s picture books that stress narratives over morals, sent a copy of Mae & The Moon, about a child searching for the new moon after the old one disappears, to Barnes & Noble’s small press buyer. Barnes & Noble ordered 350 copies, which Broder excitedly communicated to their distributor.
Their distributor responded to tell Broder not to contact Barnes & Noble in the future. The distributor would manage the relationship on Ripple Grove’s behalf. Broder followed directions, but B&N did not pick up subsequent books that they published. Broder didn't know whether Barnes & Noble was no longer interested in their other titles or if they were simply not seeing them. Trusting these responsibilities to their distributor was hurting Ripple Grove’s sales.
Two years after his experience with Barnes & Noble, Broder read an article from title development manager Mary Rowles citing how IPG gave small presses a chance to succeed. Broder immediately sent over copies of his books and Ripple Grove left his distributor for IPG, a larger company that helped them continue to grow.
Broder was “ready for my titles to have further reach. I felt like that was the next step for growing our publishing. I was disappointed about how frequently Midpoint [since acquired by IPG] would ignore my emails while I was trying to build a relationship together.”
Just World Books
Just World Books, a leftist publisher of global affairs distributed by IPG, has created an effective strategy for convincing stores to stock its titles. They consistently encourage their fans that support their political mission to march into independent bookstores to buy their books. This direct influence to drive customers to stores gives stores a great reason to stock their books.
Laura Stanfill bootstrapped her press after an enthusiastic conversation with Gigi Little, who became her graphic designer. “When I founded my press, I printed short runs through a great regional digital printer, Gorham Printing, and drove them around to bookstores. Out-of-area stores could order direct from me or through Spark, Ingram’s print-on-demand service. The Ingram Spark channel fed our title metadata to other commercial bookselling sites, though I’ve always urged our readers to buy local as much as they can, so online sales have always been secondary for us.
“We started as a regional press, publishing only Oregon authors, and that’s why such a hands-on, grassroots distribution system of lugging boxes and making sales calls worked for us. And that’s why we could create a business model that didn’t rely on Amazon. But as we grew, I realized that we were spending so much time and money on marketing our titles that having them available regionally wasn’t sustainable. We needed to make our books more available nationally—and not just by print-on-demand, which has high overhead, low economy of scale, and doesn’t really convince random booksellers to order copies unless there was some sort of local connection we could bring to their attention.
“When we accepted Ellen Urbani’s novel, Landfall, set during Hurricane Katrina, I knew we would need southern bookseller buy-in, and, for that, we needed a distributor with a sales team that could reach the South. I began looking, soon realizing I didn’t print the five or so titles per year required to qualify for most trade distributors.
“Then I discovered a newer boutique distributor, Legato Publishers Group, a sister company to Publishers Group West (PGW). I sent some books to the president, he liked what he saw, we met for breakfast when he was on a business trip, and then his sales team watched me interact with booksellers at a local trade show a few weeks later. I’ve been with that team ever since.”
Good Night Books
Eventually Adam Gamble, founder of Good Night Books, went to a distributor to keep up with his own success. “I just don’t see how a small press can afford to do all that a traditional trade distributor does, without it being even more expensive. Really, I don’t see much choice for publishers, unless they want to spend huge amounts of time and money dealing with issues of billing, collections, fulfillment and sales.”
Good Night signed with Independent Publishers Group (IPG) and handed over their lucrative gift sales accounts to IPG’s sales team, who continued to grow these relationships and sales.
Haymarket Books
Similarly to Microcosm, the publishers of Haymarket Books began to take the press more seriously when they landed a distributor. Co-founder Julie Fain says, “In 2005 we started trade distribution with Consortium, publishing five titles our first season. At that point it felt real, like we were starting to find an audience.”
From 2002 to 2010, Haymarket sold books from other publishers to complement their early list. According to Fain, “We did the fulfillment by ourselves, but over time, the volume has grown to the point where we’re now moving to do as much of this out of our distributor’s warehouse as we can. Our consumer orders are now fulfilled by our trade distributor.
“Our office space just isn’t scalable as the volume increases, and we think the costs are outweighed by being freed up to do the work of publishing and promoting the books, which is what we’re good at.”
Still, distribution is not everything.
Laura Stanfill learned many lessons along the way. “Distribution definitely has surprised me in terms of the inability to predict returns; that may get better as I have more titles out, and a better set of numbers to help me project, but with fiction it’s always variable. But I do know, for sure, every time we publish a book, our reps are selling it into stores across the U.S.—and a lot of small-press publishers and micro publishers don’t have that kind of reach.
“I have found that one of my top obligations as a publisher of a distributed press is to constantly ask myself how readers in a certain city or town will hear about our book and want to order it.
“With nonfiction, that’s subject-based, but with fiction, it’s a mix of getting the right reviews, creating events, making the book available in galleys to churn up interest, having eye-catching covers, picking the right sales descriptions and phrases, and building a brand that is recognizable by readers.”
To reach an audience, you need to:
be clever—more clever than the other people who are doing what you do.
spell out exactly what the book is.
have an online presence that appeals to your reader base.
work hard to promote your book through traditional media as well as more creative channels.
find ways to interact with your readers and keep them invested in your output and success.
You don’t need a trade distributor to do any of these things—good ones that are a good match for your work will do them, but not as well as you can and not in a way that replaces your own efforts. A trade distributor can expand your reach, but if you haven’t yet built up a way to connect with your audience, that expanded reach may not stick or be sustainable.
Common Goals
A distributor doesn’t always have congruent goals with a publisher due to their economy of scale. It’s a physical impossibility to show every book to every buyer or even to put every book in every catalog. No one can answer every email, and ultimately, someone has to make decisions and cuts. Again, a distributor’s goal is not always your goal.
Your distributor can make money through storing your books, shipping and processing returns of your books, and the various aspects of managing data and inventory that goes into publishing—without ever actually selling any books. You have to evaluate when your goals are in sync and when they are not.
Someday, maybe you’ll outgrow your first trade distributor and collaborate with someone else. Maybe you’ll find that you prefer (or have a better bottom line) being smaller. You'll choose to get more personal mail and do fulfillment for some stores selectively. Some publishers sign with a distributor and never leave, 30 years later. What’s right for one is not always a best practice for the next press.
How do your books get to your readers? Have you thought about becoming your own distributor? Have you worked with a trade distributor?
About Joe
Joe Biel is a self-made autistic publisher and filmmaker who draws origins, inspiration, and methods from punk rock. Biel is the founder and CEO of Microcosm Publishing, Publishers Weekly's #1 fastest-growing publisher of 2022 and #3 in 2023. He has been featured in Time Magazine, Esquire, Art of Autism, Reading Glasses, Bulletproof Radio, Spectator (Japan), G33K (Korea), and Maximum Rocknroll, as well as on NPR and PBS.
