Small Press Distribution has closed its operations and left thousands of paperbacks without a salesman. Selling and storing books is every distributor's mission. Plenty of SPD customers — those are the small presses that publish books the Big 5 cannot take on — hadn't even seen a statement in years. The statements are important to authors, who get paid once SPD buys a book from a publisher. No statements, no payments.
SPD was the distributor of last resort, whenever you'd ask around for what kind of partner the smallest presses are using. The company was founded as a nonprofit, an interesting structure for an enterprise built to trigger sales. It's as if a store chain had to resort to bake sales to stay in the black. This is pretty much what SPD did at the end, running a Kickstarter that raised $100,000 to bring SPD up to modern publishing standards.
Kickstarters are great tools for publishing a book yourself. When your sales force needs one, it can be a cautionary moment. SPD's departure was so quick it didn't even leave staff behind to help presses that had unsold paperbacks warehoused. You got questions, it said, you call Ingram's warehousing people. At the end, SPD was using Ingram warehousing facilities.
Distribution is as deep and arcane as it gets in publishing. Publishers and distributors call books "units," as if they were bread-making kits or watch bands. There's distribution that amounts to fulfillment (shipping a book someplace, like a reader's porch or an Amazon warehouse) and collecting money from the reader or bookstore owner.
Then there's "traditional distribution," which is much harder to get for a small press and nearly impossible for an author-publisher. Traditional distribution companies like Publishers Group West, Random House, and Simon & Schuster add a sales effort to the service. These distributors survive on a commission on the sale of each book. If you're not selling, say, $1 million a year in books, you're not a great candidate for a traditional distributor.
Small traditional distribution can have an impact. In theory, companies like SPD provide opportunity for promotions, awards, and library orders. Companies in the SPD tier include Chicago Distribution, Longleaf Services, IPG, Small Press Distribution, Baker and Taylor and the National Book Network.
Mind the promises gap
SPD was among the smallest of distributors whose books fell in the gap between promise and delivery. The books would pile up in a warehouse because after awhile, SPD could not rack up enough sales. The small presses that find themselves using a last resort for a distributor get caught in the gap. They have to print and develop the books — where genuine expenses live — then hope the sales appear through the distributors.
Some university presses have traditional distribution. Since a big run of books at some of these publishers is less than 2,000 units, distributors like Longleaf have to load up a lot of titles to earn a decent living. Two dozen titles a season is pretty common among university presses. Perhaps about 50 books a year pass through a press that uses Longleaf. If every book would sell 1,000 copies, that could amount to $10,000 per press.
The gap shows up when the books don't sell. Plenty of small press books don't sell 1,000 units a year. This is why the likes of SPD and Longleaf need to represent so many presses. The high press count is what makes for lower sales, as a distributor's rep has a limited amount of time to promote new books. After awhile, your book's sales force amounts to recommendations and also-boughts around its previous sales — plus anything your press or distributor can do with email to readers, or ads at Amazon.
Traditional distribution is a better tool for a bigger publisher. Independent bookstores are the buyers of distributed books. By the accounting of hybrid publisher Brooke Warner, founder of SparkPress and She Writes Press, other small publishers only sell 5 percent of books to indie bookstores.
SPD, and by anecdotal evidence Longleaf, are coming in right at the 5 percent mark. Or less. You might be the author of a novel with nice reviews and a swell launch reading who learns your distributor hasn't sold books anywhere but your reading bookstores. That counts for sales, but a sales resource is supposed to be selling in places where you're not staging a reading. How they're to do this in 2024, when Amazon is the world's biggest bookseller, is a problem that distributors on the lower tiers haven't solved.
Just to be clear, traditional distributors sell books to Amazon, as well as indie bookstores. Amazon orders books it hasn't yet sold and pays for them as if they did sell. Amazon doesn't place these kinds of orders from SPD-tier distributors.
Returns, bane of distribution
The book business being the odd, antiquated duck that it is means no sale is final. Amazon will take back paperbacks it's shipped to readers already. The 'Zon just ships the unsold books back to the distributor, which then deducts the sales on the publisher's account. Amazon will give you up to 30 days to return a paperback. You won't get anything but Amazon credit for it, but your publisher and its distributor have to take the sales ding.
Your favorite indie bookstore returns books, too. Before that unhappy day, sometimes the low-sellers wind up on that cart outside the front door. It's one reason security is so low at that sales point. That $8 brand-new paperback is only worth a few bucks at the end of its life.
Amazon and Ingram, retail distributors
If the sales force, warehousing, and cash-box services make up distribution, Amazon has two of those three available for anyone. Depending on how you feel about Amazon ads, the retailer might be considered a sales force, too. There's a big difference between deploying advertising and employing a commissioned sales force. The publisher compensates a sales force only when it sells, unless there's a base paycheck supporting commissions. Amazon collects a fee for every click on an ad, even if the click doesn't amount to a sale.
Ingram Publisher Services is the other massive gravitational field in the galaxy of distribution. Bookshop.org, the indie store alternative, uses Ingram's fulfillment and commerce services to deliver books ordered online to readers. By publishing my memoir Stealing Home through IngramSpark, I qualified for Bookshop.org distribution.
But at the IngramSpark level, there's no sales force working for you as a distributor. Ingram will take on a publisher partner for traditional distribution. The small press has to be publishing books that sell well.
Selling well is not a hallmark of small publishers. "What the demise of SPD should be showing us is that traditional distribution is not set up for small publishers," Warner said in a Substack article, "because they don’t have the volume to justify the cost of it."
Warner knows the small publisher mindset that surrounded SPD. She acquired books while with Seal Press, based in the same Berkley area where SPD was launched.
Even if you know and love bookstores, you can't look away from what competes with them. Bookstores need to stay open selling popular books, so when the re-imagined version of Huckleberry Finn, James, comes out it's on the front table at First Light Books. Consider this trending book, the store says, before you browse for anything else. Sad to say, the bookstores have to endure the reader who checks the Amazon price on James (30 percent less) before putting the First Light copy in their basket.
Amazon is glad to work directly with authors trying to sell their books. Bookstores would rather not, thank you. One author who discovered no sales by their distributor was sharp enough to collect promises to buy the new novel. The purchasing was going to have to go through the distributor — unless the bookstores would buy directly from the author. That kind of sale doesn't happen often. Consignment for sales, sure. It’s always worth asking about, the outright sales to the store, when you talk with a buyer.
What's to be done next
Author-publishers who need a sales footprint in bookstores are operating in the gap today. The numbers for distributing important but low-selling books do not add up for traditional distributors. Bookstores have been hanging on like this, selling enough bestsellers and offering less-notable books, for generations. The reason bookstores can return any book goes back to Great Depression practices.
Being on the right Web ordering systems can help an author-publisher get the equivalent of bookstore distribution. Ingram website ordering is common for store buyers. There are resources like Edelweiss that tie discovery dashboards, meant to lure book buyers, with ordering services.
Making distribution work for you might mean getting a bigger publisher, if you're after the traditional promises of sales to bookstores. If you have a distributor in name only, not selling your book to stores or even Amazon, you have a bragging right and an elite status.
Making a wider footprint for your author-publisher career is better served by someone's email efforts — your publisher's, if it's not you — or your own or a cooperative mailing list swap. Emails sell books. They will outsell the efforts of a name-only distributor every time. Photo by Richard Sagredo on Unsplash