Small publishers and the challenges of distribution
Some new experiments
Pleased to share a guest post from my colleague Jeremy Wang-Iverson, this time addressing one of the biggest areas of concern I hear about from small-press authors: distribution.—DK
Ed Nawotka reports in Publishers Weekly that Hachette (one of commercial publishing’s “Big Five”) is partnering with Stable Book Group on a distribution service called Stable Distribution to support smaller publishers. This will be a welcome development to many of the presses that were left scrambling after the dissolution of Small Press Distribution last year, and it was also encouraging to read about the panel at last week’s U.S. Book Show in New York where David Shelley, Hachette’s CEO, identified distribution as a way that larger publishers can share their infrastructure with indies.
For the small-press community, finding a distribution partner is crucial to bringing their books to a broader readership. Traditionally, distribution meant primarily warehousing the books and handling orders, but increasingly, the service includes a print on demand option to also produce the books. While distribution arrangements are commission based, the standard fees—50% of net sales—remain high from the perspective of the small publisher, representing the greatest expense incurred in the publication of a book.
“That fifty percent price point can be extremely hard for an independent press to swallow, especially if they are printing a relatively small amount of books,” says Jeff Alessandrelli, the publisher of Fonograf Editions, writing last year in the Cleveland Review of Books. In Alessandrelli’s piece, he includes a comment from Rescue Press’s Caryl Pagel, who says: “once you factor [distribution costs] into the cost of printing, design, shipping materials, etc., you’re quickly making next to nothing on a book sale.” That’s among the reasons that small publishers can run direct sales from their website, discounting the books 30% or 40% off the retail price and still come out ahead: they don’t have to pay the distributor’s fees on these transactions.
From the perspective of a distributor, publishers such as Rescue and Fonograf, with modest sales, are not great revenue generators, but they are not meant to be either: Hachette and Stable’s messaging in the PW piece suggests they are motivated to support this important part of the publishing world and believe their business can be sufficiently scaled up, with less earnings from more clients.
Another interesting distribution alternative that has emerged in recent years is Asterism Books in Seattle. This group, co-founded by Joshua Rothes and Phil Bevin in 2021, has taken on nearly 200 clients with remarkable terms: they don’t sell to online retailers, charge their clients 26% in commission, and don’t accept returns. Any one of these terms would represent a significant departure from how distribution businesses have been run; taken together, they represent a radical change. As Rothes told Publishers Weekly in 2023: “We wanted to start a conversation about how things might be done differently.”
Asterism’s clients are not necessarily working with them exclusively, given the limitations—Rescue, for example, has their backlist with Asterism, while partnering with Itasca in Minneapolis on new books. Asterism’s website and shopping cart are both very good and it was thoughtful of them to recently send an email promoting Zach Savich’s Diving Makes the Water Deep, which Rescue published almost a decade ago. Indie bookstores, which generally prefer Ingram—the leading distributor in the US—have begun to set up accounts with Asterism. It remains to be seen whether Rothes and Bevin’s new approach can catch on, but certainly Stable and others looking to help independent presses—“who need support now more than ever,” as Hachette VP Todd McGarity put it in the PW piece—would be advised to look carefully at this worthwhile experiment taking place in Seattle.
Also one correction to the above - Asterism commission rate is 24%, not 26% as written in the piece. Here are their terms: https://asterismbooks.com/for-publishers
This is great! Thanks for sharing. So, so happy to see more options for distribution!
I will say that as a former indie bookseller, the inability to return books to the distributor really curbs the ability to take risks on books in the store. I know that returns are incredibly hard on publishers and distributors, but not being able to return books and try something else is incredibly hard on the indie stores. Especially those with small footprints and limited shelf space. I don't know what the solution is, but it's something I know troubles all of the smaller, more independent parts of the industry.