Most publishers seek “book distribution” when what they actually need is “marketing.” Which is to say that making your books available in the marketplace is not the same thing as creating demand for them. Yet, publishers often feel the pinch point of where their books are not available rather than looking at the reasons that they haven’t recently produced a bestseller.

A Lesson from an Accidental Bestseller

In 2010, Microcosm quietly published Tom Neely’s Henry & Glenn Forever, a “fictional” love story about the public personas of Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig embroiled in a romance for the ages. Two weeks later, we went on an unrelated tour in the Western US before properly making the new book available in commercial channels. We put on film screenings and gallery installations, served with a vegan feast, to promote three other new books.

One day, I woke up on someone’s couch in Fresno to an email from our distributor. They wanted to know why there was so much interest in this book, Henry & Glenn Forever, that they had never heard of. “Remember, we’re your distributor,” they repeated thrice in the email.

I checked Microcosm’s website, and there were direct orders for thousands of copies. The book had never released data to the industry, so it wasn’t available through Ingram or Amazon. The only way to buy it was on our website.

And buy it, they did. The book was talked about every single day on Twitter. Every day, our warehouse shipped hundreds of copies. It was later featured everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to MTV to NPR as the media struggled to catch up with the fervor.

Why Marketing Creates Demand

That book is an example of good marketing. We developed the book well, and the value proposition was clear. It attracted the correct audience and repelled the wrong audiences. I clearly remember dozens of incidents at festivals and conventions where someone lost their mind upon seeing it, told an outrageous story about meeting Danzig, bought the book, and shouted excitedly to their friends about it.

Invariably, someone else would wander up, curious what all the ruckus was about. They’d flip through the book, rather bewildered, and find nothing notable about it, like a cat trying to comprehend pornography.

When Demand Outpaces the Supply Chain

In 2016, we published Dr. Faith G Harper’s Unfuck Your Brain: Using Science to Get Over Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Freak-outs, and Triggers. Dr. Harper was a debut author who had been rejected or ignored by the heavyweight publishers in her genre. She says that she looked at her bookshelf and saw many books published by Microcosm, so she pitched it to us. To this day, Dr. Harper recommends to all authors, “Who is publishing what you read? Submit to them!”

The Kickstarter campaign for Unfuck Your Brain remains our biggest ever. We increased the first print run three times. And still sold out immediately. We continued to reprint but were running into payment problems from our distributor and had to repeatedly put them on credit hold. Demand for the book persisted, but there were now gaps in the supply chain. Unlike Henry & Glenn Forever, the demand could not be satiated directly through fans locating our website. The need for Unfuck Your Brain was much greater, and the audience wanted to chance upon it in their local bookstore or, dare I say, mall store.

The Decision to Self-Distribute

Each year, sales for the book increased. We reluctantly left our distributor in 2018 to venture into the blind ocean of self-distribution. We had no role models or guides to follow. I merely talked to our favorite sales reps, asked them what I didn’t know, and mapped out the following components of what it would take to become our own distributor.

Why Publishers Outsource Distribution, and What They Forget

Most publishers think of distribution as a service that they inevitably outsource. They sign a contract with a distributor, consider the problem solved, and then spend less time telling people about their books and why they are so cool. They forget to do marketing. Or think this is their distributor’s problem.

One of our major incentives in bringing distribution back in-house was to simplify our model. We spent so much time every day following up with our distributor about something or another that they did not want us doing for ourselves. We were constantly auditing their payments and putting them on credit hold. We figured that the time we spent babysitting our distributor could be better spent selling books.

Another major incentive was that Amazon’s terms shifted more in their favor every year. By self-distributing, we would no longer have to kowtow to Amazon’s demands and market dominance. This was a business decision even more than it was a moral one. Amazon 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.

What Happened After We Walked Away

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, eight 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?’

When you strip away the contracts and jargon, distribution is just a bundle of systems, labor, and relationships that publishers need to manage one way or another.

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 shelf that I kept together with liquid nails in a closet and a computer in the adjoining hallway. Within 10 years, we upgraded to a grade-level basement garage where we could roll pallets in the front door and then access cartons by going up and down stairs. Within another 10 years, we were desperate for a loading dock because receiving 10 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 10 titles. (IBPA members get a special 10% discount on the pricing when they have 11 or more titles.) In the industry, this is called an enterprise resource planning system (ERP), and a good one costs over $1 million. Similarly to your warehouse, you can also use spreadsheets and a clipboard until you outgrow the limitations of that 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, but in reality, it’s almost impossible to get information about sample feeds and best practices. Worse, everyone wants a slightly different ONIX feed, and 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 10 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

To market your books, you’ll need to reach out to librarians and buyers, which can happen at regional trade shows or through direct mail. Either way, you want to build relationships. There are national and regional shows of all stripes for both bookstores and gift stores. 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, and 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, as 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.

Platform Catalogs and Listings

Digital discoverability is key for small presses. Edelweiss was once considered the gold standard for publishing, but UI problems and cost increases in recent years have significantly damaged its reputation as a market monopoly. As a result, it’s increasingly acceptable to utilize other discoverability platforms, or even your own website. In any event, buyers need to find your books somewhere, so the cost of something like Edelweiss is part smoke and mirrors—demonstrating your credibility vs. the 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.

However, consolidation of the industry has also hit field sales forces, so 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, with a number of retailers that nobody visits.

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) and charge 15% of the 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 those 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 its first order directly with the publisher, but once a store is in the habit of stocking your book, it makes 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/Ingram or other library “jobbers.” New Leaf is a mind/body/spirit specialty store wholesaler. Military Families Books serves just who the name implies. If you publish Mormon books, you’ll want to connect with Deseret Books. Ingram is now the last major account for most trade publishers, representing about a third to half of total trade sales.

These companies are important to make it easy for stores and libraries to find a way to order your books and 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 toward intimate relationships with influencers, family, friends, and piracy (pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/eng_fac/86).

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 return rate of 20% and Microcosm’s return rate of 1.4%.

Methods to Get Paid for Invoices

Stores want to buy your books on credit and pay after 30-90 days, so 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 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 12 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 are not able to accept EDI feeds. EDI is something that we are incorporating into WorkingLit now.

What a Trade Distributor Actually Does

As soon as they can attract one, most publishers fulfill these functions through a trade distributor. And then slowly erode their internal marketing efforts. Because of their size and scope, trade distributors often have better leverage 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.

The Real Cost of Distribution

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—and the many little costs and fees can add up quickly. Certainly, part of the costs of having a distributor are the fees. It’s certainly 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.

The difference between outsourcing distribution and running your own warehouse is 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 and helps them to take their publishing program more seriously as a series of costs and consequences.

What Distributors Do Well, and Where They Fall Short

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. However, due to capacity issues, they likely cannot maintain orders and interest like a publisher can manipulate all 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 and built in reorder 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!

When a Distributor Makes Sense

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 considering your options. 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 10 new books coming down the pipe each year.

How can you show your list’s unifying vision—with regard to quality, category, theme, and formats? How can you show your long-term publishing plan, years from now—how you plan to acquire more high-quality content? How can you show that you have a complete understanding of the current book market, either from experience or extensive research? How can you demonstrate 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. A distributor needs 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.

Again, distribution is not the Holy Grail. While a distributor does extend its credibility to you, it 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 your audience. But they can teach you a lot.

Availability Does Not Equal Audience

It’s tempting to assume that once your books are widely available via trade distribution, readers will organically discover them. It harkens back to those emotional moments of our own childhood when we discovered our favorite books by simply browsing our favorite section at the bookstore. For many, this is the dream that trade distribution represents: that the existence and intrinsic value of your work will attract readers.

To reach an audience:

• You need to be clever—more clever than the other people who are doing what you do.
• You need to spell out exactly what the book is.
• You need to have an online presence that appeals to your reader base.
• You need to work hard to promote your book through traditional media as well as more creative channels.
• You need to find ways to interact with your readers and keep them invested in your output and success.

Choosing the Path That Fits Your Press

Someday, maybe you’ll outgrow your first trade distributor and collaborate with someone else. Or maybe you’ll find that you prefer being smaller and getting more personal mail and doing 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 the best practice for the next press.

Work smarter, not harder, and find the shortest path from where you are currently to where you want to be.

Our major innovation this year at Microcosm was looking at how many new books we publish each season and which seasons had the best long-term profitability. We were shocked to learn that we earned more from a season of 16 new titles than we did from a season of 27 new titles. The logic would seem to indicate that you’d earn more from doing more, but sometimes the secret is that less is more.

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