Whether you are an established company trucking along in an industry that keeps throwing curveballs at you or are just getting started because you think you’ve stumbled upon an important voice that deserves the opportunity to be heard, distribution is on your mind in some way.

I don’t strictly mean working with an established trade distributor to feed the supply chain; I mean whichever way you are bringing your content to market.

There’s a point between your manufacturing and the availability of your product that should always be carefully considered, because deciding how to meet your audience may be one of the most important decisions you make on your publishing journey.

That said, your “go-to-market” strategy is hard to pin down if the rug is constantly being pulled out from under you. And as the independent publishing world continues to evolve—from companies consolidating to distributors closing, from order algorithms at the major retailers being restructured to shelf space simultaneously refining and contracting—your major publishing plans risk going belly up if you’re not prepared to pivot, especially when that big pub date is right around the corner.

Here are some of the biggest ongoing distribution changes or challenges I’ve seen in the last 20 years and how to confront them now.

1. Costs Keep Going Up

Not only have manufacturing expenses steadily gone up due to paper costs and regular inflation, but almost every additional piece of our business along the way has simply skyrocketed, from marketing campaigns to freight costs to the price of premium services like BookScan or Lightning Source.

And yet a 300-page hardcover that was priced at $28.95 30 years ago is still expected to be priced at $28.95 in 2026, because the economics of our industry are controlled by the massive scale of the major houses.

The most basic role of a distributor is to consolidate (relatively) smaller lists into a vendor of significance that can negotiate better pricing all around as it attempts to operate at that same massive scale. So even if you think you don’t need distribution because you can work with a few major outlets directly, a distributor may be selling to Amazon at a lower wholesale discount and/or can offer lower printing costs because it was able to negotiate lower pricing.

Distribution costs themselves are also invariably on the rise, but these savings you get should help eradicate the expense of the services while also broadening your sales. Any relief will ultimately help as inflation continues to worsen.

2. Self-Service Platforms Are Dominating

Publishing a book doesn’t really require starting a business because there are tools now that ingest your content and spew it out onto online retailers with almost no human touch and no in-between steps. While this solves a major problem for writers who just want their words to be available, it’s less practical for publishers who intend to build a strong backlist and project a bankable brand.

More importantly, the rise of these platforms has contributed to a growth in quantity, with experts suggesting that nearly 3 million books are now published annually; I seem to recall that number being closer to 50,000 around the turn of the millennium.

The publishing industry simply isn’t built to support that much volume, and while self-service platforms help keep much of that content out of the traditional supply chain, a distributor’s role is to curate that unwieldy avalanche of titles being brought to market, for buyer consideration, now more than ever. 

3. Human Support Has Evaporated

Since automation is cheaper, modern services can take uploaded content, scan it to create robust metadata, generate covers from design templates, and disburse both content and metadata to your target market with almost no human eyes on it at all—and certainly no experienced sales guru to tell you when you’re making a mistake.

This is why I still recommend developing distribution strategies that include professional consultants or publishing enthusiasts who will invest their energy in making your books better for a market that progressively needs more human effervescence. No AI bot or algorithm is going to set your books apart for you; they learn by pattern recognition.

Today’s market requires the deft ability to work around such patterns just to be seen, and that’s why you should invest in real human support wherever you can find it.

4. Cultural Shift Has Mostly Eliminated Author Development

Since the old school barriers to entry have been removed and the technology has commodified, supposedly, anyone can publish books today. But if TikTok doesn’t take your new author’s title to exciting viral new places, that author could be dead on arrival.

Everyone who sells books has the data to back up their efforts, which means that a buyer who took a chance on the first book in a series that went nowhere is never going to buy the second. We live in a time of immediate cultural relevance, and because of the incessant mirage of marketing and noise in social media channels, our culture moves faster than ever.

This is an example where your method of distribution might benefit you if it focuses on letting consumers decide rather than commercial category buyers, as an author can strike lightning in a bottle regardless of what the data says. In other words, a lack of trade support might no longer be the death knell it once was.

5. Independent Publishing That Once Teased Disruption to the Majors Has Now Emerged as Its Own Tier of Status

Bear with me on this one, because I don’t mean it as cynically as it sounds. But rewind about 15 years, when tablets were all the rage and the digital-first market was truly exploding, and you’ll see renegades like Hugh Howey and E.L. James caused some fuss by busting out of KDP or Wattpad to become fixtures on the bestseller lists.

These are still cited as indie breakout successes, with demand not created by major house marketing (even though both required the intervention of the major houses to reach that next level).

Since that exciting and unpredictable time, however, indie for the most part has continued to struggle with visibility against the majors, and there have been fewer notable breakouts, because it’s a cultural tier lacking the financial muscle to compete.

And yet, unlike in the music world, an ecosystem has never been fully fleshed out to validate this tier. Historically, the solution has been for distributors to propose that being part of their roster will help sidestep the stigma toward independent publishing, but if you’ve recently browsed a Barnes & Noble, you may struggle to find quality indies on the merchandising tables.

Addressing this issue head-on, the ABA and the Independent Publishers Caucus just announced a new indie bestseller list, to be reported weekly, to focus on both indie publishers and independent retailers. This is particularly critical at a time when Amazon holds the lion’s share of the market and chain retail support continues to decline.

A burgeoning new scaffolding for your publishing program might be exactly what you need to set the bar for realistic goals, and it may allow existing distribution models to recalibrate while new ones continue to emerge.

What Comes Next

To reiterate, it’s shocking to see how much change the independent publishing industry has seen in two decades. It will keep coming. It will get faster.

What doesn’t seem to change is the vision and the flexibility of our community as it continues to carve a niche for itself. When old systems stop working, new ones begin to take shape—sometimes imperfectly, sometimes unexpectedly.

No matter what problems arise, someone is always there trying to build a solution. The challenge is deciding which of those solutions actually serves your goals, your authors, and your audience.

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