hello! it's your thursday evening nerd thread about how distribution to major retailers (amazon and ingram) works at SPD. now whether we like it or not, small publishers work with SPD because selling to those platforms is necessary in the book industry for book availability

both to customers and to bookstores. they choose to work with us because dealing with the maze of that bureaucracy as an independent can be really shitty and confusing. SPD takes on that work, but its $$$ and labor intensive. what people don't often know is that

amazon and ingram are customers of ours and so get to dictate how many copies and what they buy from us based on publicity and algorithmic demand. this means that we do not get to pick which books and how many of them go to amazon or ingram, and by extension, bookshop.

in addition to this, it means that books have to arrive at SPD and there is a long waiting period between when they are received at our warehouse, when they get ordered by those retailers, when they get sent out in the mail, and then when they are available at those retailers

this is understandably so incredibly frustrating for small publishers who have to schedule months in advance to make sure books are as available as possible by publication date. this can have major impacts for financial planning in terms of the cost of print runs, re-prints

not to mention that sales opportunities get missed if books are not available on major retailing platforms when publicity hits, or when events happen. also with every displacement in the chain, the publisher loses more $$ since everyone takes a cut.

because of that cut, for example, SPD books are only available at around a 20-25% discount at Ingram, making them expensive for booksellers who order there. SPD sells wholesale (40%) as cheaply as possible, but we do not offer free shipping because we can't afford it.

there is always an assumption here that bc SPD is small, that we are slow or inefficient. this is not the case. working with major retailers means theey dictate terms that we cannot fight and that makes the process full of unnecessary delay. often the delay is on their end.

these are incredibly shitty factors that mean that sometimes publishers are forced to make the choice between working with SPD and working directly with Ingram or Amazon bc of a better margin and more direct metadata stream

i'm not trying to make anyone do anything different and i think that booksellers and small publishers absolutely have to do what they need to do to survive. i will support them in that! but there is a reason that there are fewer and fewer independent distributors in the business.

it is very difficult to contend with the fact that i might not be able to sell an indie bookstore who wants to buy directly from us copies of a book for an event because we sold all our copies to ingram to maintain stock there

and that in that sale, the publisher and bookseller will retain less $$, for example.

it is very difficult to contend with the fact that a publisher might have to choose to work with ingram's lightning source program because the books will be more easily available at bookshop, for example.

thank you for coming to my distribution nerd thread! some days it feels difficult to deal with this monopoly. but i dream it! SPD working directly with bookshop is a first step that will be great for publishers that we are working on and hopeful can happen.