Distribution in the Digital Age
“When you are small, you have to be thoughtful about what you send out. For a small press, a bookstore [is] kind of a zero-sum game,” she says. “They do not buy books; they rent books on the off chance that they can sell them, but that is ruinous for a small press because we need the cash.”
“It’s a headache in the beginning,” Simonds adds, noting that many of her clients are dealing with the vagaries of book distribution for the first time. “You try, as a distributor, to prepare people for [the inevitable returns], because no one thinks it’s going to happen. We have strategies for dealing with [returns such as selling them on the] Amazon Marketplace [where third parties can sell items through Amazon for a commission fee], or putting [them] back on the shelves and repackaging [them]. Some books are too scuffed up to put back in the system, so another option is to put them on our Web site and sell them as signed copies.”