As publishers, we trade in curated lists—but it’s important to remember that the system isn’t a true meritocracy. While quality may determine a book’s long-term perennial potential, it is strategic coordination between publisher, distributor, and author that dictates whether a title is even positioned to achieve bestseller status in the first place.

These systems are old, and arguably ill-suited to today’s faster, more decentralized publishing environment. They exist primarily to support the marketing architecture of legacy publishing, and in many cases, they’ve lost the plot when it comes to amplifying new or genuinely authoritative literary voices.

The New York Times & Los Angeles Times

For starters, the physical format of a book determines which bestseller list it may be eligible for. The New York Times publishes separate lists for hardcover, paperback, and eBook editions, segmented further by genre. A paperback does not compete directly with a hardcover; each appears on its own list. The Los Angeles Times bestseller list is more curated and occasionally combines formats, but hardcover editions are still the most commonly represented.

Most Big Five publishers release titles first as hardcovers, followed by a paperback edition a season or two later. This strategy exists primarily because hardcovers carry better margins, and the avid fanbase will typically adopt the more expensive version during the presale and release window. Libraries also prefer hardcover editions for their durability and archival value.

Bestseller lists are then compiled on a weekly basis using sales data from a confidential and curated network of region-specific booksellers, including independent stores, select Barnes & Noble locations, and online retailers. This data is submitted to the editorial team responsible for producing the list. While the exact methodology remains proprietary, it's understood that the list is shaped by a combination of actual sales numbers and editorial discretion. Only a select number of booksellers contribute to this process—not the full retail market.

Amazon

Amazon’s bestseller rankings are based on real-time sales velocity within a given category. These rankings update hourly and reflect recent sales activity rather than long-term performance. A title can rank highly in a sub-niche with relatively modest sales volume, which is why Amazon bestseller status is often more fluid and volatile compared to curated industry lists.

BookScan

BookScan (operated by Circana, formerly NPD) compiles point-of-sale data from a wide range of retailers—but not all of them. It is considered the industry standard for estimating print book sales, but it captures only a portion of the market.

Amazon is included in BookScan’s reporting—specifically print sales tied to ISBNs—though not all Amazon sales channels are equally reflected (BookScan ignores a huge swath of KDP sales, including print titles assigned an ISBN from Amazon KDP). BookScan also captures data from major national retailers like Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, as well as some independent bookstores that use participating POS systems. However, coverage from indie booksellers remains incomplete.

Crucially, BookScan does not report on wholesale distribution (like Ingram shipments) or direct-to-consumer sales through author or publisher websites. In today’s landscape, where many independent publishers and authors rely on direct sales, this creates noticeable blind spots in BookScan’s reporting.

Co-Ops

“Co-ops” refer to paid, premium placement opportunities offered by bookstores or online platforms. The most visible example is at Barnes & Noble—those prominent front tables of new releases or themed displays are typically co-op spots. Publishers, working through their distributor, pay for these placements as part of seasonal marketing programs.

Amazon offers a digital version of co-op through its Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) platform, which includes homepage banners, carousel slots, and featured product recommendations. These placements are often targeted and algorithmically driven, but still require a financial commitment.

Very few independent bookstores offer co-op placements. Their merchandising tends to be more curated, reflecting staff picks, seasonal interests, or local authors. These stores typically have more skin in the game when it comes to what they feature, and paid placement is rarely part of the equation.

Publishers in league with their distributors deploy co-op strategies at select regional big-box retailers to enhance their opportunity to chart on bestseller lists published by the Times. This is how publishers can indirectly pay for the marketing opportunity that these lists enable.

The most effective strategy for charting on the Times bestseller list begins well before publication. Publishers work closely with independent booksellers during seasonal sales conferences hosted by their distributor—typically on a biannual calendar (Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer for Ingram-distributed titles). These conferences give sales reps the chance to pitch upcoming titles directly to booksellers, who often place early orders based on these presentations. When paired with targeted co-op placement, this strategy ensures strong shelf presence during a book’s release week.

For authors with bestseller ambitions, it’s critical to examine the publisher’s approach during this stage: how the book’s metadata is structured, how its description and positioning are pitched, and how the physical book is printed and bound. Every detail—from the spine width to the comparative titles—plays a role in whether a title earns attention, garners early orders, and builds enough momentum to chart.

As such today is the publishing date of my book, A Book About Books, now available everywhere books are sold. You may purchase the title from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and an array of other sales channels.

I like to focus on a specific problem I am trying to solve for when writing. A character in a story might struggle with his sense of value, a piece of copy may seek to address something a customer is missing, and in the case of a text on the business of books, we examine each part of the book industry’s supply chain and the challenges it faces today.

Below is an opening excerpt from A Book About Books, where we outline some of these problems. The book goes on to thoroughly define each step of the chain before exploring ways one might approach solving them.

Reader, I am proud. We only get so many publishing days—so many chances to send something off into the world. As this loop closes, another trailhead emerges. A driving purpose of this book is to motivate action—to show, by example, that you can do this too. Onward!

Problems

Problems are inevitable and I don’t perceive them as bad. They are a product of our crawling state of entropy. The thrilling part is that we have the opportunity to harness a problem like a wild stallion and ride it directly into the sun. Let’s mount our stallion by taking a high-level look at each step of the supply chain and the problems that exist within them. Bold phrases are industry terms that have been expanded upon in the glossary, starting on page 102.

Problems with Big Publishing

Book publishing has been severely disrupted by print on demand and the democratization of distribution that it has granted independent authors. Social media amplifies this effect by providing individuals with large followings more distribution capital than publishers. Today, publisher acquisitions are less influenced by curatorial taste-making and behave more like venture capital—in other words, the logic is to purchase assets below their value, corner a market or genre, cast a wide net, and hope for some whales.

As such, book publishers have become increasingly averse to risk and more prone to homogenized choices; taking obvious bets, following trends in lieu of being “ahead of the curve,” and shirking anything too “avante garde.” What I largely mean by this is book publishers have flattened their content considerations into a predictable pancake and invest far less in evangelizing new talent.

The data that emerged from the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust suit filed in 2021 against Penguin Random House (Bertelsmann) over its attempted acquisition of Simon & Schuster from Paramount Global reveal the following trends:

1. Emerging to mid-career talent are being largely ignored; author care can be great but has great potential to be stagnant. Of 14,000 PRH titles published in 2021, 90% sold under 1,000 copies.

2. Advances are shrinking, even for authors who have previously published bestsellers. The consolidated market has reduced competition between big publishers, driving down advances.

3. Criteria is assessing emerging talent has changed to fit a fast-paced churn of content informed by social media and parasocial clout.

Problems with Distributors

Throughout this book I detail the ‘Book Trade’—the ecosystem of distributors, wholesalers, and booksellers that are all responsible for the movement of books and how companies like Ingram and Amazon are entrenched across several crucial layers of the trade’s supply chain. The problem here is distributors honoring arcane and vestigial agreements penned with Amazon in the 90’s that do not make sense in today’s market.

The intended role a distributor provides is to connect a publisher’s catalog of forthcoming works (a Frontlist) to a network of booksellers. Distributors are also meant to be curatorial tastemakers, selecting the publishers they represent with integrity equal to a publisher making their choices on who to publish. This creates wholesale relationships between publishers and booksellers, and forges authorities in publishers who stand up talent both fledgling and established. These distributors service Amazon in addition to other big-box retail and e-commerce giants.

The issue at hand is that purchaser behaviors have largely migrated to online retailers—Amazon as an obvious default—while brick-and-mortar independent retailers reduce in size and meaningful sales volume, some publishers see Amazon taking up a majority share of their distributor sales.

The original function of the distributor creating bonds between publisher and bookseller seems drastically diluted as the priority shifts to filling larger Amazon orders. This often leaves distributors appearing more like a superfluous pass-through entity for passionless purchases online; taking a cut on a sales channel that require no human intervention, typically stirred up via the distribution capital of the publisher or author to begin with.

New types of distribution models are emerging today that do not require exclusivity over a represented publisher’s catalog, meaning the publisher can open up their own accounts with Amazon and fill orders directly through programs such as Amazon Advantage or Amazon Seller Central (Fulfilled by Amazon or FBA) or Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Both the margins and cashflow potential in this direct control of e-commerce accounts are becoming increasingly crucial for smaller/start-up publishers to consider as they enter the market. Even mid-to-large sized publishers can use their weight to strike non-exclusivity deals with distributors, carving out digital rights or even the entire Amazon account.

Problems with Printers

We can thank the 90s through the aughts for the domestic manufacturing drought we are in today. We saw massive supply chain disruptions in 2020’s pandemic era that resulted in book paper shortages that lasted through 2023. It feels back to normal now here in 2024, although book paper and printing costs have generally doubled across the board since 2020.

Offset Printing remains the way to go for large-volume printing. There are a handful of competitive options in the United States, although it’s easy to outsource to China for high quality large-run book manufacturing that is ridiculously cheap. However, today’s tariffs on China (which get passed onto us, the business, and then you, the reader) make this option not as marginally beneficial as it used to be.

As I’ve cudgeled into your head by now, print on demand is and is still becoming increasingly pervasive. This author believes it will be the primary default of book manufacturing a decade from now.

Problems Authors Face

If you’re new talent that does not have some sort of platform, some kind of parasocial relationship with your audience that gives you ridiculous distribution capital, it’s hard to find a publisher or representation that will give you the time of day. This doesn’t exactly mean you need a big social media following. Of course it helps, it’s a solid tool. There are ways to manufacture a platform beyond social media, but social media is a risk-mitigating factor in today’s venture capital mindset of book publishing.

Literary agents are increasingly difficult to find as advances are inconsistent—again, an impact of risk aversion. As such, there are very few independent literary agents, and literary representation is now largely dominated by Creative Artists Agency (CAA) and William Morris Endeavor (WME), where they can take their brand name talent and funnel their works to the bigger publishers.

There are still, of course, independent publishers and agents of integrity that can spot and build new talent. The players are few and far between, and they all participate in the vibes roulette of our business. This speaks to the VC mindset; a confluence of taste, integrity, and grit—seeing the future in the face of unknown odds. But like any good strategic partner, it’s hard to find in today’s landscape, and sometimes doing it yourself is better than doing it half-assed with a publisher who has no skin in the game.

Problems with Small Publishing / Start-Up Publishing:

“What good is a publisher?” asks the high distribution capital individual. “If you’re relying on me and my network to shill my book, what good are you?”

Great question. Big publishers solve for this by paying fat advances and offering legacy brand authority. Smaller publishers have to compete hard in order to prove value over what high distribution individuals can achieve themselves with today’s highly robust self-publishing tools.

Smaller publishers can compete by scaling up to the same levels of distribution as the Big Five, or using Big Five distributors, or creating their own distribution that services these accounts. At the end of the day, distribution is a plateau; there are only so many sales channels and reps behind them in addition to their heavy skew toward Amazon sales.

This leaves new or smaller publishers in a position to get creative with their offerings, how they market them, and how they choose to make them available. A big example of a simple blind spot in bigger publishers are cool events. It’s uncommon to see publishers offer their authorship a book tour or even a single event. Generally authors, especially new talent, are left to their own devices to figure out the events surrounding their book release; they often are responsible for doing it themselves or finding third party promoter support.

While capital intensive, there are ways of standing up tours that can have a reasonable target of breaking even with a solid ticketing model. The quality of marketing from sublime in-person experiences translates very well into lasting word-of-mouth awareness campaigns, and are good content pipelines in and of themselves if you record your programs. I can’t stress this enough; curating a space where an audience can have a good time is probably one of the most valuable things on the planet Earth.

A final problem small publishers face is the private equity-ization of everything; consolidations across distribution, printing, and publishing. While publishers on a micro level (a title by title basis) have to think like venture capitalists, publishers on a macro level have to think like private equity. Because most of it is owned by private equity. Simon & Schuster this last fall was sold to top PE firm KKR.

What this means is that the incentive is to keep a mature asset improving on an annual basis. This compounds the issue of risk assessment and value association in book publishing, creating constraints around acquisition choices that simply did not exist thirty years ago.

In total, this amalgam of problems has created a large, flat, stagnant surface with a massive saturation of content. This poses a challenging playing field for emerging authors and publishers alike. However, this has also created new opportunities for disruption and competitiveness against extremely boring and hegemonic publishers, crafting entirely original paths for success.

I receded from a regular publishing cadence here because I was honing in on completion; much of the themes I would share here were being fleshed out in the manuscript at hand.

A Book About Books is a compression algorithm of my professional experience in the book business. Readers will gain an understanding of the fundamental principles guiding each step of the publishing process—editorial, production, distribution, marketing, and acquisitions—across independent, self-published, and Big Five models.

This book is for those interested in working in the industry or starting their own publishing company. It is also for authors who want to better understand the often opaque machinations behind their titles, as well as self-publishers looking to maximize today's distribution tools.

The way this industry has changed—and will continue to change—is dynamic and thrilling. The book begins by highlighting a series of challenges faced by publishers, authors, and readers alike, then explores how the industry may evolve in the future.

I am happy to share that A Book About Books is complete and will be available everywhere books are sold March 11, 2025. Now that this milestone has been achieved, I will be returning to Publisher’s Stack with excerpts, lessons, and additional content surrounding the world of book publishing.

ABAB is available for pre-order directly from me, and I will personally sign these copies. Pre-order here.

The title is also available on Amazon and, soon, everywhere books are sold.

Thank you for your readership. I will leave you with the opening foreword to A Book About Books.

Festina lente, latin for make haste slowly, is represented in the logo of publisher Doubleday Books; a dolphin (agile, lithe) curling itself around an anchor (cold, grounding). What a perfect thing to say about what a publisher does—make haste, slowly.

Every step in the process of making a book is slow, but the cerebral and market pressures surrounding the act of publishing demands agility. Distributors command seasonal catalogs from their publishers, editors keep their authors to their deadlines, and authors are in concert with whatever demon is coaxing them along their own twisted and alchemical process.

In cultural industries we are constantly balancing and often at odds between the realities of making art (space, time, meandering) and patronizing art (capital, market, audience). This balance has seen dramatic moments of accelerated change from the days of Doubleday in its establishment in 1897 to today’s online-induced rapidity.

Doubleday Books is now the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, a part of the Bertelsmann global media conglomerate; a company that holds a little over 10% of the US book trade. In 2023, Penguin Random House released approximately 20,000 new books across its imprints.

Legendary book publisher Jason Epstein, formerly of Doubleday, witnessed the change of publisher priorities when Doubleday was purchased by Penguin and subsequently opened up for an IPO. He remarks in his book Book Business of the shift in the company’s priorities from editor interests to shareholder interests. Today we are witnessing more shifts in priorities as many of Epstein’s predictions have come to fruition since his seminal title released in 2001. Accelerationism fueled by capital, communication technology, and corporate consolidation has created an entirely new landscape for publishers and authors to contend with. The dolphin has abandoned the anchor.

* * *

This book brings together roughly ten years of lessons in developing literary programs, from building new publishing houses to deploying post-graduate classes on the business of books. A constellation of workshops, pitfalls, and successes inform this slim volume. The content is largely skewed toward the high level business components of book publishing, with some interjections on aesthetics, marketing, and vibes.

Readers will walk away with a better understanding of how the business of books functions from first principles—the underlying supply chain of the trade-released book from concept to bookstore shelf. Authors will gain insight on the financial realities behind making a title available anywhere books are sold, what separates quality independent labels and Big Five labels alike, and things to think about when seeking a publisher. For those who want to work in publishing there is useful information to be found with entry-level application, along with some universal fundamentals for those looking to build their own publishing company or simply enrich their understanding.

Today, publishers are all faced with a similar fundamental problem: balancing cash flow. It’s common to throw the margins of books under the bus when scrutinizing book publishing as a business, but cashflow is the killer culprit: fixed costs with staff, variable upfront costs with print manufacturing, and typical quarter-long delays in receiving revenue. These capital-intensive realities demand hits, which are far more difficult to engineer in today’s saturated content market. The valley between titles that sell hundreds of units and those that sell tens of thousands of units is immense; it’s estimated that 1-2% of titles sell over 10,000 copies within their first year, with an estimated 70-80% selling under 1,000 units.

Compared to other media businesses, 10,000 units is a relatively small number, but an immense milestone in books across genres. All publishers are under pressure to sustain dealflow with titles that meet sales expectations, needing killer accuracy on their catalog planning to ensure proper cashflow management. This requires creative strategy when dealing with today’s distributors and wholesalers; parts of the supply chain that are over a decade behind the times. Let’s say it here first: distribution is a massive source of today’s problems in the book business, and as such, a big vector for disruption. This theme is a constant throughline in this book.

Why this book, why now? I feel like we haven’t received a proper book on the business of books since Jason Epstein’s Book Business in 2001. I love that book, and I recommend you read it. Epstein’s book is important because it gives readers an understanding of how we got to today’s consolidation of everything, a phenomenon that is not unique to book publishing. He lived through Random House becoming Penguin Random House and going public, the results of priorities skewing from privately held interests to shareholders. Epstein also predicted Ingram’s moves on two fronts; a consolidation in distribution and print on demand.

Print on demand and online e-commerce technologies together have fundamentally changed the behavior of books over the last decade by radically democratizing key components of publishing. There are upsides and downsides to this, the boons and ramifications experienced in real time. This book is a representation of this very disruption, having been self-published via my self-publishing imprint designed to take advantage of the suite of global e-commerce and automated print platforms that now exist. There is no easier time than today to fully conceptualize and deliver on a book, but know that you’re competing against approximately 7,000 to 15,000 new title uploads a day across leading self-publishing platforms.

I have spent the better part of a decade contending with the problems I call out in A Book About Books; problems publishers, authors, and all who are concerned with the state of literature face. Potentially one day we will work on solving these problems together, or you will exceed me in my own competitive path. I wrote this book for three reasons: to act as a compression algorithm for my partners, to encapsulate all of my class material, and to keep my own writing practice sharp. I am excited to share the results with you, reader. Herein we lower the opacity on how this all works and inspire something in you to go out and build.

Pre-order ABAB

The following is a vertical slice from the curriculum I developed for the “book track” of the Los Angeles Review of Books Publisher’s Workshop staged earlier this summer.

Here we’re answering the question, what does a publisher do? We approach this by examining the chain of business the publisher is responsible for, the necessary relationships they make (or own) to make their business possible, and how this model intersects with emergent methods in self-publishing and independent start-ups. 

(Some of the topics here are expansions on earlier entries on self-publishing, print-on-demand, and traditional publishing.) 

Let’s not bury the lede and distill this down to a TLDR; a publisher is responsible for the financing, printing, and distribution for of the titles they’ve acquired. This chain of business can be broken into four components, which I will visualize below. 

The Book Trade

To better understand what a publisher does, we must understand the book trade. The book trade is a phrase used (by the book trade, of course!) that constitutes booksellers, librarians, distributors, wholesalers (everyone responsible for the boots-on-the-ground sale of books), and the publishers that service them with content. 

This league of groups are all interested and benefit from the sale and accessibility of books. You may have seen books marketed as available anywhere books are sold; this means that the title is made available “to the trade,” which means the publisher has some kind of distributor behind the book making it available anywhere books are sold. 

A brief note on Distributors and Wholesalers

At a glance, a distributor seems indistinguishable from a wholesaler, but there are some crucial differences. In a nutshell, a wholesaler is a passive sales entity while a distributor is an active sales entity. 

A wholesaler, such as Ingram (the largest wholesaler of books on the planet), acquires their inventory from distributors to make available to the trade at scaling discounts; the wholesale rate. Ingram uses a web tool called iPage where booksellers can hop online and place product orders to stock their stores. Generally Ingram acquires these titles for a discount of up to 55% off the list price to resell the inventory to booksellers for anywhere between 30% - 50% off the list price. It’s in that 5% - 25% margin where they make their money. 

Distributors, such as Consortium or Publishers Group West, actively represent their client publishers and facilitate sales to wholesalers as well as other interested sales channels, such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, independent booksellers, or libraries; in other words, the sales channels of that make up the book trade. Distributors make their money by earning anywhere between 20% - 28% of the wholesale price. 

Let’s have an example; consider a paperback with a list price of $18.95. $10.42 is this title’s maximum 55% discount, giving us a wholesale price of $8.53. Let’s say the distributor’s cut is 25%, they earn $2.13 off this exchange, leaving the publisher with a net receipt of $6.40. 

So, why not just work directly with a wholesaler and service all of these sales channels direct? Why not be a distributor? It’s not impossible for a publisher (self or independent) to do this, but the lift of labor is significant and perhaps very much worth the expense to delegate. To be a distributor, at a minimum one would have to open up accounts with each disparate sales channel and manage the logistics and warehousing to service them.

A good distributor already has agreements established with all of the accounts that make up the book trade on a global level, has their own warehousing infrastructure to handle timely shipping & receiving, and (not insignificantly) has their own internal marketing cycles that promote new catalogs and cross-sell their titles on a seasonal basis. 

“The Chain” Illustrated across Big Five, Independent, and Self-Publishers

Let’s start with a blank, modular representation of “The Chain.”

[Publisher (or Imprint)] → [Printer] → [Distributor] → [The Trade]

Observing the Big Five, we’ll use Penguin Random House as an example. In the case of PRH, their chain is vertically integrated. This means that the otherwise disparate parties that make up The Chain are owned outright by PRH. 

[PRH Imprint] → [PRH-owned Printer] → [PRH-owned Distributor] → [The Trade]

Independent publishers are rarely as vertically integrated as the Big Five are, so they rely on third-party partnerships at each step of The Chain. 

[Independent Imprint] → [Third-party Printer] → [Third-party Distributor] → [The Trade]

Let’s use Chapter House as an example in observing the independent chain made up of third-party partnerships. We generally use either Marquis or McNaughton & Gunn, two very competitive offset printers in North America to order our print runs. From there, we have a distribution partnership with Consortium. 

[Chapter House] → [Marquis, printer] → [Consortium, distributor] → [The Trade] 

We stand up our catalogs in partnership with our distributor, then plan our printings in line with a schedule set forth by the title’s publishing date. We work with Consortium to facilitate a marketing and release process that generates awareness within the book trade, gathering pre-sales across direct sales channels (our website) as well as sales channels handled by the distributor (everything else constituting the book trade.)

Now let’s consider how this modular chain is reflected in the self-publisher. 

[Self-Publisher] → [Amazon KDP + IngramSpark (as a printer)] → [ Amazon KDP + IngramSpark (as a distributor)] → [The Trade] 

There are many tools that now exist to help the self-publisher print and distribute books on-demand. In my past writing about self-publishing, I have expressed that Amazon KDP and IngramSpark in tandem are my favorite solutions for self-publishing. Both facilitate print-on-demand, which has its ups and downs, but in general I see it as a net positive for a swift and efficient way to blast a title out on a global level, both alleviating the burden of inventory logistics and consolidating The Chain. For certain internet personalities that are publishing forces unto themselves, this is an extremely competitive vehicle.

With KDP, the self-publisher captures the global Amazon market (one of the major sales channels in the book trade). Simultaneously deploying IngramSpark makes your title globally accessible through the world’s largest wholesaler of books (using the same 55% wholesale terms I illustrated above), getting the title a listing on Ingram’s iPage (bookseller accessibility) and blasting it through a variety of sales channels such as Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and beyond.

This method effectively makes the self-published title available to the entire book trade—available anywhere books are sold—accessibility unheard of a decade ago. We must also acknowledge the downside: the missing human element across print quality assurance and internal book trade-facing marketing facilitated by distributors. Additionally, booksellers generally display an allergy to self-published titles with few exceptions; booksellers generally rely on sales conferences facilitated by distributors and bookseller associations (that distributors participate in) to stay informed on their seasonal acquisition choices.

In the same vein with this democratization of distribution accessibility, the self-publisher competes against an exponentially expanding sea of content. How does the self-publisher create awareness when removed from conversations internal to the trade? If the self-publisher has their own internal marketing apparatus at play—influencers of sorts—they can effectively circumvent the entirety of the internal machinations at play in the book trade. They can be The Chain. Fascinating!

The Human Element

A publisher’s schedule in publishing a book is ultimately informed by the distributor. Distributors either work on a two-calendar season (Consortium deals with a Spring/Summer catalog and a Fall/Winter catalog) or a three-calendar season (Penguin Random House deals with a Spring, Summer, and Fall/Winter catalog). A publishing date is determined by the publisher, sometimes with influence from the distributor, and the production schedule is reverse engineered from that declared date in any given seasonal release calendar.

A publishing date at a minimum is set a year in advance as the internal pre-sales and sales operations, culminating in a seasonal sales conference, begins a year in advance. Spring/Summer 2024 is planned and penned with the distributor as Spring/Summer 2023 is releasing, and so on. Publishers determine the most advantageous time to release a title and declare it within any given future season.

The publisher works closely with their distributor to prepare a title to feed out across all sales channels; engaging in meetings to tinker on metadata and marketing assets to best position a title in the minds of readers and the trade. The result of this process is an in-person conference where booksellers and representatives from all corners of the book trade gather to discuss a season’s forthcoming catalog; also known as a frontlist.

The publisher, after practicing a few repetitions with their distributor, presents their catalog in a pitch setting at a convention center filled with representatives from the trade, conveying the merits of the title, the promotional plans the publisher has made for it, and the estimated vibe it will have on the market at large.

Perhaps most importantly, the sales conference doesn’t exactly end when the pitch is over. After all, the book trade is congregated at a conference over the course of a couple of days. Dinners, drinks, and conversations ensue. Relationships develop. Reputations are enforced. Friends are made. Booksellers become acquainted with publishers and their catalogs on a deeper, more personal level. Stack some years behind this and a publisher becomes a presence in the trade.

This, reader, is what a publisher does—beyond the curatorial, production, editorial, design, and financial choices—it is the facilitation of “The Chain” and the deep well of relationships involved. This is why when budding authors and publishers ask me for advice on what they should do when starting out I suggest they explore their local scenes; independent bookstores, the town’s open mic, a library near by. Speak to people. Start a reading. Do things. It’s all social, it’s all storytelling percolating in and out of our daily lives.

1. Be a little older than you are now. Consider the impulse to publish, particularly if you’re under the age of twenty-five. Think about the life to be lived and the immense encapsulation at hand. 

2. If a book is a vehicle, where is it taking you? Do you want to park it in the garage and admire its detail, or drive it around and take people for rides?

3. What is the reader’s journey? Plot a travel map for the experience you wish to share. Be sensitive commanding someone else’s time. 

4. Notice what’s around you and what you don’t like. Some of the best promotions of learning is what not to do. Use this as a foundation for direction. 

5. Cultivate a ravenous curiosity toward what is happening in your community. Who visits your local bookseller? Where do the other writers in your town hang out? Do these spaces exist, or must they be made? Greatness fosters local support.

6. Think about all of your favorite things and the countless minds it took to make them. Reflect on your inspirations and compose a team in your head of similarly motivated companions. The editing process makes the manuscript a book. The design process forges a brand. You are Frodo. The designer is Gandalf. Your editor is Samwell Gamgee, your publisher is either Aragorn or Boromir. The proofreader is Legolas, obviously. 

7. Practice writing a book description in increasingly smaller spaces; a paragraph, two sentences, seven words. This practice is fantastic for all forms of copy or thrusts at describing concepts. Poetry flows and cuts when it is aware of the space it uses. 

8. You’re always writing poetry, even when you’re not writing poetry. 

   1. As such, it’s important to study and listen to poets. This practice also enables one to scry aspects of the future. 

   2. It is equally important to know when to not listen to poets, as some of them can wield their precision implicitly toward malice. 

9. Your books are constant ignitions of conversation, especially between yourself and your writing. Be gentle toward yourself as your craft grows and your taste develops. 

10. Mastery in any medium is about consistency. Dress for the weather, take your time. Finding enjoyment in the method, even before the benefits appear, will plant your footing somewhere nurturing and unfuckwithable. 

Shaun Roberts crafted two variations of the cover jacket that we loved so much it was decided we had to run two limited edition hardcovers sporting both variations. Shaun is a dream designer — literally, in the sense that he somehow has this psionic ability to probe into the mind of the author to extract design concepts that achieve wildly exact aesthetic goals. Gabi made this part of the book’s development easy, already being a visual person, by supplying Shaun with this vision board; the echo of the final covers already visible at this stage.

The manuscript largely consisting of writing that Gabi had previously published in some form or another online was then massaged through the lens of Rhiannon McGavin, Gabi’s editor. McGavin, a tremendous poet in her own right, also holds a supremely online upbringing having started publishing YouTube videos at the age of twelve. This combination of literary finesse and online voyaging, mutual at the technical core of McGavin and Abrao, produced an incredibly thoughtful, refined collection that achieves exactly what we set out for it to do; to soothe and arouse.

Months before the book’s publishing date on a warm summer day, Gabi and I met at the Hammer Museum where she used to work for some brunch, conversation, and contemplation. Here’s what we talked about.

LOS ANGELES LOCALS ON LOS ANGELES

DL: What should people not from LA know about LA?

GA: The common misconception is that people are self-centered and snobby. My whole thing is, they're passionate and focused. This is a city of people who are attempting to self-actualize. Usually in creative industries, whether that's film or contemporary art or literature; this is the creative city, right? It requires a lot of self interest to be a creative person, in a way that I encourage. This can be misinterpreted as a lack of care for others, but I want my artists to be self-interested. People are here for a reason. 

DL: Have we ever talked about this Cameron Esposito quote? 

GA: I don't think so. 

DL: I can't remember what journal this was in, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's basically something like, “Los Angeles provides a logical backbone to completely illogical pursuits.” I read that as, it’s a space where you can come, implant, and grow no matter what it is. 

GA: That’s so good. 

DL: And it’s definitely spurred on by the Hollywood dream, the entertainment industry, but that essence has far exceeded any industry at this point. We have so many vibrant, creative fields that have blossomed from entertainment.

GA: Totally. Yeah, there's a shelf for anything. Even the weirdest stuff. It's really great. I feel for people who don’t see that. There's so much to enjoy when you’re in LA as this bustling, anything is possible, stimulating place. Also, I think what people miss about LA is how international it is. 

DL: Of course. 

GA: That's why my parents moved here. LA is the city of range.

DL: Big time. I definitely can see how the scope of it, the sheer size of LA… perhaps it's a similar effect of too many items on a menu, people can get really stuck and assume that one section of LA is the whole LA experience, or not even know where to go, what to pick. 

GA: I always say LA is like an amusement park, because you know exactly what you’ll get in each area, right? I know who I’ll see where, what kind of aesthetics I’ll get, I know what kind of experience I’ll have. Now that I'm a bit older, I love that. 

ROLE PLAYING IN VIDEO GAMES MADE US GOOD WRITERS

DL: The early Internet days. We share a bond over Neopets. I’m curious to hear how the Internet influenced your writing, the development of your writing. Did you encounter Habbo Hotel as well? 

GA: I did. I didn't get addicted to that one, but I spent time in it.

DL: So for me the trajectory was Neopets, Habbo Hotel, and then this massively multiplayer online role playing game called Final Fantasy XI. 

GA: Oh, wow. 

DL: And this was a precursor to the era that was then EverQuest 2, and then World of Warcraft. There was a pocket of time between 2003 to 2004, where things in that MMO sphere just exploded. 

GA: What’s an MMO? 

DL: Massively multiplayer online role playing game. Or MMORPG. In the sense where it's, you know, you can see the scale of something like hundreds of people simultaneously doing this thing at once. 

GA: And now that's everything, right? Video games, a lot of them you can gather and see the little thought bubbles.

DL: Definitely. That online component is intermingled with almost everything now. Living games. 

GA: They’re places. 

DL: In the 90’s and early aughts, there was this mystery to the Internet, a mystery to these online places before everything got, I don't know. Everything feels very revealed now. There's no secret, no mystery. Just attention grabbing. That might be a bit cynical.

GA: Yeah, maybe that’s what it is. Experiencing Neopets felt rare. Even discovering that game at the time was like, holy shit. This is such unique technology, you know? Now everyone’s trying to sell me this.

DL: With those games, especially as we got deeper into the multiplayer element of it, they were so instrumental in the development of my writing. Suddenly I was immersed and building so much language and so much communication with whatever audience online.

GA: You're writing every day. 

DL: Exactly. And so by the time I’m in high school, well, I can type very fast. 

GA: Yeah, I was the fastest typer in my class. That goes to show you that our experience is a bit rare, you know what I mean? Not everyone was at home getting Interneted out. That's crazy. So what would happen in these games? What would you talk about?

DL: Gosh, I mean, especially in games like World of Warcraft, which I played fervently throughout high school, it became incredibly personal. We had a guild, your guild is the group of people that you're consistently playing the content with, and you have all this end-game content where it requires big teams. And so in those early days, you needed a team of 40 individual people to run what is called a raid, which is basically a big boss that needed 40 people to coordinate together to beat it. It took a lot of time and cooperation. People got close. 

GA: Oh, that's so fun. Those were good days, weren’t they? 

DL: They really were. 

GA: I feel that though, those big online days. Neopets for me… many things trip me out about this, but in Neopets I was a big role player, and the scene was always “fairy school,” because of course I dreamed of a world where I could do whatever I wanted, plus the magic aspect. It worked on these chat forums, which you probably remember, where it's, you know… type your little story, send, wait 5 minutes for a response, repeat. Scenes would go on and on. And that was the first actual writing where, I'm nine years old giving myself a name and being like, her eyes were purple. 

DL: That's an incredible creative exercise. You're embodying this entity that you’ve invented on the spot. 

GA: Creating dialog, right? 

DL: Very complicated environments. 

GA: It was improv too, because someone else is reacting to you. You'd have someone really vibing with your narrative, at the same time you have the asshole that’s trying to kill you off, sometimes trolls. It was so fun. I always tried to make it into social media, which you weren't allowed to do. I was doing role play for a while, always being the fairy in fairy school, but later I got into being myself. I would even post pictures of myself, and it became… remember on Neopets, you could have “pet pages,” which were literally open customizable websites? I would post graphics that I made on Photoshop, I would post photos of myself with something written on my hand like, “peace.” 

DL: The early sighswoon. 

GA: Yes! I think it's so funny because people will be like, “How did the influencer thing happen?” It’s just, I’ve always been posting, even when I wasn’t supposed to. 

DL: I love that. 

GA: Then Tumblr became big for me. Neopets was huge. I loved Neopets. I went so hard on Neopets. I did everything. Made a bunch of Neopoints. The role play. I did everything. My dad was the one who got me really into computers early on. 

DL: Oh yeah? 

GA: He was single handedly responsible for it. He felt like computers were going to become everything. He was working on computers all of the time doing his business, communicating with people back in Brazil. He taught me Photoshop when I was seven, made sure we had a shared family computer we could hop on. But yeah, Neopets, to MySpace, then Tumblr came to me in 2009. My first post says, “Ah, my sister got one of these and maybe I'll use it. It seems pretty cool.” Now… a thousand pages later! All of my writing is stored there. And I still use it, still write into Tumblr, because it takes me back to this time, this early excitement with writing posts, acting like someone’s listening. Even with my book’s manuscript, I would go back to Tumblr and write portions in a text post because it’s so familiar, it feels good. 

DL: It's a drafting table. 

GA: Exactly. I love it. I didn’t have Tumblr fame, but I did have a small community of people. I remember the first time I felt like a writer was when someone sent me a photo where they’d quoted me in their journal by hand. I felt, woah, this is what I do, too. Something about that felt notable to me. 

DL: You saw the impact you had on a stranger. 

GA: Totally. It was so striking. Someone thinks I’m worthy of a quote! It really hit me. And that was Tumblr, and not even being big on Tumblr. This person found me by accident. I love that about Tumblr. Now incentives have changed… Instagram, TikTok, every incentive is to go viral, and be seen, you know? But nobody was doing that on Tumblr, there was no way. So you literally find someone by being like, “Oh, I love this photo. Oh, I like their page. Oh, I'm going to follow them.” And now I'm reading their 4am poem or whatever. That was important. I think it's so important that, especially now, if people remember that Tumblr was so great because there wasn't that incentive to have an identity. To be famous or to make money. There was no way to make freakin’ money on Tumblr. And that made it so pure, you know?

DL: Yeah, pure digital vibing. 

GA: You just wrote to write. It was so great. A very special place. 

DL: It's interesting thinking about how the incentive structure has changed and how we've rigged ourselves to think about social media in terms of visibility, pop virality, rather than thinking about content in that fun, exploratory sense. We see this in writing. Especially with poets trying to get started, where, it’s this… No one is thinking about perennial content anymore. Things that will stand the test of time, expand as its relevance stays static. Everyone is chasing viral dopamine rushes, a flash in the pan.  

GA: I agree with that entirely. I'm trying to fix that about myself. Not only fix it, but keep it up. I was actually saying this at the reading, where social media in general has killed the archive, only emphasizing your most recent posts, encouraging new daily content. That's how people define you. And it's an illusion because if you really did care about that person, you would research them. If someone inspires you, look up their interviews. Go back into the depths of their feed. If I’m obsessed with someone, I would go all the way back to your first post… I'll look at everything, right? I wonder if people still do that. 

For the artist, they have to remember, “I'm a body of work.” I'm not my most recent post and the likes it got. It's easy to get that way because the incentive is there. You have to value the archive every day. 

DL: Do you want to look at some exhibits? 

GA: Yeah, let's do it. 

In general, artists must reclaim a sense of ownership in their own sentiments toward money. The story of artists being above capital is indeed something of a disservice to the sovereignty of the artist in their own career, a vulnerability that can be patched with a conscious acceptance that art is inextricably influenced by the system of capital surrounding it. 

It’s true, making money publishing books is hard, but it is not impossible to create a competitive economy as a publisher and author. Like so many things in this millennial workforce era, it comes down to diversification; we cannot rely on any one thing to be the thing for us. This is true for most millennial professionals hosting a suite of side-gigs or multiple jobs to stay vertical during increasingly volatile times. Similarly when it comes to content, we must set aside our expectations for a singular break-out hit and instead focus on developing long-term catalogs of compelling work. 

This is why a healthy, enjoyable creative process is a necessity; we’re talking a long game, a durational build-up of labor to produce a buffered list. With this in mind, the purpose of this survey is to provide a basic understanding of some typically hidden variables. With these variables mapped out, we then consider ways of creating varieties of buffers within our creative business. 

MARGINS

We’re starting with book sales made through a distributor to the book trade. 

Let’s consider a trade paperback that retails for $18.95; this is the title’s list price. $10.43 is the maximum 55% discount deducted from the list price, leaving us with our wholesale rate of $8.52. This margin is where wholesalers and booksellers make their profit. Distributors make their money by taking anywhere between 20% - 28% of this wholesale price. For the sake of our example, we’re going to say 26%; $2.22 goes to the distributor. 

$6.30 is what remains, the publisher’s compensation per unit on a wholesale trade for an $18.95 object. This figure gives us a tidy bucket to consider our print cost, which will ultimately influence our margin and recuperation on the upfront investment for the title across design, editing, and advance against royalties. For the sake of this example, let’s assume this book costs $2.00/unit to print. 

This means in the highest wholesale discount scenario of 55% off the list price, our net profits before royalties are $4.30 per unit sold through our distributor. We define royalties by paying a percentage between 15% - 20% of the above-defined net earnings. This means for every dollar we make in net profit, we pay .15 - .20 cents to the author. In the scenario of earning $4.30 from distribution, let’s say we pay a royalty of 18% of net; the author earns .77 cents per unit sold through distribution. Our final net profit is $3.53 per unit. 

BUFFERS

That wholesale margin is indeed tight. The function of distribution to the book trade is, however, supposed to make up for the narrow margin by title exposure and sales volume; distribution at this level functions best for titles that are assumed to break at least 1,000 unit sales within their release season. 

A competitive edge that Not a Cult and other Chapter House imprints have cultivated alongside our distributor sales channels is the art of e-commerce; direct sales to readers through our website. Nothing groundbreaking conceptually, but a stark difference in margins. If there’s an opportunity to purchase a new title direct from an independent publisher or author, take it. Here’s why:

Let’s consider that same $18.95 trade paperback. In the direct sales scenario we do away with any wholesale discounting and distributor cut. We’re left with our $2.00 print cost, and a payment processing fee from either Stripe or PayPal, which is 2.9% of the transaction value plus .30 cents; a total processing fee of .85 cents. 

Last, we factor in an average expense of our storage, fulfillment, packaging, and web hosting costs across titles fulfilled on a monthly basis. This generally comes out to $1.50 per unit. All said, we’re left with a pre-royalty net of $14.60. A little over four times the margin on a wholesale exchange. The 18% of net royalty comes out to $2.60, leaving us with a final net of $12.00. 

DIVERSIFICATION

The key asset of a traditional  book publisher is their backlist. A backlist is a catalog of published titles, done and dusted, out in the world passively making revenues on whatever sales channel. It is up to the publisher to maintain the supply chain and make sure a title remains accessible. A title is considered frontlist for the first twelve months after its publishing date before it joins this esteemed list of things that have been. 

The hope is that backlist revenues at least subsidize operational costs, and provide enough profits to invest in future frontlist production. The sneaky X factor here is the curatorial choices of the publisher; did we make the right bets on the right titles? It is one of the several ways our capital-fueled landscape influences the type of art that is produced and distributed; a symbiotic relationship between what is patroned, what is consumed, and what remains fringe. I encourage authors to think about these dynamics.

This is not a call for authors to pump out content solely to juice their numbers, but rather an impersonalized way of looking at something that is finished and desired to be in the hands of as many people as possible, for as long as possible. The lifecycle of a product. The neat thing about books is that this lifecycle has the potential to far exceed our own brief and exploratory jaunt in this world. No pressure.

“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never seen a market like this before.”
— Bill Rojack, Vice President of Midland Paper via the webinar “The Powerful Case for U.S. Book Manufacturing in the Face of Global Supply Chain Challenges, Paper Shortages, and Rising Distribution Costs”

From toilet paper to meat, steel to lumber; supply chain disruptions have been felt in unprecedented ways throughout the 2020’s. Book paper has not been immune to this. The disruptions, like in other industries, are due to an amalgam of reasons accelerated by the 2020 pandemic, including labor shortages and business closures. 

In the case of book printing, the seeds of its supply chain corrosion were planted years before 2020. With book paper only accounting for 5-7% of the paper market, mills started to shift priorities toward other paper goods that nourish their bottom line; massively produced print paraphernalia such as pamphlets and packaging material. 

Then, perhaps unsurprisingly amidst 2020’s global lockdown, book sales boomed. Book printers scrambled to meet the demand of publishers rushing in new print jobs to ride the wave of inside rumination. The paper industry was unprepared, global lockdowns exacerbated things, and the issue of paper shortages have been compounding ever since. 

There are two primary methods of mass-market book printing; offset and digital. Offset is a classic method reserved for the “large-run” print job. The setup process of an offset job is the most expensive part of the process; this video succinctly explains why. As most of the cost of an offset job is in its setup process, it incentivizes volume, providing a cheaper price per unit the more you print. Most offset printers won’t accept a job for anything fewer than a thousand units. 

Digital laser or inkjet printing kicked off in the 1980’s ahead of the dot-com era. As there is no physical setup beyond plugging in your machine and loading it up with toner, digital printing became supremely popular for short-run orders and self-publishing. Digital short-run produces a more expensive price per unit and there are no price breaks for volume due to the licensing model behind digital printing. In short, you purchase a commercial-grade printer from HP or Xerox. In that purchase, you also purchase a license from the printer vendor that enables the “cost-per-click” in running a digital press—a fee per sheet. This license covers on-call maintenance, as well as restocks on toner. So, you know, they keep you going. But this is why digital printing is generally unsustainable for larger volume runs, but suitable for small batch printing, or print-on-demand.

Because digital printing requires no laborious setup process, it produces a much swifter turnaround time compared to offset. A large-run offset job typically takes a minimum of three months for your books to ship from the printer, although now lead-times have become increasingly unpredictable in the wake of paper disruptions and overwhelming backlogs. This has resulted in certain leading commercial offset printers to require more than half a year to ship jobs, prompting many publishers to resort to digital and print-on-demand to fill in the gaps.

Enter Ingram Industries

“Remember… with Ingram, the bookseller comes first.”
— Ingram Book Co. slogan circa 1970

The Ingram family has a generational and diverse history of entrepreneurship in the United States. Prior to E. Bronson Ingram II founding the Ingram Book Company in 1970, his father Orrin Henry Ingram established successful businesses across lumber, oil refinement, and a network of inland distribution barges throughout the midwest. When Orrin Henry passed away in 1963, he left his two sons Bronson and Frederic the Ingram Oil & Refining Company, which they rebranded to the Ingram Corporation. 

In 1964, the Ingrams purchased the Tennessee Book Company, a textbook depository for the Tenenssee public schooling system. Simultaneous to Ingram’s expansion to books, they acquired the Tennessee Insurance Company to help curb costs of insuring their growing liabilities in physical assets across water and land. It turns out, acquiring an insurance company and selling themselves insurance was cheaper than purchasing policies from a third party.

The Ingrams continued to scale their business, diversifying into petroleum, chemicals, and the distribution of these related products using their inherited inland barge network. Despite their focus in energy industries, the books division displayed unexpected and rapid growth toward the end of the 1960’s, prompting the rebranding of the Tennessee Book Company to the Ingram Book Company in 1970. 

From the 1970’s onward, the Ingram Book Company rolled out a series of industry-shifting programs; wildly competitive wholesale discounts for booksellers and unprecedented fulfillment speed in servicing the book trade on a national level, accelerated by warehouse acquisitions across the country. By 1980 the Ingram Book Company was the dominating wholesaler of books in the United States, a position they hold to this day. 

To emphasize the Ingram Corporation’s versatile and still-growing portfolio, E. Bronson Ingram II reorganized the corporate structure and rebranded the parent organization as Ingram Industries. In 1981, the Ingram Book Company made its first move in diversifying beyond the wholesaling of books with the purchase of the John Yokley Company, its first commercial printer. We are still talking about digital print-on-demand, after all. 

In 1989 Ingram Industries acquired Micro D, which at the time was specialized in the distribution of personal computers; Micro D would become Ingram Micro, and Ingram Micro would go on to obtain a one-third market share in the distribution of information technology products and services. 

E. Bronson Ingram II passed away in 1995 at the age of 63, and his two sons John and Orrin Ingram II became co-presidents of Ingram Industries. In 1997 under the direction of John Ingram, Lightning Print was developed to “print as few as one book at a time” to be a solution against the volume requirements of offset printing. By the end of 1998, Lightning Print had 1,500 books in its library. Today, what is now Lightning Source receives 4,000 book uploads a day with a global print grid consisting of Ingram-owned printers across the US, UK, Europe, and Australia in addition to partnerships with regional printers in over twelve other countries covering six continents. No print fulfillment in Antarctica… yet.

“Why in the world are we wallpapering the warehouse with books? Wouldn’t it be better to store a digital file and print a book when there was demand?”
— John Ingram

Ingram Industries now holds two subsidiaries that control their book interests, the Ingram Content Group and Ingram Publisher Services. This next part is remarkable to us in a contemporary context: in 2016, Ingram acquired Publishers Group West, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Perseus Distribution Services, Legato, and Perseus’ digital asset management service Constellation. In a flourish, Ingram consolidated a significant portion of the “independent” book distribution field outside of the Big Four arena. 

Today with John Ingram chairing the board of Ingram Industries, Ingram remains secure in its position as the defacto books wholesaler throughout the North American continent, with booksellers small and large primarily using ipage, Ingram’s wholesale ordering tool, as their only method of acquiring inventory. Emerging e-commerce platforms such as Bookshop.org exclusively fill their orders via Ingram. With Ingram’s network of digital printers, print-on-demand infrastructure, and international distributors they are perfectly positioned to pick up the pieces of a crumbling supply chain.

What you see today was his tomorrow, yesterday

Chapter House was founded upon the merging of imprints Black Ocean and Not a Cult, in partnership between myself and publisher Janaka Stucky. I met Janaka at the Portland AWP conference in 2018. We aligned over our zest for publishing; our catalogs sharing similar themes and aesthetics, our readership supporting us both directly with sales from our websites, our annual submission competitions robust and vital to the lifeblood of our frontlists. 

Our initial vision was to found a new imprint in speculative fiction, what would become Psychonaut Press. We found that combining our backlists and our future frontlist output under a singular group, Chapter House, would likely get the attention of distributors across the book trade. Black Ocean was coming from Small Press Distributors, Not a Cult from Southern California Book Distributors – final vanguards in independently owned book distribution. 

Our combination and future prospects gave us the opportunity to speak with a number of Big Four and Ingram-owned distributors. We ultimately went with Consortium; their pre-Ingram sterling reputation of supporting independent press, along with their contemporary catalog of publishers convinced us it was the right move. Signing to Consortium, now an Ingram-owned company, also unlocked for Chapter House a suite of tools from Ingram Publisher Services, including seamless print-on-demand enablement via Ingram’s fleet of global digital printers to fulfill our trade accounts. 

This gives us a competitive edge that assures three things:

1. Our titles will never go out of print, archived eternally in the print cloud for as long as infrastructure stands to keep Ingram’s cloud afloat. We no longer have to worry about demand to keep a title accessible.

2. If a title’s inventory runs out we can seamlessly swap to a digitally printed version of a title while awaiting its long-run printing from an offset printer, keeping the supply chain flowing.

3. Our titles can distribute globally with regionalized discounts. In regions where Ingram Publisher Services has no warehouse storage, the title can simply print and distribute to local booksellers, mitigating lofty freight operations.

This is unprecedented agility and supply chain assurance that is a must in the digital age for our relatively young, growing business. As I’ve expressed in my writing about self-publishing, Ingram extends very similar services to individual authors, albeit without the human sales force of a world trade distribution partnership. 

It seems, with almost certainty, that book printing will continue to trend in the direction of digital print and print-on-demand. Offset will become increasingly difficult to wrangle for smaller publishers, particularly under the stress of paper shortages dramatically increasing turnaround times on larger runs. Big Four companies appear somewhat resilient to this issue with their in-house offset and digital print operations neatly integrated under their multifaceted conglomerates. 

What does this mean? Is it a good or a bad thing? Like all big change, it’s perhaps a bit of both. It is fair to be wary of mass consolidation of industry. With offset, you get a delicious variety of paper, binding, foiling, and other lovely customization options. Print-on-demand, and most digital print operations, are quite on-rails with standardized trim, stock, and binding options. The automation of print-on-demand also carries with it a variety of quality assurance issues with no human touch to assure your printing is precise, your paper trimmed cleanly, and — in some hilarious edge cases — the correct book is even printed.

At the end of the day, what I care about is the empowerment of the individual or small team to compete at the same — or higher — level as big, entrenched, century-plus-old institutions. This is the edge the digital age has offered us in the face of so much infrastructure already having been bought, consolidated, and standardized. Agility over conglomerate bloat. Fluidity over corporate bureaucracy. David with a sling over Goliath’s monolithic power.

“The publisher's job is to supply the necessary readings.”
– Jason Epstein 

“I found that literature, like all religions, is also a business.”
– Jason Epstein 

I love how these two statements from book publisher Jason Epstein play with each other. Something that is religious or spiritual supplies a necessary ephemera to the human experience; and so often, art is assumed to hold a morality that transcends the icky dealings of business. These quotes express that we do not create in a vacuum; business practices indelibly influence not only what we consume, but the process of how what we consume is made to begin with. 

Today, four book publishing empires exist producing 80% of the book trade in the United States. Two are German multimedia conglomerates; Bertelsmann (Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster) and Holtzbrinck (Macmillan). French publishing giant Hachette Book Group is presently the third largest trade book publisher in the world. Then there is News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire that owns HarperCollins. 

Previously Viacom CBS was among the previously termed “Big Five Book Publishers,” but their former property Simon & Schuster has since been acquired by Bertelsmann back in 2020.  

Jason Epstein lived through this immense consolidation, seeing his tenure at the vibrant midtown Manhattan outfit of Random House morph from an “indie” press into a publicly traded business; a move that marked a shift toward an ever-accelerating hits-driven content churn to appease investor interests, prioritizing growth until Random House’s eventual acquisition by Bertelsmann. 

The 1920’s through 1950’s are generally viewed as a “golden age” in American book publishing, a time where the Big Four outfits were still relatively small-scale and highly personal, a time that Epstein played a significant role in creating the trade environment we see today. Before Epstein’s time, booksellers typically dealt with expensive hardbound books — a luxury item that made a trip to the bookstore a steep investment. Epstein pushed forward high-quality yet accessible paperbacks into mass production via publisher Doubleday, forcing his competing publishers to follow in his wake. 

Epstein’s inspiration at the core of his work was to spread the joy of literature he experienced as an undergrad at Columbia University. He wrote about being transported to ecstatic levels amidst the library’s resourced stacks, feeling called to bring that literary exuberance to the rest of the world. His spirit and innovation produced massively successful catalogs, and during this golden age of publishing, many publishers found such fantastic success that it drove them toward one natural conclusive direction — expansion. 

Frontlist output eventually became less about pushing forward stories and culture in a divine, sometimes daring sense and more about the bottom line. Dips in stock prices became the new litmus test for the solvency of a season’s catalog, informing future acquisition choices and risk assessments. 

Nowadays my fellow authors share a variety of experiences working under one of the hundreds of imprints within this Big Four empire. There are examples of pleasant, generative work environments with managing editors that passionately immerse themselves into the catalogs under their charge. There are other stories that report of aloof teams begrudgingly assigning their time to squeeze out yet another project on their expanding list. 

Something that encapsulates so much inevitably becomes a spectrum, undefinable in binary terms. Because big publishing contains as much as it does, experiences can change from imprint to imprint, team to team. Much like working with an independent publisher, the success of a book and the expectations around a work environment’s compatibility comes down to the team you find; the quality of aligned spirit. 

For big publishing, typically this spiritual alignment starts at the literary agent. For independent publishing, direct with the managing editor. This alignment goes on to influence a defining factor in trade book publishing, a critical force behind the possibility of a book: distribution. 

DISTRIBUTION

In the 1930’s, in a Depression-era response to protect booksellers, Simon & Schuster rolled out a program where shops could return unsold copies of books to their distributors for a full refund. This practice became commonplace, and to this day, any wholesale acquisition of books via a trade distributor can be returned for a full credit. 

This practice extends to retail and ecommerce monoliths such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. The great crash of Borders back in 2011 caused a devastating tidal wave of returns that mostly impacted independent publishers; bankrupting several outfits in one fell swoop when thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars worth of returns gutted future revenues. 

For big publishing, this is a fine practice that is mitigated by the sheer volume of titles produced. The hedge this creates is for smaller operations only producing, say, a few titles a season. The smaller the print run, the fewer books in a catalog, the more viscerally a return is felt. 

This dynamic means smaller publishers have to be supremely tactical in deploying a title through trade distribution. Unlike the big publishers with their in-house distribution ops, independent publishers rely on third party partnerships; either with independent distributors or by assigning their wholesale business to the distribution arms of the Big Four publishers. 

I can, and will eventually, take up an entire post about the state of independent distribution (any trade distributor outside of the Big Four realm), and discuss yet another great consolidation under the Ingram Company. We’re seeing a trend here with rampant consolidations, aren’t we?

Distributors work in seasonal catalogs, Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter. A publisher typically provides a distributor with their seasonal catalog approximately a year in advance of a title’s publishing date in the form of a pre-sales meeting. This is where all pertinent information on a title is shared, discussed, and strategized between publisher and distributor. 

It is the publisher’s job to share key selling points and marketing plans for their titles, and a distributor, typically loaded up with industry-wide knowledge and an equal hunger to find success in their catalogs, volleys back feedback on the publisher’s approach and framing around all elements pertaining to selling the catalog. 

This is an iterative process that results in a title getting blasted across all sales channels that deal in the acquisition and selling of books. This is what it means when a title is available anywhere books are sold. With Big Four distribution and larger independent distributors, this process culminates in a sales conference where the publisher pitches their titles to sales representatives from all corners of the book trade — Barnes & Noble, Amazon, librarians, larger independent bookstores, and so on. 

Typically, there is not an author in sight during this process. It is the behind-the-scenes busywork of getting a book packaged and sold, harkening back to the important quality of aligned spirit in this overall process; feeling secure that your publishing team understands your work and knows how to put its best foot forward in an ever-expanding pool of content, so hungry for your precious attention. 

Should we be aligned across publisher, distributor, and author the result would be a work whose message is conveyed with integrity, and although it’s never guaranteed even if you play all of your cards right, a critically and financially successful project for all involved; most importantly for the author, hopefully pushing them forward in the timeless canon of literature we all wish to contribute to. Literary exuberance for all. 

AFTERWORD

“The success or failure of the projects I have been involved with has always been apparent from the earliest vibrations.”
– Jason Epstein 

Jason Epstein passed away a couple of months ago on February 4th, 2022 at the age of 93. While I didn’t know him personally, his book Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future has been a massively influential text in my journey as a book publisher. 

Epstein witnessed tremendous change. Change when Doubleday realized his vision for trade paperbacks. Change when Random House became public. Change when a fledgling internet started poking its ethereal tendrils toward academia, industry, and eventually into every facet of our culture. He predicted many things, among them Ingram’s push toward print-on-demand and the obsolescence of bookstores in the face of digitized retail. The Strand Bookstore in NYC used to have 47 neighboring bookstores within six blocks. Isn’t that remarkable?

We now live in the aftermath of corporate hegemony, amidst a deeply interconnected world filled with knowledge cushioned against lies. Nevertheless, the spirit of publishing remains, and excellent books are still being made across publishers big and small. Moreso, opportunities for authors to publish and distribute their work, as well as for people to spin up imprints of their own are growing as tools for printing and distribution become increasingly sophisticated. 

The book business is really a people business and stories are at the core of what makes us human. A care for process and people is what is at the heart of a good collaborative relationship. I wrote this post after my entry on self-publishing because it’s important to know two things: you can do it all on your own, but everything is enriched by a good team. 

We can see this trend replicated in any industry where the means of distribution has become accessible to independent creators. Video games are a fantastic example; in 2004 the Valve Corporation completely flipped video game distribution on its head by introducing digital distribution via Steam, the de facto marketplace for PC gamers to purchase and download games to their rigs. For the first time, game developers were freed from the confines of the printed disc and could facilitate their own publishing process from the comfort of their home. This revolutionized the industry, forcing Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo to follow suit with their own digital distribution marketplaces, ultimately enabling independent developers to create and publish their own works direct to platforms. Now over 10,000 games are released a year on Steam - more than half self-published. [2]

Books are no different with the advent of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program and Ingram’s LightningSource + IngramSpark programs. Authors now have the capability to behave as their own publisher and reach sales channels that are veritably indistinguishable from what your traditional publisher utilizes. 

Self-publishing does have its downsides; print on demand, the default for any self-published distribution channel for books, sports an array of quality assurance pitfalls, bookseller biases, on-rails print options, and ineligibility for awards or critical reviews. However, the upside is a digitally listed book that is globally accessible through wholesale and retail sales channels with an undiluted margin. 

Self-publishing is not superior to traditional publishing, nor is it inferior. It is yet another tool in the shed. This begs the question:

What makes a good candidate for the self-publisher? 

• You have your own audience. Social media influencers, bloggers, brands – if you’re already cultivating a readership, you’ve already done half the work of a publisher. 

• You’re sitting on a mountain of content with no other publishing opportunities. Why wait? This isn’t to say one should rush the book making process, but if you’re feeling stagnant on publishing opportunities, now is the right time to pull the trigger yourself. 

• You want to experiment. Nothing’s stopping you from pursuing traditional publishing opportunities parallel to self-publishing a catalog of work that publishers may shy away from. 

Many Hats

With the immense effort it takes to make a quality craft of, well, anything, it’s no surprise that most writers want to hone their focus on writing good books. Administering the publishing process is an entirely other job that can be handled in a strategic partnership. 

The publisher’s duty is to help guide the author in crafting a book that is ready for market, communicating the scope of the project to distributors, the marketing narratives to booksellers, facilitating the product elements of a book’s design and manufacturing, defining the rules of retail and wholesale pricing, and acting as a custodian for the title throughout (ideally) the rest of time. 

When self-publishing, one should start by re-tuning the narrative. You must not think of yourself only as an author. You must also view yourself as a publisher. Through that lens the scope of responsibility inflates. Once the first draft of your manuscript is complete, you must snugly fit your publisher hat on top of your author hat and…

• Begin the book cover design process. Either you have design chops, a Photoshop-savvy friend, or a budget to hire someone. This process could cost anywhere between sweat equity to a low-to-mid four-figure sum. 

• Identify who your editor is and what you’re hoping to gain from the editing process. Line edits? Generative notes? Pairing down? Narrative cohesiveness? This could be a workshop colleague willing to work for a revenue split or someone you hire. It’s about collaborative trust, working with someone who understands your context, and applying a second set of critical eyes on the end-user experience. 

• Layout design. There are many tools that now exist for typesetting a book. Like the cover design process, you can either run this process yourself or set aside a nominal budget.  

• Proofreading. Once you have drafts complete of your book files it’s time to read and reread until everything is crystalized. It’s, of course, helpful to bring in a pair of fresh eyes for this process, either through collaborative partnership or payment. 

As a comparative example, my publishing imprint Not a Cult spends approximately $1,500 on cover and layout; another $1,000 on editing (if looking at a ~80 page poetry title), and another $750 on proofreading. Factoring in author advances, a full-length poetry book before printing costs anywhere between $3,500 - $6,000 for us to produce. 

By the end of this production process you have two files - a print-ready cover jacket and your typeset interior. 

Controlling the means of distribution

Let’s talk about the Ingram Company. Ingram began as the largest wholesaler of books in the North American continent. They’ve since expanded into a multifaceted conglomerate comparable to any Big Five publisher; they’ve acquired prestigious book distributors Publishers Group West and Consortium, they’ve acquired a vast fleet of digital printers creating a global print on demand grid, and they’ve gobbled up an array of ecommerce fulfillment warehouses. 

Most pertinent to this story, they administer a tool called ipage. ipage is a web tool used by booksellers and librarians to acquire inventory at wholesale, making a title widely accessible to the trade. Self-publishers can use IngramSpark to list their digitally distributed, print on demand title on ipage, setting their own wholesale rules, crafting their own metadata, and controlling how their title appears across sales channels. 

Beyond ipage, the IngramSpark tool enables self-publishers to also blast their title across a variety of bookselling platforms such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Books, and more. Users can also cast a huge net with eBook distribution. 

With this tool exclusively using print on demand technology, the self-publisher loses certain custom printing options (as well as risking certain quality assurance edge cases) but is able to host a widely available book with no upfront printing or warehousing costs. 

While this tool does make a title accessible on Amazon, I suggest using it in tandem with Amazon’s KDP. KDP enables users to upload their book files using a very similar process to IngramSpark, but instead of wholesale, it allows users to control full retail listings of their book across 12+ countries on Amazon. While this is not an endorsement to the Bezos combine, it is a high-margin, highly accessible option for the self-publisher. 

With these tools combined, the self-publisher has created a title listing available to readers in 12+ countries and accessible to the trade at wholesale with direct deposits cashing out every month. 

With such pervasive placement a final, more subtle boon is bestowed upon the self-publisher: search engine optimization. Books take huge priority in the search engine hierarchy; with a title and author placed across such a diverse array of sales channels, the self-publisher can do a lot in engineering search phrases in a title’s metadata that can take an otherwise competitive phrase (such as an author’s name) and create an entirely new breadth of visibility for the author. As commerce becomes ever-increasingly digitized, this factor is perhaps one of the most prominent value adds the self-publisher creates for themselves. 

Circling back to the subject of agility; this distribution process can be established in a matter of weeks. Compare that to the typical trade schedule where books are put through a distribution process with a minimum 12-month lead time. 

All that being said

Self-publishing can be deployed at a highly competitive level. The self-publisher can be a one-person powerhouse of production, creating a robust backlist that could potentially serve as a perennial asset or path to future business development opportunities. 

We can look at poets such as Rupi Kaur as an extreme example of success. Milk and honey was originally a self-published book via Amazon’s KDP until Andrews McMeel acquired her title, expanding upon the robust market she created for herself. 

Publishers in any industry ride a fine line between artistic integrity and opportunism. Infrastructures responsible for investment are typically risk averse. In more niche markets such as poetry, I am seeing increasing examples of publishers that are no more competitive than these self-publishing options, deploying tools such as LightningSource to grant their titles widespread market access via print on demand. 

And that should serve as a fine litmus test for any traditional publishing opportunities ahead of you. What is the publisher providing you that you couldn’t provide yourself? Is the business opportunity being presented going to be an equitable division of labor? Do the distribution opportunities increase through the publisher, or are they the same as if you went through Ingram independently? Is the investment the publisher is putting in going to scale beyond your current audience scope, or are they simply riding the wave you’ve created?

You have the tools.

Afterword

In a post about self-publishing, I would be remiss not to mention Tetra House, the self-publishing services division to our trade publishing group Chapter House. If you’re an author interested in diving a bit deeper into the world of self-publishing, please feel free to reach out with any questions.

Resources

1. IngramSpark

2. Amazon KDP

Sources

1. “Self-Publishing in the United States, 2013-2018”: https://www.bowker.com/siteassets/files/pdf-files/bowker-selfpublishing-report-2019.pdf

2. Annual release figure reporting by SteamSpy