Preface
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.