Book West's Niche

While no single West Coast wholesaler can fill the gap left by the closing of two Ingram distribution centers—the Denver facility shut down in February and the one in Chino, Calif., will close this week (News, May 7)—five-year-old Books West is aggressively going after regional book business in the Rocky Mountain states. "We can't respond by becoming Ingram," said director David Edinger. "They had 100,000 titles. There have been a lot of regional wholesalers that have gone out of business by changing too many variables at the same time or getting overextended with the chains. That's why we're really limiting ourselves geographically to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, even though it's tempting."

Instead, Books West—which was founded in 1996 by Bill Nach along with small press publisher Dave Rich when he couldn't find a distributor for his books Denver Hiking Guide and Tellurides and decided to publish them himself—has focused on increasing the number of titles it stocks. "A year ago," said Edinger, "we carried 3,000 titles and now we carry 8,000. We're growing our title base by 250 to 500 each month. Our goal is 10,000 to 12,000 titles altogether. We intend to remain a specialty regional distributor carrying small press titles." At the same time, Books West has expanded its customer base. "We were very much a Colorado wholesaler that did some business in other states," said Edinger. "Eighty-five percent of our business was in Colorado last year, now 50% is here." In addition, Books West doubled the number of account managers it has in the field from three to six.

Last year Books West created a new division, bLogistics, to handle order fulfillment for publishers. "It's a nice fit," commented Edinger. "We have 12 publishers." Among them are the Junior League of Denver and several seasonal publishers. Books West is also the exclusive distributor for 3D Press. In January the company doubled its warehouse space to 20,000 square feet.