Northern Lights

The big news in publishing and distribution may be mergers and acquisitions, but 38-year-old North Country Books in Utica, N.Y., has found that staying small and focusing on one specific area has its own rewards. Founded in 1965 to publish books about New York State, the publisher/distributor is one of the few successful regional distributors left. It carries specialty titles by large houses like Random House as well as its own publications. North Country's own list ranges from its all-time bestseller Murder in the Adirondacks by Craig Brandon, a reconstruction of the real-life murder that inspired Theodore Dreiser's novel An American Tragedy, to a new account of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium-Trudeau Sanitarium, Portrait of Healing by Victoria E. Rinehart, with a foreword by Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau.

"Every year our sales increase," Rob Igoe Jr., v-p of marketing and sales, told PW. "Our summer business is all tourist businesses. In the wintertime it shifts over to cities like Albany for Christmas. We don't really have any down time. Very often I'll make 10 calls a day. I sell to a lot of small tourist shops and hardware stores and gift stores." Many of the places Igoe visits—businesses in towns without a single traffic light—are too small to see any other publishers' representatives, which is why those with a specific Adirondacks or Finger Lakes title will often contact North Country to sell it. Igoe works with buyers to help ensure that their inventory complements that of neighboring businesses. From the more than 1,500 titles in the North Country catalogue, he tries to help those that specialize just in children's books, others looking for outdoor titles, still others who want Lake George posters.