The Longest Running Distribution Relationship

If no news is good news, then Boston, Mass., Shambhala Publications has a lot to celebrate. The 32-year-old publisher is about to ink a new four-year distribution agreement with Random House, which has been its distributor for the past 27 years, making it the longest distribution arrangement in the business. Several years ago, when Random House was bought by Bertelsmann and got out of distribution almost entirely, Shambhala was the only client asked to stay on. "The reps wanted Random House to keep us," explained Peter Turner, Shambhala president and executive editor. "They like selling Shambhala's books. It rounds out the other imprints, and some have been selling them for a long time."

The stability of having the same distributor has enabled Shambhala to continue to achieve what Turner characterized as "steady solid growth, between 8% and 10% increases in net over the past two or three years." Shambhala publishes between 80 and 90 books a year, and has experienced some of its sales increases from the success of its Shambhala Classics line. "We're seeing put out on some of these reissues of what their annual sales would be," said Turner, who also has high hopes for new titles like Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön's The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Sept.), Kate Horsley's novel Confessions of a Pagan Nun (July) and Larry Dossey's Healing Beyond the Body: Medicine and the Infinite Reach of the Mind (Oct.).