Recently, at lunch with a senior level editor from a big New York house, I asked my typical, nosey question: "What's going on?"
Over the years, I've probably asked this question a few hundred times, and I usually expect—and receive—answers that have to do with book deals in play or personnel in transition. Sometimes I hear about a bookselling or marketing issue: what Oprah (or now Starbucks) is rumored to be favoring, what position certain buyers or stores have taken on specific titles. But not on this particular day.
"Everybody's worried about this AMS thing," the editor said, referring to the end-of-year bankruptcy filing by the distributor that supplies Costco, among other big outlets. "That's all anybody's talking about."
Now, it's possible that I've just been lunching with a particularly edit-centric crowd, and that if I were more in touch with the so-called back-office folks—and, increasingly, Perseus's David Steinberger—distribution would have long been a common topic. But let's face it, the distribution end of the business—which in the old days meant Baker & Taylor and Ingram and a couple of others—isn't the "sexy" part of what we do. Only thing is, recent events have made even the most business-challenged of us realize, distribution is kind of essential.
PW, mostly in the person of our news director, Jim Milliot, has done an impressive job sorting out the very complicated scenarios involving AMS, which have included Perseus's offer to take over distribution for the clients distributed by AMS's PGW subsidiary. (Steinberger also recently bought the Midwest distributor Consortium, and the California/ New York publisher, Avalon.) But it wasn't until this particular debacle that most of us edit-centric types have really been paying attention. When somebody reminded me, on New Year's, that PGW was the distributor of Dave Eggers's What Is the What, for example, and that demand for the book (thanks to Francine Prose's NYTBR rave) was outstripping availability even more drastically than sometimes happens with "sleeper" hits because of inventory problems related to the AMS filing, I suddenly got the point. It's all very well—and truly impressive—to put together a powerful novel like the McSweeney's founder's, but if it doesn't get to the store (even Amazon indicated there might be a one—three week wait for it), what good does it do the reading public, the author, the publisher?
Clearly, longtime distributors have always known the value of what they do. The problem is, some of them, like AMS, have been a little less than straightforward (she says decorously) about their financials, and all of them have struggled with low profit margins. And while there's surely risk involved in distributors consolidating, at Perseus and elsewhere—some small presses that worked with Consortium have voiced concerns about getting lost in a big, bad machine—there are also advantages in one company handling distribution for many small publishers. It's called "economy of scale," and it may mean that distribution can become the well-oiled, profitable machine it ought to be.
Which may help editors stop worrying about how to get books out, and go back to what they do best: focusing on how to get them in.
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