Baker and Taylor Going Out of Business…
No Real Surprise…
B&T at one point in time was the main distributor to bookstores. Maybe the largest book distributor at times. It was founded in the 1800s, actually.
Over the last fifty years it morphed into different forms and with different corporate owners too stupid to detail out here. And parts of the company were sold off. (Always a good plan.)
When indie publishing with Amazon fired up, “extended distribution” went to B&T and for a time all indie books had a special code that basically kept bookstores from buying indie books.
Can I say “shortsighted on B&T’s part. But at that point their main customers were the big traditional presses, so pretty sure where that mandated from. (We started up Ella Distribution to go around that blocking code, and then one day they lifted it and killed Ella.)
Ingrams, with purchasing POD companies and merging them into Ingram Sparks, took over as the major book distributor and they cater to the indie publishers in a ton of ways (although I wish they would hurry up and connect to Shopify stores.)
B&T morphed into a library focus ed distribution to try to say alive, but it had a lot of competition that did it better these days.
B&T was basically another old traditional-focused feature that this new world killed off. It will hurt traditional publishers with large accounts payable with B&T, but I have not yet heard of any indie press getting hurt at all. Not how we indie publishers do business in this new world.
So B&T shutting down is no surprise. They just couldn’t keep up the shell game of old methods, huge warehouses, and selling themselves to the lowest bidder in mergers.
Another traditional dinosaur bites the dust. No one really cares.
6 Comments
Vincent Zandri
Down & Out Books also suddenly shuttered. One of the best traditional based small publishers of noir and hard-boiled mystery, they also informed more than 100 authors they would not be seeing any royalties earned over the past year. Imagine if Id had the IP to the 10 or so titles of mine they publish? I would have been making money on all of them. Oh well, now I get to relaunch them and never will I sell the IP outright again. Now if I could only get the two novels Thomas & Mercer are holding hodtage….
dwsmith
Nothing ever comes out of Thomas and Mercer. But check your contract. I bet it did not include omnibus rights, so you can put the two books together, maybe add a short story and an introduction and do an omnibus and price it under the price of the two they hold. Indie publishing is so much fun.
Jason M
Another one bites the dust. I’m not particularly upset. The new world offers 15x the number of opportunities for writer/publishers (which is what we all must become).
Also, I had totally forgotten about your Ella Distribution. That must’ve been a while ago now.
dwsmith
Yup, it was a while and first time Steph worked for us. She built a stunning business and just as it was launching, B&T put us out of business with their change on not blacklisting indie books.
Mangala McNamara
I’m finding that there are 3rd party apps that claim to bridge the gap and connect IngramSpark with Shopify.
Haven’t tried myself yet… has it not worked for WMG?
dwsmith
Had not heard about them. We work directly with Ingram.