ANY decent bookstore distributors out there?

[Zine Editor]

I work on what I guess you could call part books/part fanzines. My latest work was doing the cover of The Alpha Control Reference manual for Alpha Control Press.

For years Diamond Distribution was my distributor. But over the years, as they destroyed the competition, their rules became more and more ridiculous. Lately, hey have frozen small press publishers out entirely by instituting a "benchmark" requirement: your book/zine must have sales of $2500 miimum; anything less and they just cancel the order.

I looked at another distributor called Ingram. No problem: they'll carry my stuff! Just send then $750, and they'll set me right up.

I contacted another outfir called Haven, but as of this date I have heard nothing.

I'm beginning to think that the issue isn't so much finding the best distributor, but finding the one that is the least awful.

I've gone the eBay and Amazon route. It's nice getting a couple of orders a month from them, but it really doesn't help to finance new book/zine projects.

Has anyone found a decent distributor that caters to comic book shops?

[Dan 10things]

Most of the ones that did a lot of zines have failed in the past few years. If you're really looking for wide distribution, I'd look at who other widely distributed zines are using. Maximum Rock'n'Roll is using Disticor Magazine Distribution Services as their main distributor, with smaller distributors like No Idea, Ebullition, Revolver, AK Press, Subterranean, Last Gasp, Ubiquity, and Marginal also helping out.

[Zine Editor]

Dan 10things said:

Most of the ones that did a lot of zines have failed in the past few years. If you're really looking for wide distribution, I'd look at who other widely distributed zines are using. Maximum Rock'n'Roll is using Disticor Magazine Distribution Services as their main distributor, with smaller distributors like No Idea, Ebullition, Revolver, AK Press, Subterranean, Last Gasp, Ubiquity, and Marginal also helping out.

[Zine Editor]

Thanks.Bwfore Diamond decided to get rid of all the small press publishers, it was a simple time: Solicit to Diamond, leaving the publication date several months in the future. Wait for the orders from Diamond. If the orders were large enough to pay for printing, then go ahead and print the book. If not, tell Dimond the book was cancelled. It was a nice, low risk system: so nice that everyone went to Diamond, their competition died, and they decided to become the bully on the block.