how did you get your distro started

[paganfrog]

so, im trying to establish a new distro. how did you guys get established? im slowly promoting mine on a few online places i know about and telling some friends who may be interested. what did you guys do to get yours running and active?

[lizzy / marching stars distro]

I announced I would be opening the distro 6 weeks before it opened. That gave me time to get the stock I wanted, publicise a lot and generally make people aware the distro was coming! I set up a livejournal and myspace and posted around saying it would be opening in 6 weeks (please send zines for consideration!)

I sent out oodles of flyers to as many people/distros I could think of.
I posted to livejournal/myspace/various zine communities and forums when I opened.

I would say mostly I've got my distro up/running/active through a combination of:
- posting to various places online
- sending out millions of flyers (for example every order I send gets 5 flyers)
- tabling at events definitely gets you noticed too

It does take tiiiiime to get a distro up and running though. People are hesitant... is this person trustworthy? Will I ever get the zines I order? etc etc.... it takes a while for word to get around that your distro is a good one...

Also, people won't reeeally start to order until you've got a largish catalogue I find... I opened with about 22 zines I think and had orders from the first week... so yeah, I had a lot of my time and money in the distro before I even opened.

I have repeated myself many times in this - sorry!