Janice Phelps Williams

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  • Open Your Heart with Pets: Mastering Life through Love of Animals
  • Wham! Bam! Publishing: The Strategic Marketing Plan for Authors and Publishers (with Joan E. Phelps)
  • What Saved Me: A Dozen Ways to Embrace Life (as Claire Starr)
  • They Called Me Beautiful: A Dog's Search for Love and the Family that Rescued Him (as Claire Starr)
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DISTRIBUTION

Publishers face many options when planning how their books will be made available to bookstores, book wholesalers, and readers. Options include:

• In-house order taking, invoicing, and shipping
• Contracting with another company to take orders, invoice accounts, and ship books
• Whether or not to accept returns
• Determining trade discounts
• Entering into agreements with wholesalers such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor
• Entering into agreements with nonexclusive distributors such as New Leaf, Midwest Library Service, Quality Books, Inc.
• Entering into an agreement with an exclusive distributor that has sales reps who will pitch your book to various accounts.

Determining which of the above will work best for your publishing company involves closely looking at many factors including:

• The amount of books you are printing in your first run
• The amount of money you are budgeting for marketing
• Exactly what those marketing efforts are
• How long you are able to wait to see a return on your investment?
• How much risk are you willing to take on the money you have invested in publishing this book?
• What are your long-range and short-range goals?
• What are you able to do in-house and what are you not interested in doing at all?
  

In 1999, I founded a publishing company, Lucky Press, LLC. Lucky Press has over a dozen titles in its list. We have used the services of a fulfillment company, signed on for a few years with a national distribution company, and, at this time, take and fulfill orders ourselves, with the majority of our orders going out to Baker & Taylor, Amazon, individual readers who visit www.luckypress.com, and a book club that has had great success with one of our titles (now in its sixth printing).

We have learned a lot along the way and that experience is beneficial, I believe, to the publishers and self-publishing authors I work for. When designing and editing your book, I will be able to draw on my experience as a publisher because I know what it is like to invest money in a title and then hope (and pray) that the endorsements and orders will begin to flow.

Also, please consider purchasing Wham! Bam! Publishing: The Strategic Marketing Plan for Authors and Publishers, as it includes a section on distribution and contact info on many distributors and fulfillment houses, and wholesalers as well.(Available from Amazon.com)