Lenie had to to race in her car for five miles to catch the FedEx truck, but today we made the noon deadline for the September/October issue. Had we missed it, we could have missed the newsstand by a week, which could cost us money. It has to do with making trucking deadlines in the distribution chain. But we are not nearly as dependent on distribution on the newsstands as we were years ago. That’s because I took steps to wean us from that dependency by cutting back our newsstand presence. Sometimes readers who like to buy us from the newsstand complain that BHM issues are difficult to locate, but it’s for the best. The newsstand is a losing proposition for most small publishers; the middleman, namely the distributor, makes the money. I’m satisfied with the 12,000 or so issues we put in the larger bookstores, such as B. Dalton, Waldenbooks, Crowne, etc. through Ingram Distributors.

I have horror stories about large distributors and the amount of money they’ve screwed small publishers out of (including BHM) with their various bankruptcies and changes of ownership. Distributors battle amongst themselves for primacy in the newsstands; it’s always the small publisher who ends up taking any losses. Even now, with the small numbers we have on the newsstand, there is another shakeup in that industry that I am keeping my eye on, hoping we are not going to get hammered again.

Lenie, Annie, Rhoda, Lorraine, and Ramona have done the work these last two days. I just had to write my columns and give a little direction to some of the pages. Lenie worked at the office until near midnight both nights. She used to do all-nighters, but we both agreed that’s just not healthy.

Tomorrow morning we begin the thousand mile drive to Annie and Erik’s house in the Mojave Desert. They are preparing to move the first week of August from the 29 Palms Marine Corps Base to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, so we’ll help them clean up their rental. We had planned on this visit long before Erik got his orders for Camp Lejeune, and we’ll stay at the 29 Palms Inn, one of the most pleasant motels in the entire Mojave Desert. They offer fairly primitive cabins with swamp coolers. No telephone, TV, or Internet. It’s meant as a getaway for people who work too much. We qualify.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Publishing BHM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.