Perhaps you’ve heard of the chaos about to visit magazine newsstands. If not, you will soon as you look for your favorite magazine at the local store. As many as half the magazine titles that should be headed for newsstands right now will not make it due to a distribution war among distributors, wholesalers, and publishers.

Backwoods Home Magazine is not a party to this turf war, but we are somewhat caught in the middle, and about 4800 copies of our upcoming March/April issue will not make it to bookstores such as Barnes&Noble. This is because the issues were to be delivered by Source Interlink, a major wholesaler that is also a major participant in this war. If you’d like some details, click here.

This battle for distribution control could cause major, possibly fatal, damage to some magazines, but, as usual, Backwoods Home is prepared for anything. It won’t hurt us much at all. Long ago I limited BHM’s exposure to the newsstands, having been burned for $35,000 when American Distribution Services (ADS) folded six or seven years ago owing us a bunch of money. I have a deep distrust of the magazine distribution system and the handful of large companies that control it, and I have avoided doing business with them as much as possible. This has meant BHM is barred from being displayed at many retail outlets — even my hometown grocer, McKay’s Market in Gold Beach — but it protects us from the major financial damage that tends to follow in the wake of distribution upheavals such as is going on now.

Source Interlink was forced on us when Barnes&Noble awarded them the rights to distribute magazines to their stores a year or so ago. I almost did not sign the contract with them, but I thought it important for BHM to continue to be in the big bookstores. Up to that point, Ingram, a good company we have done business with for many years, was delivering us to Barnes&Noble, and they still deliver us to the other big bookstores like Waldens and Crowne.

The possibility of these massive distribution upheavals is the main reason why BHM is probably not displayed at your local newsstand. It’s simply too financially dangerous for small magazines like BHM to be heavily invested in putting tens of thousands of magazines on the newsstands, with the payout to us lagging six months behind the display date. I place a total of only 12,000 magazines on the national newsstands. I feel pretty smart, right now.

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