Do you want to get your comic, graphic novel, or any other kind of book into bookstores, libraries, and other retailers? Well, keep reading.
Hi there, I’m Andrew, the founder of Black Panel Press, a graphic novel publishing company. Today, I’m going to be talking to you about distribution. How do you get your book into bookstores, retailers and libraries? I’ll be talking mostly about comics and graphic novels, but really, a lot of this applies to any type of book. If you’re publishing a novel or anything, you can keep watching because much of this will apply to you. This is actually part eight of the self-publishing course I put together over at course.blackpanelpress.com. So, I’ll have the link in the description if that’s of interest to you. Head over there for more information. Let’s get right into it.
Who are the major players in the bookstore distribution?
We call it the book trade market. In the retail market, there are two main wholesalers. These are the main wholesalers who will be able to sell your book or your comic to retailers. For the comic market, the main one, which has been around for God knows how long, probably 40 years or more, is Diamond Comic Distributors. I work with Diamond, and they’re a great bunch of people. I definitely recommend reaching out to them. They have their process for submitting new graphic novels outlined pretty well on their website. But over the last few years, there have been a couple of competitors that have popped up.
There’s I believe they’re called UCS Comic Distributors, and another one is Lunar Comic Distributors. I definitely recommend it because I have experience with Diamond because, you know, they are probably, I don’t know this for sure, but I think they’re the most popular comic distributor out there. So, I recommend reaching out to them. But you want to keep your options open because a lot of the times like Diamond and other Distributors, they receive a whole lot of submissions, and you want to make sure that you have options, right?
So, submit to all three if you can. And for the bookstore market, that’s going to be Ingram. That’s the primary wholesaler that sells the majority of books to the retailers, to the bookstores in North America. I think they have some distribution also in the UK and maybe in Australia, some other English-speaking markets. But definitely in North America, they’re the biggest. And so, for all the independent bookstores, they’re going to be the ones to order from. And then also some of the chains, I’m not sure which ones, but they’ll order from Ingram as well. And then for libraries, it’s going to be Baker and Taylor. That’s the primary wholesaler, those that’s the company that will sell into the local library, they order from Baker and Taylor, alright.
Those are your different markets. You have your comic, you have your bookstore, and you have your library markets primarily there. Those are the wholesalers that you want your book to be available from, alright. And then from e-commerce, you have your author or publisher site, you also have Amazon, Kickstarter is really popular, and you have comic and book festivals, alright.
There are a few what are called Master Distributors, those are Independent Publishers Group, Publishers Group West, National Book Network, and Midpoint Trade. These are the ones that are the most widespread in the industry. If you have any shot at making a distribution deal with one of these, you definitely want to go with them first. Try them out. I’m not saying that you should wait before you reach out to other Distributors, always, you know, keep conversations going, keep your options open. But if you can get, especially in the book trade market, if you can get any of these Master Distributors, that would be definitely recommended. And some smaller Distributors, if you consider the book trade market as a whole, Diamond Book Distributors is a fairly small distributor, but highly recommended again, especially if you are publishing Comics or graphic novels because of their expertise with this medium. Then I would definitely recommend Diamond Book Distributors as your number one option if you’re going to be distributing comics or graphic novels.
They have two sides of their business we looked at earlier. They have Diamond Comic Distributors, and Diamond Comic Distributors will distribute Comics or graphic novels to comic shops across North America. But then they also have the other half of the same company, which is Diamond Book Distributors, which will distribute to the wholesalers that we looked at earlier and to retailers as well. There’s a couple of other ones that they’re smaller, but I have spoken to several of these, and they’re a lot more accessible if you are an independent author, if you’re just getting started, if you don’t have a big following or big a lot of experience in publishing so far. Then these are some Distributors that will work with smaller Publishers and authors, and sometimes, you know, some of these, they have a larger startup fee than others, some of them have no startup.
Options for Comic Distributors
Let’s take a look down through some of the options for Comic Distributors. We have Diamond Comic Distributors as I mentioned, we have Lunar UCS, we also have Emerald Comic Distributors, and that’s owned and operated by Anne Bean, who’s a really lovely person. And as long as your book has good quality, and that’s she’s somebody that I would definitely recommend reaching out to talk about opportunities to distribute your book, especially like really Indie stuff LGBTQ, you know, they do a really good job of Distributing that primarily on the west coast of the United States. I recommend reaching out to Anne at Emerald. And then Powerhouse Distributing, this is a company, the guy who ran it, I can’t remember his name, but he was a really nice guy, very you know, a hustler. And I don’t know if they’re still around, you have to look and see if they still are, but the Emerald Comic Distributor and Powerhouse, those are two very small Distributors. I know that Anne Bean is still around and I think doing well. They don’t have that many stores, last I looked, there were about 30 stores, probably more by now because again, she’s a very hard worker, a hustler type of person. I wouldn’t be surprised now if there’s more stores in that network and she might eventually become a competitor of Diamond and Lunar and these other Distributors, but for now, pretty small. You’d only want to work with them if you can’t get a deal with either Diamond, Lunar, or UCS. These are the major Comic Distributors, which have comparable distribution networks?
How to apply to Diamond Comics Distributors
Let’s look at the diamond application again. There’s another link that I’ll have in the description, but just to get a general idea of the application. If you want to have product samples ready, I recommend using some of the print-on-demand services to do that if you don’t have your book already printed in large quantities like Lulu Express, and Amazon KDP, you can also do IngramSpark, probably a bunch more out there, just use print-on-demand. You’re going to do a product info sheet, you’re going to put together a cover letter, you want to have everything very polished and professional, a publishing schedule. Diamond has probably thousands and thousands of accounts, so each account takes administrative time to maintain. And so, Diamond and other distributors, don’t want a million different accounts, right? So, they want people that are going to be more serious, publishing schedule, so several books per year ideally. If you’re an independent author with one title, well, it has to be a really good title, I think, to come on. So, if that’s the case for you, you know, keep your options open, and maybe consider working with a publisher in order to get your book distributed.
You have to have a marketing plan, so social media plan, the larger the following that you have, the more successful that’s going to be, so highlight that if you have a newsletter list with, you know, a couple of thousand people or social media following on Instagram with 10,000 people, definitely highlight that. And the festival conference plan, you know, what events are you going to attend to promote your book and an advertising budget and plan. So, these are all things that you want to have planned out. So, different modules of the course, as I mentioned, if you wanted to visit that site later on, I do cover some of those topics, but there are a lot of people on YouTube also that cover similar topics. So, another company that I like quite a bit is Reedsy, I think they make marketing promotion pretty accessible.
How The Comic Distributor Industry Works
To summarize, this is how the industry works and how all the different major players interact with each other. You have different kinds of layers in this industry. First, you kind of have yourself, so the publisher or the author, I haven’t added that anywhere here, so there are no icons, which just imagine that you know, you’re a publisher, you’re an author, okay. And you’re going to sell your book to a distributor, a distributor like Diamond Comic Distributors, American West Books, Independent Publisher Group, and many others.
All of them will sell to the wholesalers. So, the wholesalers are mainly Ingram for the bookstore market and Baker Taylor for the library market. And then technically, Diamond is for the comic shop Market only, they kind of work as a wholesaler as well. They are also wholesalers here. All right, and then all of the wholesalers will sell to the independent retailers and some of the major chains. So, like for example, they might sell to Barnes & Noble, to Indigo, or some of these larger bookstore chains they’ll buy directly from the distributor. So, in some cases, some of these major chains, they will not buy from the wholesaler, they buy directly from the Distributors, and at least in some cases, right, and that’s just because they’ll get better terms, they’re big enough that they can do that. Then you have other bookstores, so the independent bookstores in your neighbourhood, for example, they’re buying from Ingram, the libraries, your local library is buying from Baker and Taylor.
I hope that that gives you kind of a good idea of all the different players in the and how they work together. Another topic that I’ll get into at a later point here but you know, because one of the reasons why the margin is so low in publishing, you’re you’re not going to be rich in publishing unless you do a lot of volume. So, one of the reasons the margin is so low is because of all of these players that each need to take a piece of the pie, alright. So, they each need to get a percentage of the profit to support their activities, and that reduces our overall margin. But they do provide services that make sure that their books get into the hands of readers.
How to sell Digital Copies of Your Books
There’s a lot more material in here, a lot more detail. I don’t think people want to read for an hour about book distribution. I’m just going to talk a little bit about a couple of services I find really interesting for digital distribution. So, I definitely recommend that you distribute your books digitally because you have the advantage of, you know, people that have they don’t necessarily want to spend as much for the physical copy, they just want to read it on a TBL or something. There are many people like that in North America and in the world more broadly, but also because it can be very difficult to ship physical copies to Europe, for example, if you have customers buying from Europe. And so, by offering your book digitally, that makes it available to them. So, these are two platforms that are kind of like digital aggregators of books.
One is Draft2Digital, this is the one I use, they don’t charge anything upfront, they just charge 10% of your sales. They distribute to all of these different platforms, so Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, OverDrive, etc. So, I find the biggest source of revenue for me are Apple Books and Amazon. If you don’t want to give up 10% of your sales, well, you know, you could probably do just fine by just doing Amazon and Apple, maybe you could throw the book on Kobo and some of these other ones too. But there’s also Google Drive, but not a lot of sales happen there. There’s another platform I didn’t have the greatest experience myself, but it’s a bit of a different model. So, it’s a fixed monthly rate, I can’t remember what the pricing is right now, but you can go visit them and find out with 0% of your sales. So, you keep all of your sales.
So, that’s it, that’s the basics of distribution. If you’d like to get more information, you can visit course.blackpanelpress.com, and send me an email, and I’d be happy to help you.