Well, maybe the CEO of the Independent Book Publishers Association, should be in a position to know if a crisis is at hand, and should certainly be cautious about the risk of crying wolf to her 4,100 members. Ken Whyte at SHuSH tells us that Andrea Fleck-Nisbet recently told Publishers Weekly that the industry is “at an inflection point.”

As I understand it the big problem is that Ingram, providing warehousing and distribution services for many small (and quite a few large) publishers, is just charging too much for the Independent Publishers Association members. (A couple of independent distributors have recently closed their doors.) Mr Whyte calls it “the Ingram problem”. Ingram Content Group he says represents more than 37,000 publishers around the world — can that really be true? (Stocks books from . . . , I’d believe.) Whatever the number there’s surely a perfectly understandable force at work here: Ingram — any powerful business — will seek to use its monopoly power to maximize its margins. Push and push until you get all the profit going on this or that product, and the producers of the product will no longer find it profitable to create the item — at which point your revenue crashes, because 60% of nothing is not such an attractive proposition. At this point, or just before this point is reached, your well-run big company will suddenly see the justice of reducing its fees — obviously, we all understand (ha-ha), they were generously intentioned all along, and always had our best interests at heart. If only they’d known of our suffering! Well now they do, and everyone’ll all get along marvelously with them enjoying a meager 55% of the margin.

Among the sorts of signal that will get Ingram to this point is of course clients moving their books elsewhere. Anne Trubek writes at Notes from a Small Press that her publishing company, Belt Publishing, is moving its books to Arcadia Publishing from Ingram. Short of such action Ingram will no doubt find themselves motivated by talk of setting up a collaborative distribution system for all the smaller publishers out there. Sure we all know it’d be a nightmare to get up and running, but Ingram really doesn’t want to allow you even to dream about it: the more they get, after all, the more attractive such an alternative will look. There’s a platonic ideal out there for sharing out the money raised by a book’s sale — I don’t know what it should be exactly but something along the lines of

  • Author 10%;
  • Printer 20%;
  • Bookstore 40%;
  • Distributor 25%;
  • Publisher 5%.

Ingram, and you, might like to dicker with the splits, but it’d be crazy to let the golden goose die in this ditch — or more likely to migrate to a totally self-publishing ebook model.