5ish Questions with Nicole Baxter of Bookmobile and Itasca Books
Publishing and Distributing as Ongoing Adaptations
Nicole Baxter, Director of Sales, Marketing, and Publisher Services at Bookmobile. I’ve worked at Bookmobile for 25 years (it’s a great place to work). Before Bookmobile I worked at Hungry Mind Press (the bookstore had a publishing arm) and bookstores (used, independent, and Borders). Best reached at nbaxter@bookmobile.com
As I've detailed elsewhere, and I think you've seen, my contention is that SPD was bad for small press literary publishing. Bookmobile and Itasca Books has been serving the community in a variety of ways in the past, and looks like it will be expanding the scope of its services to the community in the wake of SPD’s closure. So to start us off, can you talk generally about what Bookmobile and Itasca are and do?
Bookmobile is independently owned and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We began as a design and typesetting production house in 1982, then started offering print services in 1996, and distribution services in 2004.
Itasca Books, which is a division of Bookmobile (and we’re in the same building), offers traditional print distribution to the trade. We also offer options to help publishers capture a bigger cut of sales–we manage fulfillment, for example publishers funnel their direct-to-consumer website orders and we handle the shipping. Or our Amazon Seller account allows the publisher to control their retail price, and our ItascaBooks.com website gives the publisher a bigger cut of a sale.
Our clients use our Stacks portal to manage printing and inventory–clients can quote print runs, see their print history, and place orders. Just a tab away is access to their inventory–publishers can see what we have in stock and the status of their fulfillment orders (in process and shipped, along with a tracking number).
Let’s dig into Itasca and its distribution model a little bit more. Your stated approach is: “digital from the ground up, not tied to old-school practices, not supporting overheads that bear no relationship to how publishing works now.” Can you talk a little bit more about what these distribution practices look like and how they’re different from the old model?
The old model includes strict seasonal schedules and the assumption that the best way to sell a book is through the multiple layers of distribution -- distributor, wholesaler, bookseller, plus Amazon -- and that returns are a given. For some books that is still the best model, when augmented by selling direct at events or online. For others -- especially those where the author has a significant online presence and/or personal network, or the book has a strong hook with an identifiable community -- the best model can be to sell direct via an Amazon Seller account, plus a website like ItascaBooks.com, plus direct sales to organizations. The other big difference from the old model is short run digital printing, of course, where print runs are sized to the audience instead of printing thousands of copies to hit some arbitrary and unachievable sales goal at low margins.
The features you’re mentioning are such a change from SPD. While SPD provided somewhat comparable access to the trade market and Amazon, there was limited transparency and control. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this seems to offer small press publishers two advantages. First, the ability to make printing and distribution choices that fit the needs of the individual book. And second, the ability to streamline operations.
And I want to play out that second part a bit, because I think it’s overlooked. When I was at Les Figues, a large amount of my time was spent doing various logistical tasks. That included carrying boxes of books from the freight truck into our office storage to spending hours each week boxing up books and waiting in line at the post office, FedEx, and UPS. But if I were to set up operations with Bookmobile and Itasca, I’d immediately get most of that time back. And, while small presses often point to thin margins as a challenge, a related resource challenge is time. It’s probably more impactful for an editor to spend their time selecting, editing, designing, and marketing a book rather than standing in line at UPS.
Another big change for these publishers is that they are moving from a very focused distribution catalog at SPD to a bigger, general catalog at Itasca. At SPD, all the books fit a fairly narrow category (at least from the perspective of the trade market): literature, including fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction. At Itasca, publishers will find themselves listed alongside every genre, from business books to cookbooks to histories and everything in between. What are the challenges, and maybe even potential advantages, for publishers making this transition?
Yes! We aim to make the distribution process as transparent as possible–inventory is always visible and our statements go out every month. I agree with you, letting Itasca handle the communication with Amazon and Ingram, and manage the mailing of dropships, handle returns, etc. frees up a publisher’s time for acquiring, editing, and of course marketing their titles.
We do rely on publishers to market their titles, and our options aim to make that easier whether they’re working on direct to consumer sales to traditional print distribution. Because publishers are driving the reader to their titles, we’ve found that being among a wide variety of publishers is not a disadvantage. And we’re adjusting our online catalog as new publishers join–for example we’ve added a CLMP member section to our website, https://itascabooks.com/collections/clmp-publishers
We’ll continue to adapt to best serve publishers too–Bookmobile definitely has a history of that!
Tell me more about that history of adaptation. Again, this was a critique about SPD—their approach and services didn’t change with the times, or at least not fast enough to keep up. What are some of the big changes you’ve undergone in the past, and what are some potential changes you’re foreseeing on the horizon?
One of our biggest transitions has been making print runs, inventories, and drop ship orders (including status and tracking numbers) visible to publishers. We’ve also transitioned to publishers entering in their metadata via Stacks, so everything is in one central place.
We also add on and support sales paths where a publisher can earn more on their book sales–so supporting the direct to consumer sales. For instance Unbound Editions sells books on their own website–their website funnels orders to Stacks and we take care of the fulfillment. Unbound sees a list of the orders in Stacks as backordered, in process, shipped–along with the tracking number. So that’s the best sale for Unbound, because no one is taking a cut of their sale. (We also sell their books on the ItascaBooks.com website, and then distribute to the trade.)
Then we have clients who maybe don’t need traditional print distribution to the trade–they’re selling their book to a select audience and it doesn’t need to be available to Ingram or a bookstore. We can sell their book on ItascaBooks.com for them–we give them the option to sell through our Amazon Seller account too. That way their book is available on Amazon (so they can say yes to that cousin who wants to buy it on Amazon) and they can control the retail price (Amazon can’t undercut it on Seller).
And a feature we added just for SPD publishers, an OSI category for backlist titles. We heard from SPD publishers that part of their mission is to keep books in print. And some of their older backlist titles didn’t make sense financially to have at Itasca and pay admin fees for–so we came up with OSI, Out of Stock Indefinitely. For OSI titles, we don’t warehouse the books or send out the metadata. If a wholesaler or bookstore would ask us about an OSI title, we’d put them in touch directly with the publisher to fulfill the order.
Looking ahead, we’re working on making updating metadata for titles easier, moving statements online . . . and lots of other things!
I’m so excited hearing about all of these advances. There’s so many great tools for small press publishers that previously didn’t exist. While there are still a lot of challenges for these publishers to “compete” in the general trade market, it seems like at least the issue isn’t a massive tech and tools disadvantage anymore.
But that leads to my final question, the flip side of that coin. The stereotypical small literary press publisher and editor doesn’t have a tech or business background, or the resources to hire for that need. I’m not sure the exact process you’re using to funnel orders from a press’s website to the Stacks fulfillment flow, but I’ve dealt with similar integrations in the past and they can be somewhat complex to set up and maintain. How do you support new and existing presses so that they can take full advantage of all these opportunities?
Yes, funneling orders automatically from your website to our fulfillment does take some tech know-how. For that we work with Shopify, WooCommerce Checkout, BigCommerce, and SquareSpace.
If the above is not an option, publishers can manually upload their website orders to us as well, either one by one or by a spreadsheet template.
Then last, instead of running a shopping cart on their website, publishers can link to their title’s page on the Itasca Books website–they’ll earn more on an Itasca Books sale then Amazon, Ingram, etc.
We try to cover all options!
You can find and purchase books directly from Itasca Books, including a dedicated category for CLMP presses here.
And if you’re a publisher or writer who has been impacted by SPD’s closure or want to discuss the future of literary publishing, please DM me using the button below.