Why I'm Not Sad about SPD

Initial Thoughts on SPD's Demise

This was originally written as a series of Instagram Stories that I shared on the evening of 3/31/2024. Based on the responses from my friends/followers there, I decided to find a more permanent place for those thoughts. Below is a reproduction of those slides. Note that I’ve done some slight editing to clarify, but the content/message is the same.

1.

I’ve been thinking about the SPD disaster over the weekend and trying to gather my thoughts. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to say something. Or if I wanted to, whether I actually would. But I feel compelled to share them, as scattered as they are.

2.

First, the impact to me personally. With SPD shutting down, my book A Turkish Dictionary is almost certainly functionally unavailable moving forward. A sad personal note as I approach the 7-year anniversary in a few days.

But what I really want to talk about is what it [SPD’s demise] means for literature, small presses, and publishing in general.

3.

And I want to start by saying something I think people are trying to say but are dancing around. SPD was really, really, really bad at its job. It was terrible at selling and distributing books to bookstores. And it was terrible at fulfilling its basic obligations to its presses. It had no vision for the future and no bedrock for the present.

4.

When I was a bookseller, SPD was known as the absolute worst distributor to work with. There’s lots of examples and reasons (by far the slowest to fulfill an order, regularly rejected returns), but here’s one specific example that I think exemplifies it.

They sent an order of a handful of books (6 or so) in a box that was big enough to hold 100 books. The order arrived nearly 8 weeks after it was placed. Because it was in this huge box, receiving stacked other boxes on top. But because the box was empty, this caused it to collapse and all the other boxes above to fall over.

This wasn’t a major issue. Everything got restacked, everything was fine. But it exemplifies the weird, sloppy, and unprofessional way that the organization operated.

Why did they put 6 books in such a huge box? Did they not have different sized boxes in their warehouse? Why did they choose to pay higher shipping fees because of the size of the box? Why did it take 8 weeks to fulfill the order in this manner?

5.

When I was managing editor of Les Figues press, I saw the sloppiness from the other side. Again, there are many reasons and examples I could share, but here’s one.

They had no internal mechanisms or processes to understand if or when they needed to receive more books from a publisher until stock went to zero AND an active order came in. This meant that time to fulfill that order to the bookstore could take months (as we saw above). Which means, in actuality, that the order would be canceled—but not until AFTER the publisher had fulfilled the invoice and taken on the additional cost of shipping books that no longer are needed.

6.

So among my many responsibilities, I took on the responsibility of monitoring and managing our SPD stock levels. I checked weekly so that I could proactively reach out and ask them to initiate a new invoice.

And don’t even get me started on how terrible Amazon fulfillment became after we let them take over our in-house (me) fulfillment process. Within 6 months or so, we went from virtually all of our backlist being immediately available for fast shipping from Amazon to a tiny percentage (I estimate, based on memory, about 1/3 of our backlist).

7.

Again, that’s just a small example. But I hope they are illustrative of the ways that SPD failed to do even the most basic role it claimed to serve. Yes, technically it provided a distribution conduit to bookstores. But it did that job so poorly that it also kneecapped small publishers. Yes, SPD’s existence was important to small presses. But we shouldn’t overlook the fact that it did its job so poorly that it also limited and harmed small presses.

[Additional note: I didn’t specifically discuss the exorbitant fees and delayed/delinquent payments to presses in my original stories because that’s already in the existing discourse. But I want to add that in briefly here to make sure it’s included.]

8.

The combination of their fees, their poor performance, and their slow turnaround made them a financial and operational burden for presses.

9.

And I know a lot of people put their heart and soul into laboring for that organization. This isn’t meant to throw anyone under the bus—other than the leadership. Because this was a failure of leadership, through and through. Which, given the revelations of the last couple of years, shouldn’t be a surprise to hear.

10.

So, like, am I just grousing and complaining and unloading some of my own frustrations? Yeah, a little bit. But it’s also touching a nerve that I’ve been thinking about since I entered the literary world. That might be for another mini-essay on another day [note: this Substack!]. But I’ll drop a few initial vague thoughts.

11.

I’m intrigued by the distribution model Asterism Books is building. I’m excited as I see writers utilize various social and digital publishing platforms to build community and distribute their voices, with traditional publishing becoming almost secondary. And I’m certain that there are additional paths ahead that are so much better than the ultimately harmful and limiting reality SPD forced upon the literary world.

12.

If you have thoughts about all this, please share them with me (comment below!). And if you think I should continue writing and thinking about could/should come next, please subscribe to this Substack. I’ve been less active the last few years while starting a family, but I feel fired up to say and do something right now. Thank you!