Gavin Grant explains why, if you can, it’s often better to buy your small-press books directly from the publisher:
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced as a company? Distribution? Promotion? Finances?Everything comes back to finances and sales. If we sell books through our website we get say 90% of the cost (we pay shipping and Paypal takes a percentage). If a book is sold through our distributor we can get as little as 35%. It’s a challenge to publish books on 35% of retail.
And yet he also says:
The one part of the internet that worries me in the great flattening-out-and-increase-of-accessibility is that when people go to what for them seems the easiest thing, it can be killing their local economy. Some online booksellers’ higher discounts mean that local businesses are losing business and in danger of closing. There is nothing like the human capital of a well-informed bookseller (or any other kind of store) and when buyers shop online they are taking the money from their local stores that would pay people to do the job in their town. So while your local bookshop may not carry everything, they can usually order what you want. And, again, since most people buy books in bookshops, getting them physical bookshop is important.
Publishing is a complicated business sometimes. But I don’t think he’s wrong: I still buy an awful lot of my books in brick-and-mortar stores. When it’s a smaller press that could really use the cash, though, it may be better to buy direct from them online.
I really can’t say enough good things about Small Beer Press, by the way. I’m delighted (albeit delightfully surprised) to hear they’ll be publishing a desktop calendar next year. And I just finished Geoff Ryman’s terrific The King’s Last Song, which they published in the US recently.
Updated to add… I think the calendar Grant refers to is the “Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2010” available for pre-order here. It sounds very neat.