Retail--A good thing?
guildofblades:
>>Ryan: POD is something I'm still trying to understand--not the concept, but the implementation. If an author has an arrangement to publish and deliver one copy, wouldn't that translate favorable into a retail supply chain where a shop might order a dozen or two copies at a time? Of course, everyone's margins would be squeezed a bit, but if it makes sense to sell one copy at a time, why not a dozen and provide a reasonable margin? <<
Hi George,
For us POD fits in because we are the POD printer. We print the books and card games right here in our store. In the future when all of our new machinery is in place, we'll be printing out of an industrial building likely to be within 2-3 miles of this store's location.
Most stores do not stock a dozen of anything at one time. My deepest inventory on any D&D 4th edition book is about 4 copies. Why should I stock more when I can re-order it steadily from our distributors? Capital that would be sunk into inventorying copies 5-12 is better spent inventory some 6-8 other books so we offer our local customers a wider variety of inventory choices.
For a time I believed it was in a small publisher's bes interest to largely sell direct, both for the higher profit margin per sale and for a better connection to their audience. And that 3 tier system only really worked for the larger publishers, who got good enough service through that system to generate wide accessibility for their product on the market.
Now that we've run GOB Retail for a year, I have seen the direct impact of our store's ability to promote select smaller publishers' products. In pushing and expanding those sales we've diversified our inventory, made our store more unique, generated sales for games that I am very doubtful would have happened otherwise and I believe we sold overall more material as the small press purchases were "bonus" purchases by the consumers, not taking away from them buying the latest and greatest goodies from their existant favorite games from those larger publishers.
So yeah, so far on our end the evidence suggests that as a store, if we can offer a greater variety of games and products from the hobby game industry, customers will dive in and partake in a much broader range of what the industry has to offer. It is simply as retailers, we have to recognize that the small press stuff doesn't come backed with huge marketing budgets to drive interest, so we must devise our own techniques for bringing those quality products to the attention of our customers. Figuring out how to do so brings its own rewards (diversity, stability, greater overall sales).
The challenge largely lies in the supply side. Its difficult to order direct from many companies as they have just one or two titles and ordering deep is not necessarily a great option. IPR makes it more feasible, but as you say, some aren't set up on IPR.
Its our hope that once our POD is fully estabished with the capacity we want, we'll be able to launch our wholesale program and distribute, maintaining inventory on a near POD basis. We would keep inventory on hand, but it would be just several copies of most things which would be reprinted as they sold.
Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Retail Group - http://www.gobretail.com
Guild of Blades Publishing Group - http://www.guildofblades.com
1483 Online - http://www.1483online.com
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