Punk Planet's distributor goes under

Fuuuuuck! Can I help?

I second that emotion. Is there something I as a consumer can do?

But you know some of us are so independent that we can't even get picked up by distros. They will not even return my emails and calls about BLISTER PACKS.

But you still have distribution, according to this announcement, by someplace called Disticor? Waht did the IPA do for publishers if someone else was doing the meat-n-bones distribution? I'm cornfused.

I will say, though, that I'm very impressed you can see for 1,000 miles. I never knew anyone who could do that.

Whats the next step?

we've been answering this question, here and elsewhere: what exactly did the IPA do for us? Originally they were our primary national distributor, then they had some financial troubles and decided to get out of the distribution game, selling our contracts to Disticor in the mean time. Fine and dandy, to the degree that *theoretically* the IPA would be staying on hand to make sure we didn't get lost in the shuffle—which is our fairly generous way of accusing most national distributors of ignoring us 'cause we're not TIME (or, for that matter, MAXIM).

This news, while not surprising, nor terribly detrimental in comparison to the rest of the last year of absolute bullshit we've put up with from the IPA, does mean we've lost our one-and-only advocate *at* our national distributors. And considering the way the distribution system works—I can describe in greater detail if anyone's interested—this is, ummm, not good.

Also, of course, the fact that the IPA still owes several struggling independent magazines money that we'll now never ever see doesn't help, you know, the independent magazines the organization was founded to support.

As for what the next step is? I dunno. Watch this space for more announcements of more magazines unable to survive in an increasingly hostile environment. I found out about two yesterday alone.

These are not, by the way, always issues that relate directly to organizational disfunction. These are the result of a vast series of deliberate, calculated moves on the part of smaller, unseen arms of major media to eliminate independent, not purely profitable, small media because they don't conform to corporate profit-making mandates. So: you want a good reason not to get excited about that new Prada eyewear or Kenneth Cole watch? Because those are parts of systems intent on destroying the spaces you can go in our culture to wonder whether or not you should buy them.

Don't mean to be a snot, of course—elsewhere I can be really forgiving of things like Prada eyewear, but today I am too pissed.

this is mostly a book problem, and not a mag problem, but it does affect our sisters-in-arms at McSweeney's and Soft Skull (who even put out a book of mine):

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/publishing/independent_publishers_g...

does anyone wanna come over and fight me? i'm just so full of rage today.

http://www.ccchronicle.com/paper/arts.php?id=1831
http://www.chicagoreader.com/pdf/051104/051104_hottype.pdf
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2006-06-14/news/feature.html

The story of AMS is a big one, but I've got personal beef with this part:

"SCB, IPG and NBN are still around, but their reach - individual or even collective - may not be wide enough to help PGW's client base."

First, no Oxford comma (!!), but really, what would constitute a reach "wide enough to help PGW's client base"? Because I worked at IPG for many years and I really don't know why we/they (I still think of myself as working there, since I'm not working anywhere else yet...) couldn't reach big enuff for Soft Skull, for McSweeney's, for whomever. Is reach a matter of reps? Buyers? Clients? IPG sells directly to everyone--retail, wholesale, Amazon (just like Consortium, NBN, PGW, Ingram's new distro arm, Harcourt, Random House, etc., do)--and I'd think that, with its consistent growth record and solid business practices, IPG could take on many new publishers and sell the living daylights out of their books as well as books of IPG's existing, decades-old clients.

And maybe then I could get another job there and work for a good company again, dammit. All this book news makes we wish I were still in the shit.

So, apparently, there was a clause in the original contract allowing IPA to sell your contract? Or was it something different?

The only reason I aak is because this has happened to lots of bands and lots of labels I've been associated with where the orginal contract is sold with the idea that someone from the old guard will act as 'advocate' but then that person disappears or gets out of the game altogether.

Speaking as a PGW publisher, I guess I'd say that NBN, SCB, IPG wouldn't be in a position to take on 150 publishers with $180 million in sales, certainly not in one fell swoop. Definitely all three of y'all have publishers who are much bigger than a lot of the the smaller PGW clients, ourselves included. But point made by Sarah at GalleyCat was one, I think, of aggregate capacity—be it the warehousing/fulfillment side of things, or the sales representation side—where the fact that PGW's field sales forces is in-house rather than commissioned reps provides extra capacity.

I suppose if PGW's biggest clients—Grove, Avalon, New World Library and a few others, were all to decamp to Random House, Holtzbrink, Hachette, the NBN-SCB-IPG folks woul dbe able to take on the remaining ones. But I'm of the view that, in the great publishing ecology, it is healthy to have a diversity of scale within several strong independent distributors...

Excellent point and explanation, and thanks for it.

"So, apparently, there was a clause in the original contract allowing IPA to sell your contract? Or was it something different?"

No, not quite. What it was was that the IPA themselves used run their own distributor (originally called BigTop, the name changed later to Indy Press Newsstand Services) and our contract was with souly then. However, they began to hemorrhage money last year, leaving all their distributed titles holding the bag. Their fix for that problem was to partner with a larger Canadian distributor, Disticor, and new contracts were cut. Now, why did anyone sign? Because Disticor promised to pay the back amounts owed, to a point. So, cash-strapped mags like us, Clamor, Herbivore, and many many more signed.

The idea was that the IPA would still act as a marketing agent and advocate for the smaller, niche titles that their mission charged them with protecting, while Disticor would use their much more robust back end and collections to actually get these titles paid.

Well, with IPA out of the picture, it's just Disticor, who partnered with IPA to begin with because they wanted help dealing with smaller titles. Now they're the ones we're stuck with.

It's fairly analogous to the band losing their A&R rep or whoever and left to fend for themselves. And it sucks just as much.

Plus, there's money still owed to us by IPA that we'll never see.

And there's the impact it's already having on other small press magazines.

To sum up: This fucking sucks.

or not: http://politicscentral.com/2006/09/12/landry.php

Just above your right shoulder it says "King Of Metal."
That's pretty cool.

"Dave Hoffa: King of Metal" stickers we had printed up for our then mailorder guy, now reviews editor Dave Hoffa, who is so metal that he's writing a tour diary for Metal Edge magazine.

goddamnit.

It'd be a massive undertaking, but what about some of y'all forming your own distro alliance?

no one's got it.

Just to clear the air, it's "Metal MANIACS" magazine.

Thanks for hosting a dialog about the IPA madness. The news really hurts and I'm trying not to think about it, but the thoughts keep creeping in. I'm a fighter -- all the indie publishers are -- and the thing that sucks is that I don't know if there's much left for us to fight. But I'll keep digging to see what I can do.

After trying to contact the law firm handling the bankrupcy filings and also the IPA/IndyPress to get any sort of information possible, I received an e-mail from the law firm saying that the publications affected by this need to wait a couple of weeks. Then the firm will send us some sort of paperwork to fill out in which we can explain what we're owed. Dan said that he thinks all that's left at the IPA is some desks and computers. Venus Zine is owed much more than that -- I think most of the publications are.

I hope and believe that we'll survive this. Punk Planet, Venus Zine, and scores of other independent titles have been around long enough that we've become good at weathering storms. I know that for Venus Zine, we're changing the way we look at the publishing industry and staying on the edge in order to keep up with all the changes in the world, the Internet being a big part of that.

Amy

Crap

Hi all,

I'm a former editor at Tikkun and used to consult for the IPA. The IPA once had a noble mission of helping indy magazines--distro was an afterthought. IPA had a discussion forum, produced technical manuals, held an annual conference (full of boring but important talks about circulation, etc), had a list of magazine consultants who really knew the independent press, partnered with the Council of Literary Magazines to provide really cheap software for magazine fulfillment, and, in the last five years, offered a loan fund which was really useful to magazine that needed capital and weren't big enough for a bank loan.

In short, IPA was a nonprofit, mission-driven organization. The real story here is not about distro per se, but about how nonprofits go bad. IPA got distracted by the idea that it should try to support its internal staffing needs by following a for-profit model and offering fee-for-service. That's how they ended up so deep into distro hell.

In the 19th century, do-gooder organizations were supported by wealthy patrons. In the 20th century, they were supported by foundations (created by often-guilty monopoly capitalists like Carnegie--see Bill Gates for a modern example). Foundations are still around, but those on the left only seem to want to support exciting new programs. They don't seem to understand that the most effective way to support left-leaning nonprofits is by supporting infrastructure. Programs are great, but without really boring stuff like paying rent on a physical office, buying and finding someone competent to run database software, offering living wage salaries and benefits--without these, an organization can't really exist for long.

If the IPA could have gotten infrstructure grants, they wouldn't have needed to hire a director whose head was in the for-profit world and who ended up betraying the organization's mission.

Ok, well, I could go on forever, but don't want this comment to be too long. Distro is a whole different story.

jgk

Thanks for the interesting insight, Jo Ellen.

Amy

would you guys ever consider having online subscriptions? like having the entire magazine online and people could subscribe to it that way? i don't purchase many magazines because:

a. i rarely go shopping for things that aren't food,
b. i rarely have $22 laying around to subscribe,
c. i don't feel like having more clutter in my apartment.

It would cost less money to produce so more of the money could go back to you guys....plus it's just more ecological. you could still do the paper thing too, but maybe the online thing would drum up more business.

. . . but newsstand distribution has been an ongoing concern in independent publishing for *years*, and dan and i, having some crazy number of years in this biz which combined is, like, more than 30, have really genuinely thought about, investigate, planned for, and even attempted most of these solutions.

bottom line is: a distro coop was a viable idea a year and a half ago, and we tried to move forward with it. few other mags were as quick to understand how the IPA would affect them as we were, and failed to throw resources behind it. we did distro in-house for awhile to play around with it, see how viable it was, but when we were offered the disticor contract, it became clear that the only way we were going to financially survive—i.e., get that back money we were owed—was return all distro management to that company. so. we did it. we could fight, get back the right to distro our own magazine, spend enormous amounts of money and time getting us back to the place we were at a year and a half ago, sure. but, uhh, does that really make sense?

as far as online subscriptions go, people just don't pay for internet the way we'd need them to to keep up the quality and breadth of reporting we do at PP. people just like reading the mag in print. so we have to print the mag.

so, really, we say it all the time with this and all other magazines, you don't subscribe (or buy stuff), you're not financially supporting the magazine. it's just plain old true.

Our very own Ben Tanzer wrote a piece few months ago on this IPA crisis for local THIRD COAST PRESS, which recently went online-only: http://thirdcoastpress.com/pissed_IPA_in_crisis.php

Also, while Jo Ellen's right—that the story here is about one organization gone horribly, horribly wrong—that fact doesn't really give us much to work with. The fact is that the IPA has gone horribly, horribly wrong, AND screwed up our distribution, our financials, and our community support base in the mean time. While the blame shouldn't be lifted from the IPA, ever, dealing with the damage done is—at least to me, right now—a more significant concern.

You guys are stuck with Disticor now? How long until you think they pay you what IPA owed and how long is left on your contract?
This is a crap situation. Sorry, guys. I've seen many a label go through problems like this. It's terrible, terrible.

You said it right there. What's truly mind-bendingly frustrating is that it's a crap situation created whole-hog by an organization that was originally set up to keep struggling independent publishers OUT of crap situations. Fuck ME, you know?

But, you know, this happens all the time on different scales. Non-profits start to think they have to follow a for-profit model which they're not equipped, financially or philosophically, to follow. Then they fail and wind up hurting exactly what they were intended to assist.

PGW, AMS Headed to Splitsville?
by Jim Milliot

Several sources have said that it appears increasingly likely that AMS's distribution subsidiary, PGW, will be sold off in a deal that could close relatively quickly. Sources said that "well funded" companies have been in discussions about acquiring the company in a transaction separate from any AMS deal.

A sale would be fine with PGW's clients, many of whom are growing more concerned that their credit claims will be overwhelmed by the large amounts owed to the major publishing houses. In an effort to give themselves a better chance at retrieving more of the money owed them, the PGW clients are planning to appeal to the bankruptcy trustees to have PGW's situation dealt with separately from AMS. If their request is not granted, the publishers may try to unite their claims into one claim so the group could move up the creditor list.

Meanwhile, the U.K.-based Quarto, has become the first publisher to detail how the AMS bankruptcy will affect it. Quarto said that its sales to AMS were £2.3 ($4.3 million) million in 2006, and that it is owed about £1.3 million (it expects to be paid another £300,000 for a new shipment now on its way to AMS when it arrives at the company). Quarto said that despite not receiving some $1.5 million from AMS, its cash generation "was close to target" in 2006. The company said it is awaiting further financial information before determining how Quarto will "continue to trade with the company in the future, other than on a COD basis."

From Chris Anderson, who wrote them:

"The IPA's Domino Effect:The Enron of Indie Media Leaves Publications in a Pinch" online here: http://www.indypendent.org/?p=715

You cal also read a brief sidebar on the future of the IPA-NY here: http://www.indypendent.org/?p=714

And an overview of the "Independent Media Scene" here: http://www.indypendent.org/?p=713

You can download the entire pdf of the latest issue-- with a nice two page spread of all these articles here: http://nyc.indymedia.org/en/2007/01/81776.html

are contributing to a discussion on this matter at OTHER magazine's blog: http://othermag.org/blog/?p=205

Thanks for all the links, Anne.

Ex-Punk Planet associate editor Joel Schalit has written a pretty interesting take on the whole IPA debacle. The line that resonates with me is the realization that "The IPA was failing to perform its most basic functions as a distributor. To put it bluntly, the company could barely tie its own shoelaces."

Which is very true, and is part of what we're struggling with right now--over the last year and a half, while putting on the face of actually doing something for us now, with the numbers staring us in the face, it's clear that they weren't doing shit for the magazine in terms of building our distribution, because they were too busy trying to save their own asses.

http://mashdownbabylon.typepad.com/mashdown/2007/01/and_we_all_fall.html