The biggest force in publishing that nobody talks about

One of the things I'm learning about by running Curious Reading Club is exactly where power lies in the publishing industry. Some of the answers won't surprise you: Amazon, of course, dominates nearly everything it touches, voracious and aggressive; and the "big five" publishing houses command most of the attention in the market, even if they keep trying to buy each other to reduce the competition. But some players aren’t very well known outside the industry.

Here's one I keep bumping into that may be new to you: Ingram.

A decades-old family company headquartered in Tennessee, Ingram Industries is a book, magazine and media wholesaler that distributes printed material to most of the stores in the US and across the world. Customers include Barnes & Noble, libraries everywhere, and almost every independent bookstore and online retailer. Basically, if you work in any part of the publishing business, you almost certainly know Ingram—but if you are only a reader, it’s quite likely their existence is a total secret.

⌘

I first started to understand Ingram’s influence back in 2017 when we were putting out the independent mental health magazine Anxy. We had plenty of questions about distribution. How do you get magazines into stores? You get picked from a supply list that the store is given by their distributor. Who is their distributor? Nearly always Ingram. And how do you get on Ingram's lists? You have to agree with their terms.

Those terms were really hard for a small, independent publishing business: we had to sell at deep, deep cover price discounts; we had to ship inventory to their warehouse for potential distribution; and we had to agree only to get paid for the copies that sold—not the number of copies we sent out. The worst part of it all was that any unsold inventory was pulped, not given back to us. That felt like a double wound, first not selling and then destroying. It meant we had to be prepared to write off basically anything we sent to Ingram, while hoping that somehow sales would take off.

With the reading club, I'm seeing again how deep Ingram is inside book publishing and distribution. It's everywhere. Basically, if you pick up a book from a physical location, there's a high likelihood it was supplied by Ingram, and if you buy it online, there's a high chance it is pulled out of an Ingram warehouse. For the most part I'm actually working more direct with publishers than going through a middle man or distributor—but dealing with Ingram feels inevitable, and honestly a little scary.

That’s because, increasingly, Ingram is more than just physical distribution. Like many industries, publishing has seen a massive roll-up over the past few years, with the biggest companies expanding into new areas as a way to protect and extend their core businesses.

So today IngramSpark, the company's digital publishing service, is one of the leaders in book self-publishing. Its Lightning Source print-on-demand division vacuums up 4,000 new titles every day. And Ingram even has tools that let you manage sales on Amazon, making it both a supplier to and competitor with Jeff Bezos's business.

If you want to read more, there is in fact a whole book on Ingram's rise. It's called The Family Business and it is published—perhaps unsurprisingly—by an Ingram subsidiary.

I feel like I'm only just getting started on understand this whole thing, but like I said, most people just haven't heard of it before.

So now you have.

⌘

Next week we're holding our live Zoom Q&A with Carl Elliott, the author of June’s pick of the month, The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.

Carl will join us for an hour on Tuesday June 11 from 3pm Eastern/12pm Pacific, and we’ll be discussing the book, medical ethics, scandals and whistleblowing. And you can be part of the conversation by signing up to our mailing list to get details.

See you then

Bobbie