Mike took 20 of them for Foyles. They sold out in a week. We took along some more. We did similar elsewhere. By issue 3 of Smoke: A London Peculiar, our two-person distribution network was selling 5,000 copies per issue in over 80 London shops, thanks to the relationships we had built with individual booksellers.
That world has gone. Ten years later, Matt and I are launching our first Smoke book, From the Slopes of Olympus to the Banks of the Lea, into a very different marketplace. Now, centralised distribution and buying are king, and the personal approach has little power. In many cases, it's not even allowed—and this position fails booksellers as well as independent publishers.
Take what happened to us in 2007. Before then, we would hand-deliver 340 copies of every issue of Smoke to Malcolm Hopkins, the wonderful magazine buyer at Borders Oxford Street. He shelved them well, and every one would sell—a good return for both parties. But then we received a letter from Borders head office saying that, in future, branches would not accept deliveries direct from publishers; we would need to use a “recognised distributor” instead. Malcolm left, and the last issue we’d hand-delivered was left in the storeroom; over half came back as returns.
This was at a time when our sales were increasing elsewhere. And what a grim irony it was that Borders went bust not long after its approach became so impersonal.
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