OK, so the Tortoise Books blog has been taking a backseat lately to pretty much everything else. Jerry (who’s writing this but will be avoiding the first-person singular) tends to prioritize writing for money over writing for attention or exposure or whatever. So he’s been busy finishing his latest book, and editing other forthcoming Tortoise books, and the blog’s been relegated to the farthest-back bench seat in the multi-passenger van that contains his various writing personas. But every so often, his inner blogger needs a turn in the driver’s seat, especially when there are announcements that seem too significant for the blogger’s rowdy and immature younger brother, the tweeter. Such as this one: Tortoise Books is now officially set up on our new distributor, Publishers Group West!

Slow and steady wins in the end—even in publishing. Over the past eight years, we’ve worked to build a reputation for quality and (one hopes) fair dealing as well. We believe we’re putting out books as good as any on the market, and treating the people who created those books with dignity and respect. We’ve worked hard to get those books in front of readers; in the last P.C. (pre-COVID) year, we sold books at a dizzying away of fairs and festivals, as well as doing several large and lucrative (and labor-intensive) online presales and bookstore events.

But hard work alone isn’t enough—and in this business it’s all too easy to work hard, rather than smart. It’s a lot of work to lug books to festivals and promote pop-up fairs and what-not; sometimes that work pays off, and sometimes it doesn’t. (Granted, that’s actually part of the charm of small-press publishing—it’s a gamble, and you never know whether any particular book launch or pop-up festival or online presale will pay off. A few years back, Jerry was headed to a bookstore event and was a little worried about turnout; he called a friend for advice, and heard the following: “If you won every time you sat down at the table, you’d probably get bored.” The event ended up being sparsely attended, but the perspective helped.) We turned a small profit for 2019, the first time we’ve done so for a full calendar year; the big summer festivals helped, as did events like Northwestern University’s Summer Writers’ Conference and the CWA’s Let’s Just Write! Conference where we got to sell books to authors in the Chicago writing community.

Needless to say, 2020 has been different—but even if it hadn’t been, it was clear after last year that festivals and online sales alone would never turn this into a full-time business. (“You tend to win the game you’re playing,” someone else told Jerry last year, and that stuck with him; winning the festival game might be fun, but takes a lot of time and energy, so much so that it’s often distracted us from the bigger and more lucrative games.) And while we’re certainly looking forward to selling books face-to-face at festivals once all this is over, the bigger game is the regular book retail market. It’s a big enough game, in fact, that you need to be part of a team.

Like it or not, we can’t do everything, nor can our success ever be completely dependent on the fruits of our own labors; if we want to make money, other people have to make money, too. (There are perhaps fewer more pernicious myths than the American one of individual accomplishment, or the Ayn Randian submyth that it must happen through selfishness; our success is not only dependent upon our authors and their readers, but also on our suppliers and booksellers as well. Our independent bookstore friends need to make money, the book printers need to make money; like it or not, even Amazon needs to make money. And each offers something the others don’t, so it is in fact possible to support them all.) And yet we can’t build individual relationships with every independent bookstore on our own; while we’ve worked hard to get our books in Chicagoland indie bookstores, there are stores we’ve never been to in the area, to say nothing of the ones in the rest of the country; even going to bookseller’s conventions, one can only do so much.

The same goes for the online marketplace. IngramSpark and Amazon’s KDP platform have allowed us to sell books globally without having those bookstore relationships everywhere. We’ve sold books in every one of Amazon’s sales regions, and while the numbers are miniscule, it’s something that wouldn’t have been possible a few decades ago. Discoverability is a huge problem, though; everyone’s drowning in an ocean of content. (“Infinite content,” as the Arcade Fire put it, in a memorable phrase from an unmemorable album.) We’ve made a lot of connections on Twitter, but every author on Twitter is lowkey (or highkey) hawking their book, and since we sometimes buy those books and then don’t get around to reading them, we can only assume the same is happening on the other end. Even online book promo tools can only do so much; while we scored a BookBub promo deal for Joe Peterson’s Gunmetal Blue and sold more books in one day than we’ve sold in any other month, the deal was expensive and didn’t quite pay for itself. We got to see our KDP sales bar chart get really big, and then get really small again; we were hoping it would be some kind of permanent breakthrough, but our monthly sales numbers soon dropped back down to where they were. We’re grateful for the bump in sales and the new readers, but we simply couldn’t afford to grow sales for every title that way. It was exciting but not sustainable; we needed to do something else.

Enter PGW. There are a few distributors out there that we thought about approaching, but the ones in the Ingram Content Group were highest on our list; they have a pretty wide behind-the-scenes reach in bookstores. We have a certain amount of validation, which is important in this business. (Everyone needs to get validated at some level; everyone needs someone else to say, “This is worth checking out.” Books need blurbists, because blurbs are like eyebrows; you don’t always notice them when they’re there, but when they’re gone, things look weird. And publishers need distributors, because otherwise there’s not much separating us from any of the innumerable POD outfits that have sprung up around the globe. We’ve gotten some review attention from trade magazines and newspapers, but not nearly as much as we’d like; now that we have a distributor, we will, one hopes, end up getting a little more.)

More importantly, we’re working with a team. So rather than having to contact bookstores individually and beg them to stock our books, we can get them in front of PGW’s sales reps and in their catalogs, and have their sales reps hawking our books. And while the onboarding process was somewhat slow and deliberate (perhaps necessary, for both sides), the setup process has been pretty crisp and efficient. Before we signed an agreement, we had to tap our business development person on the shoulder (metaphorically and electronically) every so often to move the process along; now that everything’s signed, we have a dedicated account representative, and several sharp employees working behind the scenes to help us set up our titles, flesh out the metadata, and get all of our information flowing into every channel of the sales pipeline. Oftentimes now they’re tapping us on the shoulder, waiting for us to complete some task in the onboarding process, and when we do have questions or issues (figuring out how to get digital ARCs, making sure our name is listed on the overall list of presses, etc.), they’re addressed promptly and efficiently.

What kinds of sales will this lead to? It’s impossible to say, in the COVID-weakened world. But the revenue numbers PGW provided during the intake process that suggested we’d be able to grow our top-line revenues a fair amount, and wholesale sales for our recent fall titles suggest that may be happening. We are pitching our spring 2021 titles (Meiselman, The Pueblos, and Infinite Blues) to their sales reps this week; these will be the first books to get the full front-to-back full-cycle sales treatment. And if we can sell more books and keep costs more or less what they have been, we’ll be turning a much more decent profit. All of this is still a gamble, but it’s a fun gamble, and now we’ve got a seat at a bigger table. If we can make smart enough bets to stay there indefinitely, we’ll call that a win.

Oh! Bookstore folks, ordering information is as follows:

Distributed by Publishers Group West, An Ingram Brand

Submit orders to your sales representative or via IPS Cart on iPage

Order Phone: 866.400.5351 | Fax: 800.838.1149 | E-mail: ips@ingramcontent.com | IPS SAN: 6318630