By Hugh Gallagher
One subject I wanted to cover, that I am sure only a small percentage of people have the slightest interest in, is that of magazine distribution. I only broach the subject because I can remember some people thinking I was racking in the dough when at the end of my publishing career I was charging a whooping $6.95 for an issue of Draculina. Nowadays people are charging between $9.95 to $19.95 for a magazine. Who can justify these outlandish prices? Let me take you on a little Draculina distribution journey...
When I started my magazine adventure back in 1985 I had a dream of seeing Draculina on a newsstand, available for anyone to purchase. It would be several years before that dream would be realized as I was a working class boob with no money and a vivid imagination. After publishing Draculina as a fanzine off and on for many years, I decided to go into a full size magazine format and started back with issue #1. I knew nothing about distribution or even how magazines got to that sacred shelf space at my local drug store. I would learn process very slowly and painfully, much like Chinese water torture, and equally as painful.
One subject I wanted to cover, that I am sure only a small percentage of people have the slightest interest in, is that of magazine distribution. I only broach the subject because I can remember some people thinking I was racking in the dough when at the end of my publishing career I was charging a whooping $6.95 for an issue of Draculina. Nowadays people are charging between $9.95 to $19.95 for a magazine. Who can justify these outlandish prices? Let me take you on a little Draculina distribution journey...
When I started my magazine adventure back in 1985 I had a dream of seeing Draculina on a newsstand, available for anyone to purchase. It would be several years before that dream would be realized as I was a working class boob with no money and a vivid imagination. After publishing Draculina as a fanzine off and on for many years, I decided to go into a full size magazine format and started back with issue #1. I knew nothing about distribution or even how magazines got to that sacred shelf space at my local drug store. I would learn process very slowly and painfully, much like Chinese water torture, and equally as painful.
Yours truly holding the first issue and last issue of Draculina. Quite a change from beginning to end.
I won't go into all the printing issues I had with the first issue of the Draculina magazine, but simply stick to my distribution efforts. There was no distribution... I was solely mail-order, advertising first in Fangoria and also the Comics Buyers Guide (which by that time had been bought by Krause Publishing from creator Alan Light, turning it from a fun fan-ran newspaper into a money grubbing piece of crap). I would also get reviews (mostly bad) in papers like Screw Magazine, Magick Theatre, and other publications, which despite their efforts to kill me would simply rack up sales. I did get some positive press, but I always found something gratifying in publications that would attack Draculina, only to see their own publication go under due to lack of sales, as Draculina Publishing continued to prosper.
Fangoria ran a mail-order business called Fantaco and they were pretty much responsible selling out of issue #1 and #2 of Draculina fairly quick. They would contact me asking me to reprint the first two issues, which I declined as I always felt the magazine was getting better and I just wanted to keep improving it. Reprinting, in my mind, felt as if I was stepping backward. But, after issue 3, after selling exceedingly well and begging me to reprint, suddenly Fantaco quit ordering. I never got a reason why, but I believe some mother complained about catching her kid with a copy of Draculina. As always with the good old USA, gore and death will never be frowned on, but put any naked boobs in the mix and it must be shut down!
I went several issues relying on small ads in fanzines and a strong but small subscription base. I kept searching for a distributor and finally found my first in Capital City Distribution. CC (Capital City) refused me on several submissions but finally broke down and added me to their catalog and sales were good. CC was a direct distributor, in which to say, they sold mainly to comic stores and sales were final, there were no returns. I would have to supply CC with a description and cover art for an issue of Draculina three months before it was actually to be released. CC would put this into a catalog that was distributed to comic shops who would in turn made available or even sold the catalog to their customers. Customers would make their selections from this catalog, stores would place their orders, and CC would send the total orders to you. Once you received this purchase order you had a date that the product had to be delivered to CC's warehouse, after which you were paid 30 days later.
Now this sounds great but there were a few things that messed up this Shangri La. First off, I am more of an in-the-moment kind of person. Planning what I am going to do three months down the road was no easy task. And it wasn't always easy to get people to make definite commitments so I didn't want to promise something that may fall through and piss people off. So planning issues was a major stumbling block for me, but I did do it with little to no repercussions. The other thing was, I had no money. So I had to shell out the money to get the issue printed and then 30 days after CC received their copies, they would send me a check. And that check was for half the cover price! So, issue 9 had the cover price of $3.50, I was getting $1.75 a copy plus I was having to pay the printing costs and the shipping costs to get it to them! And believe it or not, CC was one of the best companies to deal with!
Sales picked up and I was happy. But I still searched for more distribution. There was one more bigger direct distributor called Diamond Distribution. Diamond was top dog, and they continually refused to take on Draculina until issue #14 when I added the color cover. Then Diamond became one of my biggest distributors. They were set up in the same fashion as CC, with one vital difference... they only paid 40% of the cover! And that is if you waited the full 30 days to get your money, they had other deals where they would send you your money in 10 days but paid you even less! Once again, you were paying printing costs and shipping them the magazines and waiting 30 days to get 40% of the cover price.
Another smaller mail-order business I dealt with was Bud Plant. I can't remember for sure but I believe they only paid 40% of the cover as well, plus they bought in much smaller quantities as their distribution division had been bought out by Diamond in 1988.
I'd like to point out the difference between CC and Diamond. I loved CC. Although losing 50% of the cover seemed like a lot, they bought a lot and were very prompt in paying. Plus CC had a staff that seemed like a bunch of fan boys that happen to work of a distribution company. It was nothing for me to get requests for back issues from workers wanting to complete their personal collections. They enjoyed what they did and weren't looking to screw anyone over. Diamond, on the other hand, seemed like corporate creeps. They would gig a publishers anywhere they could. They knew the small guys had a tough time covering their printing costs and shipping costs and would offer little deals in which you would totally get screwed over. I guess no one was putting a gun to the publishers head, but it really felt like they were ready to take advantage at any time they could. Luckily for me I had a good relationship with my printers that would offer me up 30 days credit and I had an American Express card that had no limit, so when my five figure printing bills came in I could make it work.
Fangoria ran a mail-order business called Fantaco and they were pretty much responsible selling out of issue #1 and #2 of Draculina fairly quick. They would contact me asking me to reprint the first two issues, which I declined as I always felt the magazine was getting better and I just wanted to keep improving it. Reprinting, in my mind, felt as if I was stepping backward. But, after issue 3, after selling exceedingly well and begging me to reprint, suddenly Fantaco quit ordering. I never got a reason why, but I believe some mother complained about catching her kid with a copy of Draculina. As always with the good old USA, gore and death will never be frowned on, but put any naked boobs in the mix and it must be shut down!
I went several issues relying on small ads in fanzines and a strong but small subscription base. I kept searching for a distributor and finally found my first in Capital City Distribution. CC (Capital City) refused me on several submissions but finally broke down and added me to their catalog and sales were good. CC was a direct distributor, in which to say, they sold mainly to comic stores and sales were final, there were no returns. I would have to supply CC with a description and cover art for an issue of Draculina three months before it was actually to be released. CC would put this into a catalog that was distributed to comic shops who would in turn made available or even sold the catalog to their customers. Customers would make their selections from this catalog, stores would place their orders, and CC would send the total orders to you. Once you received this purchase order you had a date that the product had to be delivered to CC's warehouse, after which you were paid 30 days later.
Now this sounds great but there were a few things that messed up this Shangri La. First off, I am more of an in-the-moment kind of person. Planning what I am going to do three months down the road was no easy task. And it wasn't always easy to get people to make definite commitments so I didn't want to promise something that may fall through and piss people off. So planning issues was a major stumbling block for me, but I did do it with little to no repercussions. The other thing was, I had no money. So I had to shell out the money to get the issue printed and then 30 days after CC received their copies, they would send me a check. And that check was for half the cover price! So, issue 9 had the cover price of $3.50, I was getting $1.75 a copy plus I was having to pay the printing costs and the shipping costs to get it to them! And believe it or not, CC was one of the best companies to deal with!
Sales picked up and I was happy. But I still searched for more distribution. There was one more bigger direct distributor called Diamond Distribution. Diamond was top dog, and they continually refused to take on Draculina until issue #14 when I added the color cover. Then Diamond became one of my biggest distributors. They were set up in the same fashion as CC, with one vital difference... they only paid 40% of the cover! And that is if you waited the full 30 days to get your money, they had other deals where they would send you your money in 10 days but paid you even less! Once again, you were paying printing costs and shipping them the magazines and waiting 30 days to get 40% of the cover price.
Another smaller mail-order business I dealt with was Bud Plant. I can't remember for sure but I believe they only paid 40% of the cover as well, plus they bought in much smaller quantities as their distribution division had been bought out by Diamond in 1988.
I'd like to point out the difference between CC and Diamond. I loved CC. Although losing 50% of the cover seemed like a lot, they bought a lot and were very prompt in paying. Plus CC had a staff that seemed like a bunch of fan boys that happen to work of a distribution company. It was nothing for me to get requests for back issues from workers wanting to complete their personal collections. They enjoyed what they did and weren't looking to screw anyone over. Diamond, on the other hand, seemed like corporate creeps. They would gig a publishers anywhere they could. They knew the small guys had a tough time covering their printing costs and shipping costs and would offer little deals in which you would totally get screwed over. I guess no one was putting a gun to the publishers head, but it really felt like they were ready to take advantage at any time they could. Luckily for me I had a good relationship with my printers that would offer me up 30 days credit and I had an American Express card that had no limit, so when my five figure printing bills came in I could make it work.
Yours truly again at an early convention in the 90s, this was before my dealings with newstand distribution. I was young, had hair, and was happy with the world. Look at the the first photo to where I am bald, pissed at the world, and no longer have a publishing empire.
But even with CC and Diamond I was getting in comic stores, but how do you get into regular stores? Welcome to newsstand distribution. At least with direct distribution you knew what you signed up for and you did get paid, newsstand distribution was a completely different animal I dealt with a few of them, the last being RCS which was ordering thousands of issues, of which only a small percentage were ever paid for. See if you can follow along on how it worked: Let's say you have this great new magazine and RCS wants it. You send them X amount of copies of issue 1 and they distribute it to all kinds of big book store chains, newsstands, etc. Okay, you paid to print those copies and paid to ship it to them, you have not seen a dime yet but there is big promise. I mean, once people see this everyone will buy! Now issue #2 comes out, RCS increases their order and once again you print it, ship it out and now you are holding the bill for two issues and have yet to see a dime... but wait, there will be a big check coming soon (you are promised). Now, issue #3 comes out, RCS increases their order again, you reluctantly send it out. You see, unlike direct distribution, newsstand distribution works like this: issue #1 is sent out to the retailers, yea, it is on the stands. Then issue #2 is sent out to the retailers and this allows the retailer to return any unsold issue #1's for credit. So, they send in a check only for the issues they actually sold and return any unsold ones. RCS has a lot of paper work to do so they can't really get all this processed until after they receive issue #3. Therefore, you are now three issues deep in printing costs and shipping costs before you see any money for issue #1.
Now this is the funny part. They do not send you back those unsold issues, they send you an “affidavit” stating how many copies were returned and destroyed, and attach a check for what was allegedly sold. You could give them them 5,000 copies and they could pay you for 500 and claim the the other 4,500 were destroyed. I can remember when I was kid going to a place called the Bargain Center. They had stuff that looked like they fell off the back of a truck, as they had a real array of items for a brief period of time at really cheap prices, but you were lucky to find the same thing twice. My favorite section was their magazine section. Here you would find three magazines in a bag for .25 and I was in heaven. Copies of Scream, Psycho, Withes Tales, Castle of Frankenstein, bundled together in on bag for less than the costs of one issue. The big problem was a lot of the magazines had the title cut off the cover. I never could understand that, what nutcase was running through the magazine store slicing the titles off of magazines? But I was benefiting because they were jamming these defective publications into a bag and selling them to me dirt cheap and a lot of times a perfectly good issue would be in the mix... little did I know these were the unsold newsstand distributor publications. In earlier times the distributor would cut the title off of any unsold magazine and then return these to the publisher stating the magazine was returned and destroyed, the cut off title being the proof. I'm sure the publisher had no idea they were shoving the remainders in a bag and discounting them at places like Bargain Center. By the time I was in the biz I wasn't even getting the title, I was just getting a piece of paper staying X amount of copies were destroyed... or being sold in bulk to Crazy Gene's Magazine Emporium... either way I wasn't seeing a dime.
There was one small newsstand distributor called Desert Moon Periodicals that would send me back any unsold issues. I appreciated that, but I literally had to hound them to get paid. I would refuse to send them any more magazines until I got a check, which usually worked, but it really got tiring trying to chase down the money. What pisses me off most is they talked me out of the last 800 copies I had of Pinup #8 and then went bankrupt a couple months later. I literally have two copies of #8 in my possession. 800 magazines that I would have sold at $7 a piece retail... good by $5,600!
The number of newsstand distributors that went under owing me thousands is ridiculous. But getting your publication out to the public is hard work and it never got easier. In 1995 Marvel Comics started their own distribution company Heroes World Distribution which stole a lot of money from Capital City and Diamond in sales. In an attempt to survive both companies started signing exclusive contracts with publishers to run the other distributor out of business. Diamond got DC comics and Archie leaving CC with much smaller publishers and running them out of business. Facing possible bankruptcy CC was bought out by Diamond in 1996 giving them an almost monopoly on the direct distribution market. Of course Marvel's self distribution idea died in 97 and Diamond became a powerhouse.
All of these changes truly affected the small publisher, now 40% of the cover was the best we could do and we had to deal with the shady newsstand distributors on a daily basis attempting to track down money. My continual calls to RCS were always greeted with optimism in how things were looking up, but the checks were always small in comparison to what was handed to them absolutely free. One of my calls was met with true honestly when they told me, “none of these magazines we distribute make money, you need to sell advertising, that is where the money is made, not on magazine sales.” It was after that that I cut off all newsstand sales. I had sold advertising but I did not want to commit myself to doing nothing but trying to sell ad space to make my magazine work. I wanted to work on the magazine. I did not trust this affidavit they sent me and I did not believe that the system was set up fairly or with any checks and balances. It was Thunderdome!
I even attempted to start my own distribution company in the early 2000s. I had rented a warehouse with office space and set up some deals with various small publishers. I sent a catalog to stores and received orders, I then had to deal with collecting from stores... My god, does anyone pay for what they buy in business deals. I quickly got turned off on this and just continued to grow my own mail order business selling my own many publications and magazines and books from other small publishers. I included a large number of movies, books and other unique items. It was literally my mail-order business that kept me going those last few years. And then the Internet grew... and that is another story altogether.
So, when you see a magazine with a $9.95 cover price (which is insane), chances are that publisher is only seeing a small fraction of that price come back to him or her, and I am sure they have to fight for every dime they get. Any publication surviving in todays world has be a real fighter, or a glutton for punishment.
Now this is the funny part. They do not send you back those unsold issues, they send you an “affidavit” stating how many copies were returned and destroyed, and attach a check for what was allegedly sold. You could give them them 5,000 copies and they could pay you for 500 and claim the the other 4,500 were destroyed. I can remember when I was kid going to a place called the Bargain Center. They had stuff that looked like they fell off the back of a truck, as they had a real array of items for a brief period of time at really cheap prices, but you were lucky to find the same thing twice. My favorite section was their magazine section. Here you would find three magazines in a bag for .25 and I was in heaven. Copies of Scream, Psycho, Withes Tales, Castle of Frankenstein, bundled together in on bag for less than the costs of one issue. The big problem was a lot of the magazines had the title cut off the cover. I never could understand that, what nutcase was running through the magazine store slicing the titles off of magazines? But I was benefiting because they were jamming these defective publications into a bag and selling them to me dirt cheap and a lot of times a perfectly good issue would be in the mix... little did I know these were the unsold newsstand distributor publications. In earlier times the distributor would cut the title off of any unsold magazine and then return these to the publisher stating the magazine was returned and destroyed, the cut off title being the proof. I'm sure the publisher had no idea they were shoving the remainders in a bag and discounting them at places like Bargain Center. By the time I was in the biz I wasn't even getting the title, I was just getting a piece of paper staying X amount of copies were destroyed... or being sold in bulk to Crazy Gene's Magazine Emporium... either way I wasn't seeing a dime.
There was one small newsstand distributor called Desert Moon Periodicals that would send me back any unsold issues. I appreciated that, but I literally had to hound them to get paid. I would refuse to send them any more magazines until I got a check, which usually worked, but it really got tiring trying to chase down the money. What pisses me off most is they talked me out of the last 800 copies I had of Pinup #8 and then went bankrupt a couple months later. I literally have two copies of #8 in my possession. 800 magazines that I would have sold at $7 a piece retail... good by $5,600!
The number of newsstand distributors that went under owing me thousands is ridiculous. But getting your publication out to the public is hard work and it never got easier. In 1995 Marvel Comics started their own distribution company Heroes World Distribution which stole a lot of money from Capital City and Diamond in sales. In an attempt to survive both companies started signing exclusive contracts with publishers to run the other distributor out of business. Diamond got DC comics and Archie leaving CC with much smaller publishers and running them out of business. Facing possible bankruptcy CC was bought out by Diamond in 1996 giving them an almost monopoly on the direct distribution market. Of course Marvel's self distribution idea died in 97 and Diamond became a powerhouse.
All of these changes truly affected the small publisher, now 40% of the cover was the best we could do and we had to deal with the shady newsstand distributors on a daily basis attempting to track down money. My continual calls to RCS were always greeted with optimism in how things were looking up, but the checks were always small in comparison to what was handed to them absolutely free. One of my calls was met with true honestly when they told me, “none of these magazines we distribute make money, you need to sell advertising, that is where the money is made, not on magazine sales.” It was after that that I cut off all newsstand sales. I had sold advertising but I did not want to commit myself to doing nothing but trying to sell ad space to make my magazine work. I wanted to work on the magazine. I did not trust this affidavit they sent me and I did not believe that the system was set up fairly or with any checks and balances. It was Thunderdome!
I even attempted to start my own distribution company in the early 2000s. I had rented a warehouse with office space and set up some deals with various small publishers. I sent a catalog to stores and received orders, I then had to deal with collecting from stores... My god, does anyone pay for what they buy in business deals. I quickly got turned off on this and just continued to grow my own mail order business selling my own many publications and magazines and books from other small publishers. I included a large number of movies, books and other unique items. It was literally my mail-order business that kept me going those last few years. And then the Internet grew... and that is another story altogether.
So, when you see a magazine with a $9.95 cover price (which is insane), chances are that publisher is only seeing a small fraction of that price come back to him or her, and I am sure they have to fight for every dime they get. Any publication surviving in todays world has be a real fighter, or a glutton for punishment.