We had a bit of a blow last Friday, as the company that distributes our books to bookshops in Australia, the Scribo Group, announced it was closing down with almost immediate effect. No distributor = no sales, so we are delighted to secure the services of Dennis Jones and Associates to distribute our books as of 1 August 2011. Dennis and his team, who are based in Victoria, will start representing our September list nationally with immediate effect.

We’d actually been distributed by Scribo and its predecessor Tower Books for a decade, so it was a shock to finally have to move. We’d like to thank all the staff at Scribo/Tower Books for their support and commitment to our books and wish them well for the future. Sadly, 50 jobs will go as a result of the Scribo closure.

Changing distributor is a big deal and no publisher does it lightly. It can take a long time for all bookshops and library suppliers to learn about the change and start ordering from the new distributor. There are also a lot of costs in physically moving thousands of books, advertising the changes and waiting for final reconciliation of your accounts with the old distributor, which can take a while. All this can hurt the cashflow of a small business considerably. Fingers crossed, this move won’t hurt too much, because we have new releases and reprints in transit from our printers as I write (all currently headed to the wrong warehouse in the wrong state, I might add! – there’s another task).

We’ve known Dennis Jones and his very experienced team for years and they’re a good fit for our list. We’ll also be joining some other notable local Australian publishers there, which will be great.