What's the Difference Between Publishing and Distribution?

Most people are only familiar with the first and last stages of books: the writing and the selling. In between are several other steps that most people don't know a whole lot about. Agents represent authors in negotiations with publishing companies and finding an agent is usually the next step after writing a book. Agents represent authors with publishers and negotiate a sale. For more info about christian book distributors, follow the link. When the publisher acquires a book, they then take care of the editing and design elements and have the books printed. This is the actual publishing of the book, but if the process stopped there, the books would never find their way to stores.

That aspect of the book business is done by distributors. While publishing and distribution can be done by the same company, they don't have to be. Some publishers are also distributors while others focus on buying and producing books and leave the distribution to specialized book distributors.

Distribution involves getting retail stores to purchase copies of the book for sale to the public. Distributors purchase books at a discounted rate from the publishers. Follow the link for more information on obtaining a book printer. The retailers buy the books from the distributors, again at a discounted rate. The bookstores can then sell the books at full retail price to consumers and make a profit. Many bookstores have deals with publishers and distributors that allow them to return unsold merchandize. These books either get returned for redistribution elsewhere or destroyed.

Have you ever read the first page of a paperback book and wondered what the warning about buying a book without a cover was about? That has to do with one of the methods used to return unsold books. The purpose of this was to save everyone on the cost of shipping whole books back and forth, not simply an act of destruction. The warning is a way to keep retailers from removing the covers of the books, getting a refund, and then selling the book anyway.

E-books use a different model. An e-book produced by a publishing company will still go through editing and design. There is no printing, though.

There are different ways to distribute e-books, including both open models that provide free books and closed models that use copyright protection to limit who can download the files. Either way, there is no third party distributor to provide the properly formatted e-books to retailers. Learn more about the professionals at Book Masters. Instead, the retailers can simply provide the e-books themselves. This is true of both traditionally published and self-published works.