Consolidators/Fulfillment List??

[Polaris]

Greetings,

I would like to ask that we start a list of consolidators/distributors here.  I am asking this for selfish reasons (I am trying to find good ones), but I also think it could be a big help to other new game publishers.

I know of the following:

1.  Eureka (from Gold Rush Games).  The GRG site is at www.goldrushgames.com  Mark Arsenault is a huge friend to the small press/publisher

2.  Key 20 Direct:  www.key20direct.com  I have heard some great things about them.

3.  Rapid POD:  www.rapidpod.com  This company is brand new, and is having a lot of difficulty with communications.  While there have been some complaints mentioned about them on the GPA list, it is likely a result of them being new.

4.  Impressions Advertising:  Aldo (the owner of the company) has stated that he is full of clients and is not accepting any others now.

*Please* add to the list if you are able.

Thanks in advance for your help! :)

Polaris

[Eero Tuovinen]

Check out "Resource Library" link at the top of the page. I should think that these belong there.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Eero's right that we do offer a list of all sorts of resources, and that you should check that out.

However, the fulfillment topic ought to be reviewed in discussion once in a while, so let's do that. Eero's own Arkenstone Publishing (see his sig) qualifies, and I also direct people's attention to Indie Press Revolution; however, note that these companies do not accept blind submissions.

Any others that ought to be considered at the moment? Tundra Sales Organization is defunct, I think, and the Sphinx Group has turned to mainly non-RPG clients.

Best,
Ron

edited to fix the link

[Eero Tuovinen]

Hey, that's true, I'm a distributor! Didn't realize it before, but yeah! Most everything we sell direct, but there's a couple of Finnish rpg retailers that sample indie games now and then. We've sold the stuff to them for about the same we paid for it ourselves to encourage the practice. Now at least one store seems to methodically order a couple of each game we take on our lists...

Our main purpose, however, is to be a retail-level importer: people who don't want or can't buy direct from America can get the same stuff from us. So it's perhaps a little misleading to consider us consolidators/distributors, when 90% of our sales are retail. Or what do I know, I have a rather fuzzy understanding of the American industry scene overall. What do these words even mean, exactly? What's a consolidator? Distributor I think I know about.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I did not use the word distributor. I very specifically did not say that, and I disavow it 100% now. Time to define a few things.

CONSOLIDATOR: makes multiple titles from different publishers available for sale. This is the most general term and full of all sorts of options and variable; without further specifying, it doesn't mean anything.

DISTRIBUTOR: a consolidator who (a) buys the game books from the publishers and (b) advertises broadly to retailers in general, selling the game books to them.

FULFILLMENT HOUSE: also "warehouser," basically a storage space and invoice handler for the publisher, sometimes acts as "agent" in terms of specific customers. A form of consolidation because it services more than one publisher.

Most fulfillment houses will sell direct to individuals as well as to stores, and most distributors are limited specifically to store sales.

Some few fulfillment houses are also distributors; for example, I think Osseum buys the games from the publishers, whereas Key 20 does not. (I use Key 20 - the book is owned by me and no one else until it gets to the store.)

In my view, fulfillment houses are a necessity and can often be very positive in terms of publisher mutualism. Also in my view, I do not consider traditional distribution (as described above) to be positive except in certain special cases. (Adept Press has managed to find such a case, in terms of carving out its own economic role.)

Eero, you are definitely a consolidator, but you are not quite fitting into the distributor model because stores are not the primary customer for you. It's a little tricky, though, because (as I recall) you pay up-front for the books - I think that's a feature of the international nature of Arkenstone, at least it is in the case of my interaction with you.

There are tons and tons of further variables to understand about distribution (in the broader sense of the term), such as returnability, percentages, and many more, but I want to get some ground rules laid for how we're going to talk about it.

Best,
Ron

[Eero Tuovinen]

Thanks Ron, that helped. The Consolidator definition was new to me. Of course I knew the etymology and common use of the word, but that doesn't help with exact nuances. I imagined that it's a subcategory of "folks who buy stuff", but apparently it is the category. And yeah, we pay up front. I've always thought of Arkenstone as just a publisher/retailer, making use of modern web-sales technology to make available a public service to Finnish rpgers. The fact that we're in Finland and practically the only local source of these games here is just a coincidence. Retail is retail, whether you do it through a store or a web-store.

An American fulfillment house, on the other hand, is clearly something I'm going to need when I finish some game for international markets. So obviously I'm thinking they're just a great idea and a necessity in the (hopefully) opening future of international culture. In Finland we don't really have separate distributors, because Finnish retailers buy their stuff from American ones. This of course makes for stores that are little copies of American FLGStores...

But anyways, do we have a topic here, actually? I'd personally be interested in hearing concrete stuff about all these distributors and fulfillment houses and their business practices, but it'd have to be real numbers and such, not generalities. Anybody with experience on the GRG program, for example? Also, new analyzes about the state of the market and industry are always a treat to read. The basic stuff is still in pretty good memory from threads a couple of years back, so I at least don't need a rehash. How about it Polaris? Will it be the basics of returnability and other contract points, or do you have some specific interest in these services? Actually, more interestingly... what kind of services you're needing/expecting out of your consolidator? I should think that that would be more helpful than just listing everybody.

I don't think that I myself have anything useful to add, though. I know nothing much about the American industry scene, for understandable reasons. I don't even use or need distributors. I'm sure that there's some interesting story to why there is such a distributor system at all (no doubt it has something to do with the hobby store system of '70s), but I can say that I haven't needed it for anything myself.

[Mike Holmes]

James with RPG Mall and RPG Now, etc, has several of these services, doesn't he? Not sure which definition he qualifies as, but he seems to offer a number of options.

Mike