Thread by @rohadi

Here's my 🧵 I mentioned yesterday on how Canadian authors, especially in niche industries like Christianity, are at the mercy of a handful of distributors who aren't equipped to match a rapidly changing industry.

As you know, #WhenWeBelong 'officially' launched last week. /

The book was printed a month early, so orders were shipped early if you bought direct from the publisher. But when you buy from a retailer, either Chapters or a small bookstore, you're dependent on 1-3 (usually 1) distributor.

Distributors control availability. In Canada, that's Ingram, @parasourcecom , and Word Alive, (Amazon does their own thing).

My book sold out on Weds everywhere incl. Amazon. Sounds great right? Except the distributors didn't bring in remotely enough. How did they miss so bad?

This part is a guess, but @parasourcecom relies on author popularity/name recognition. They've never heard of Rohadi. Strike one. They also go by early orders. Since I"m small, I sent most ppl to the publisher direct. The rest hit up Amazon and Chapters. So they didn't get a full

picture of demand. But distributors didn't even meet pre-order demand. Folks are still waiting on orders from a month ago!

There are obvious disconnections in the distribution business model in an industry where the main competitor (Amazon)...

have forecasting tools and distribution at their disposal evidenced by the fact Amazon filled Canadian demand gap the fastest (it's now in stock).

Which sucks because most authors hate Amazon for ruining the book industry by eating margins for everyone. But their tech is winning

But distributors aren't helping themselves by only selling the latest mugs or top selling books. I mean I GET why they aren't going to carry too many books with limited space. But my publisher was pretty clear a Canadian author was publishing months in advance and to prepare.

They (Parasource and Word Alive) didn't .

So where do we go from here?

My book is still unavailable everywhere but Amazon b/c the 'bottleneck' is the distributor, and there's no mechanism to get them to buy more, EXCEPT

Order more books from your local bookstore!

They can backorder with Parasource (Ingram has 100 copies coming) and if enough backorders come through, maybe they'll fill those orders sooner rather than whenever.

I apologize to Canadian readers who are still waiting for books. You can still order direct from the publisher, from Amazon, eventually from Chapters (but you can't even backorder with them), or directly from me.

I promise, the book is worth the wait.

// END RANT HERE

Which you can find here, of course.

shop.rohadi.com

Of note, this is a distinct problem in Canada. The USA has no such issue. I assume other markets like Australia are similar to Canada.