>>I can tell you that the cost of doing business with B&N is quite high, in terms of discount structure and distribution issues.
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>Ed;
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>We had a computer book store named Computer Literacy, here in Silicon Valley. They were the largest source of computer books for professionals in the valley with an outstanding selection. They even cattied "Hackers Guide", etc. They carried Visual FoxPro Advisor at there three stores. Then two stores, one and now none! A sign of the times and Barnes and Nobel keeps churning along.
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B&N is a tough business to deal with. Although they now use a distributor to deal with many small publishers (Koen), it was cost-prohibitive for niche marketplace operations to deal with them - in many case, you'd have to ship stock directly to hundreds of different locations, all billed through a central operation, except when a store made specail orders, which had to be billed separately; the nature of the business required open-ended returns acceptance, they were slow to pay, and would often apply credits in advance of shipping returns, or apply credits from one store to pay bills from another, or from the central account. It's a nightmarish situation, and having spent over 10 years in the business, I could well appreciate why Advisor might choose not to do business directly with them.

Dealing with the large distribution operations in the publishing industry is a challenge; I know of many publishers who have chosen to forego sales through the chains or offerings through large operations like Ingram and Amazon because the cost of administration exceeds the revenue gained. If people want your product badly enough, they'll buy it direct from you; it's the bookstores who drive the distribution operation madness. They don't want to deal with hundreds or thousands of different publishers, or try to figure out who to return something to; they'd much rather deal with a single large operation such as Ingram with an open returns policy (they'll take back anything from anyone, whether Ingram sold it to them in the first place, unless it's clearly marked as a remainder or something similar). They'd rather deal with a couple of distributors for the bulk of their purchasing, especially for mass market publications that they stock on speculation of sales.

Dealing with Advisor or Hentzenwerke or someone like that for the individual bookseller is a headache, and they push the publisher into dealing with the large distributors on the promise of increased sales volume. The publisher then discovers the 'joys' of dealing with these guys. There's nothing like being told that the distributor is withholding a part of what they owe you against 'expected future returns', and then having them apply credit memos for returns the moment they decide they might want to reduce the stock on your product. I've seen situations where the distributors played games like returning 1,000 assorted copies of books from dozens of locations (taking the credit to offset their payable) and then placing an order for -exactly- what they've put in for returns a couple of days later, so that they can extend their credit terms for another 120 days or so. < mumble > (something nasty about creative accounting practices) < groan >.

If you want the magazine on the shelf, convince the store to stock it directly from the publisher, because it may not be feasible to deal with large-scale distribution. There are plenty of VFP books that haven't sold as many total copies as there are Barnes & Noble and Borders outlet stores combined...

>By the way I have ordered a number of computer books during the last 6 years from B&N and have never had one arrive at either of the two stores in my area. Trying to fill customers orders is a joke. Better to find another source like I did.
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>Things are not too good in Silicon Valley! Business is bad and service is worse!
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I deal with niche publishers; if you happen to know of one that's having problems with their order processing and supply chain, I know where they might be able to find some software that could help...for a price, of course! < BEG >