Trip to Stylus Publishing, Inc.

Two weeks ago, I had to travel out to Sterling, VA to visit with our US distributor/marketer, Stylus Publishing, Inc. I had never been to a distribution warehouse before and figured many of you hadn't either, so I figured I'd share a few pictures and insights.

Basically, the warehouse holds all of our books (both Earthscan and RFF Press) and is separated by their own in-house schematic (surprisingly, its sorted by BIN number, and not titles, etc). It is absolutely HUGE and ridiculously organized. Note: we share the space with a few other publishers (for example, Stylus has its own imprint and houses its books in this warehouse as well).

When an order comes in, its contents are gathered and brought to the back of the warehouse for packing and processing. This is the area of most activity in the warehouse as not only are orders being processed to go out, but also being processed as returns are coming in (depressing thought). The workers processing the returns separate "damaged" books by publisher and places them in giant individual boxes. Our marketing rep goes in every day to the Earthscan damaged box and tries to find homes for the ones that are hardly scratched. As she told me "every book needs a home, just like puppies." Made me smile.

I was thrilled to discover that Stylus shares their administrative space with Potomac Books (formerly Brassey's Inc.), one of the leading independent publishers of American history, military history, etc. (You may remember Bob telling us his agent had been in talks with Potomac Books about possibly acquiring his novel about platoon leaders experiences in Vietnam.) I own may of their books myself, and was chided for "geeking out" in my excitement over getting to meet a few members of their staff. I got to meet the marketing manager and was given an advanced copy of their upcoming catalogue...pretty cool!

All in all...I had a great trip. Not only did I sit in on a lot of meetings and learn Stylus' role in marketing and distributing our books, but I made a few fabulous contacts (isn't it always about networking anyways?)