- - - - Until recently, our books were distributed by Berkeley's Publishers Group West (PGW). They made it possible for small publishers—such as Soft Skull, House of Anansi, and many others—to get their books into stores all over the country. Not only that: they also collected receivables, and paid all their publishers on time. In 2002, they were bought by a larger company called Advanced Marketing Services (AMS). This didn't seem to affect the publishers, because PGW's services remained the same. At least, it was all OK until a few weeks ago, when AMS declared bankruptcy. This meant that all outstanding debts were frozen by the courts. This was particularly bad timing, since those debts covered all books shipped from September through December—fall books, gift season—the majority of any publisher's yearly sales. Since the bankruptcy filing, there's been a lot of uncertainty, hearsay, and fine print. PGW is a great organization, and its employees have been energetic and straightforward through this saga. Recently, another distributor, Perseus, stepped in with an offer to take over many PGW accounts, and this appears to be the best way out of a bad situation. How does this affect McSweeney's? We were owed quite a lot of money when the bankruptcy was filed, and, given that we are very small and operate in a hand-to-mouth fashion, this is a problem. Perseus has offered to pay 70 cents on the dollar for the debts owed to PGW's publishers. This is worse than getting everything but a lot better than getting nothing. So, practically speaking, 30 percent of all of our revenue from the past four months (and 30 percent of the revenue earned over the same period by all the other small publishers who work with PGW) is gone. Sadly, this includes quite a lot of money that was generated by What Is the What for the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. Despite this setback, there are still significant funds going to Valentino's foundation, and McSweeney's in general will muddle through this difficult time. Many other small publishers are in a similar situation or worse, and all could use your help. From here on out, the slate will be clean again and you can count on the standard percentage of your book-buying dollars to go to us publishers. What's that you say? Would it help for you all to buy books now, during this lean time? Well, sure—it would. We and all the others in this situation do best with these direct transactions, and we promise to deliver top-notch books in return. To read an article about the situation, click here. To order books from us, click here. Soft Skull has a book-subscription deal. And we're sure plenty of others do as well—just look around.
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