American Bungalow Magazine - The Magazine published in the interest of preserving and restoring the modest American 20th Century Home, the Bungalow, and the rich lifestyle that it affords.

Those of you who customarily pick up your copy of American Bungalow at one of the Border’s Books stores will have to look elsewhere for issue #62. Recent circumstances have forced us to discontinue shipments of our magazine to Borders (along with Borders Express and Waldenbooks) until we are certain that we will eventually be paid for magazines sold there.

A couple years ago, in the spirit of big box marketing, Borders made the decision to deal exclusively with Source Interlink, billionaire Ron Burkle’s venture into the murky world of magazine distribution.

On April 27, 2009, Source Interlink notified us that they had filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. We have been assured that the move is strictly a plan of reorganization, but since we were already in discussions with Source’s legal department regarding payment for magazines ordered over the years, we are unwilling to send more shipments until the situation with the sole supplier to Borders stabilizes, if it ever does. Also, dire predictions about the future of Borders itself are not encouraging.

For a small magazine like American Bungalow, working with the big magazine distributors is a challenge even under the best of circumstances. Our contract with Source, for instance, requires them to make a settlement payment 210 days after the subsequent issue goes on sale. As a quarterly publication, that means we cannot expect full payment for our fractional share of the money from issues sold until 300 days after they appear on the newsstand, and then we must take the distributor’s word for the number of magazines actually sold. With back issues worth $10 each, it always hurts to learn that tens of thousands of unsold copies of American Bungalow have been sent to a paper recycler (distributor Anderson News implies an annual income of over $11 million from sales of unsold magazine to pulp buyers). Unlike these big waste generators, the small magazine distributors must rely on efficiency and quality of service to stay in business. Many of the small shops and magazine distributors, the ones whose owners we often talk to on a first name basis, buy directly from us and return unsold copies for credit.

This mismatch of business philosophies is nothing new. In the 1998 movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” the systematic destruction of Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) small, family-owned book shop by big box bookstore owner Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) comes to a Hollywood happy ending when the two owners fall in love. But even in the movie, Kelly’s intimate boutique, The Shop Around The Corner, fades into memory while its customers flock to the impersonal aisles of Fox Books. Perhaps the best summation of the inevitable event was delivered by Kelly, who laments, “People always say that change is a good thing, but what it really means is that something that you didn’t want to happen, has happened.”

As we all know, we live in a time of change, and most of the change lately has been about saving big guys from their own sins by getting little guys to pay for bailing them out. Our magazine has invested all we dare to in this instance. But don’t worry, stores like Barnes and Noble, Amazon and countless small “shops around the corner” will continue to offer American Bungalow. If you need to inspect before you buy, please patronize your local bookstore.

Better yet, we hope you’ll help eliminate all the distribution waste and support American Bungalow directly by simply subscribing!

-John Brinkmann

This entry was posted on Friday, May 29th, 2009 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Bungalow Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.