New Strategy

We are very pleased to announce that Torrey House Press is joining ranks with Minnesota based  Consortium Books Sales and Distribution in order to gain a greater distribution of our titles.  This change marks the end of a one year experiment in an alternative approach to book publishing that met with mixed success.

We published our first three titles in a manner known as print on demand (POD).  In the usual way we made contracts with our authors, developed and edited manuscripts with them and had the book interior and covers laid out and designed.  However, when it came to printing, we uploaded electronic covers and interiors to Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Group in Tennessee.  Books were printed individually when they were ordered instead of being printed in offset print runs and stored in a warehouse.  Lightning Source is both printer and distributor and through them we were able to make our books available to independent bookstores as well as online at places like Barnes and Noble and Amazon.  At Amazon, for instance, someone in their Prime program could order a book that had not yet been printed on Monday and receive it on Wednesday.  Modern day amazing.  It was all good except for one thing: it wasn’t enough to get books into the hands of more than a few hundred readers.

It turns out that books need to be hand sold.  It’s not enough to have social media set up, a web site, a mailing list, online listings, a few good reviews and word of mouth.  You might think that would be enough, and we were hoping.  But books need more of a nudge than that, particularly literary fiction and nonfiction.  Getting our handsome books in print the way we did established us as serious and got Torrey House to the position where a full service distributor like Consortium would take us on.  By this fall, Consortium will act as our much larger representative to the book trade—including bookstores, chains, wholesalers, libraries and specialty markets, providing sales and distribution through their in-house and independent representatives.  It’s a much broader reach than we could make alone.

For Torrey House this means stepping up and forward toward convention.  We will now be doing the usual offset print runs, perhaps in both hard cover and trade paperback, storing them in a warehouse and having them broadly distributed in the United States and Canada.  And hoping they sell.  Conventional publishers are struggling today, as everyone knows.  By nurturing our passion and keeping our overhead low we suspect that, with Consortium’s help, we can make this thing work.  Wish us luck.