You may. In large part, it will depend upon the books you publish.
NB: If you use a “self-publishing company,” vanity press, POD publisher, or subsidy publisher, NONE of the following applies. You aren’t the publisher, and the book trade isn’t likely to be interested. No matter how good your book is.
Bookstores can’t afford to buy directly from small presses for routine stocking. They have to go through wholesalers or distributors. If you want your books on bookstore shelves, you’re more likely to get them there through a distributor.
Similarly, large wholesalers can’t afford to deal with tens of thousands of tiny publishers. If your sales are less than $100,000 per year, after all discounts and returns, you need a distributor (or a fulfillment house that gets you into Ingram) to get you into this channel.
The next reason to use a distributor is marketing. The distributor doesn’t do your marketing for you, with the exception of producing a catalog showing the titles it handles, but it does make your marketing more effective.
An example: If you don’t have a distributor on board, most of the important reviewers, such as PW, LJ, SLJ, Kirkus, or even the NYT, just won’t be interested. They can’t waste review space on a title that won’t be available in bookstores.
Selling is also an important function You’re unlikely to get an appointment with a Barnes and Noble category buyer, but larger distributors’ National Accounts Reps do. Each title may get less than 30 seconds in front of the buyers, but that’s a critical 30 seconds indeed.
The last common reason to go through a distributor is the cost-effectiveness of their services. Distributors warehouse your books, process your orders, handle credit and collections, and pick, pack, and ship the books. And they do it for less than you probably can. Most indie publishers don’t recognize this, because they don’t accord the labor its full cost. That cost is the value of the task your people would perform instead. That task could be marketing, or developing new projects, or whatever, but the chances are good that you have more work than you can do. And if you, or someone on your staff, is doing fulfillment, more of that other work is going undone.
In short, to get into bookstores, a distributor is probably your best option, even if it is expensive. There are other choices, of course, and not all books are designed for bookstore sales.
What are you using? Distributor, fulfillment house, DIY, or something else? How is it working for you?
[...] are other choices, of course, and not all books are designed for bookstore sales…. source: Distribution – Who Needs It?, [...]