Could Publishing Empower Small Entrepreneurs to Sell Books?
The publishing industry has seen dramatic shifts in recent years. Book sales surged during the pandemic, only to dip as COVID eased, leaving publishers of all sizes scrambling to reinvent everything from acquisitions and packaging to inventory management and marketing.
Simultaneously, advances in technology, logistics, print-on-demand, and AI have created extraordinary new opportunities for the industry—and a potential new form of online retail. Inspired by the success of Bookshop.org, which competes with Amazon by leveraging third-party warehousing and shipping, and BookTok, which has transformed book discoverability, I propose empowering avid readers—some of the most powerful book advocates—as online retail partners.
At Ulysses Press, we've experimented with adding non-book products like magnets and t-shirts, produced on demand and shipped directly to customers by Printify, on our online Shopify store. Printify's drop-ship model allows individual retailers to profit without holding inventory or incurring COGS and to allocate funds instead on advertising their online stores. This has enabled Printify to build a $300 million company. . . without ever having to market their own products.
Can the publishing industry adopt a similar approach by empowering individual reader-entrepreneurs through Shopify, ONIX, and warehouse APIs? Discover more in the latest white paper.